reception readers and reading at home

[calmseeker]

What do others think? I obviously want my child to learn to read. He is doing well enough - painstakingly using phonics to decode words. I am trying to get him to using the context and pictures but his major strategy is phonics. Nightly or morning reading of his reader is proving quite torturous. I try to make it fun. I have an education background so know what to do but sometimes I think is this really so very important when he is so young and wants to go outside and play and explore and make things.
I am an avid reader and a bedtime story has been a nightly ritual from the word go. The librarians nearby know us so books and reading are a huge part of our lives.

you don't have to 'sound out' to be using phonics. It baffles me how people think we read if we DON'T utilise our phonic knowledge. Clever children have often worked it out for themselves when learning to read independently, but they are certainly aware of the rules. How could they not be?

Yes I hear what you're saying Humphrey. But, so many words in the English language are irregular. How would a phonics reader know how to read TRY, BUY, LIE; they all rhyme but are spelled completely differently. I only throw that in as an example. I'm not a teacher and don't know the answer to any of this but it's an interesting discussion.

If they have dyslexia or a learning difficulty they will find it hard to learn to read, otherwise they will pick it up when they are ready and you reading to them is the most beneficial IMO.
I agree with Humphry about phonics. It is the code that represents the language and learning it takes the mystery and guesswork out of reading.

It is interesting! I should say that I am a primary school teacher

Our phonic code is very complicated compared to other languages, this is even more reason for teaching it explicitly. The words you mention are all phonically decodable.

Baby; different letters, or combinations of letters, can represent the same sound, or more than one sound. E.g me, bee, beak, seek, the ee sound is represented by different spellings. It's called the extended code in phonics and I think it's part of how they teach it in schools.

I do think you should stop anything that is tortuous. My DH has really painful memories of his mum crying over his reading attempts as a child. You really don't want to get that far.
The most important thing at this age is surely to promote reading as a pleasurable experience, and to go at the child's pace. We do something like 10-15 minutes a night, but probably 5 minutes of that is painful decoding and the other 10 minutes is giggling about how ridiculous it is that we have to read the word "cat" yet again / doodling a picture of the "cat sat" and talking randomly about Granny's cat. As long as we are looking at a book and happy, that is enough for me right now.

Oops bee and seek have the same 'ee' spelling.

All of those are quite easily decodable, bananamama. Almost all of my reception children would have been able to decode lie and by at the end of their first term. Buy is slightly trickier, but only because 'bu' as a way of spelling the sound 'b' is usually taught a bit later. The 'y' is easier as most will know it from knowing that the 'igh' sound at the end of short, and some longer words is often written as 'y'. They will already be using that to read my, fly, fry, cry, why etc.

My dd2 is in reception and she didn't have any interest in reading Her books for ages. I didnt force it as tbh every time we did try she would just get really frustrated as she couldn't make head nor tail of it. I left it a few months and tried again, all of a sudden it just clicked with her and now she's pretty good. I think the daily phonics stuff they do at school slowly sunk in to the point where it began to make sense to her.

Dd1 just didn't get it, full stop. In the end in year one I paid for her to do an online reading programme called easyread, aimed at visual learners and dyslexic kids, and she went from not being able to read at all to being able to read pretty much anything in a couple of months.

I wouldn't force him to read if he's not enjoying it.

Thanks for the explanation re phonics I can see it's more complicated than I had first thought. Sounds exhausting. I keep thinking of more examples of irregular English words, can't imagine there's a phonics way for each one surely some of them just have to be learnt? Try, Buy, Lie ... Sigh, My, Die, Nigh, Why, Chai, Alibi.... (I'm getting ridiculous now).

Hat's off to teachers anyway. They are amazing.

It's actually a lot simpler than it seems but it does seem complicated when you are trying to get to grips with all the principles of phonics at once. In reality we drip feed these principles to children over the first term, so they often get to grips with the ideas without too much hassle, even if some need more practice than others to get there fully.

You have managed to pick a really rare spelling of /igh/ with chai though.

DD didn't read at all in reception and in fact wasn't interested in phonics full stop. MIL (ex primary school teacher) was mortified and basically made things quite a bit more stressful last summer by trying to push a just turned 5yo into lots of phonics practise.

DD has finally (half way through year 1) realised the benefits of reading, plus her peers are reading and she wants that herself. She likes to play games that require some basic reading skills too. This is currently proving to be a great motivator.

We already read to DD at bedtime and I switched to simple books so I could point out the words as I read them. DD will now read a few words or a sentence and I'll read some, then she will. She's gone from no phonics last summer to being middle of the class for her reading ability. Reading isn't her strength, those are in other areas, but my goal for her is to try to give her a love of reading, even if it takes a gently, gently approach to get her there, rather than have her top of the class for reading in year 1, but hating it.

Purple, my youngest niece was the same. Read to everyday since she was tiny, although I'm not sure she ever really enjoyed it much, wasn't at all interested in learning to read and struggled with the phonics. It was the school that did intensive phonics with her to help her. By about this point in year 1 she still didn't love reading, in fact asking her to read could result in quite epic tantrums, but she was a competant and accurate reader. Roughly average, maybe a bit above. I do think it was still really hard work for her at this point and she had to put a lot of effort in. At some point in year 2 it just fell into place and became fairly effortless and once that happened she became an avid reader. At 8 I rarely see her without a book in her hand these days.

I think as fluent adult readers, we forget how much effort relatively novice readers are still having to put into a skill most of us no longer have to consciously think about. For most 5 year olds it's probably not the relaxing activity we as adults find it.

I teach phonics - not a huge fan. It sucks the joy out of reading.

Do it because you have to but make reading fun. Re-read favourite stories and let your dc follow with their finger. Leave out the occasional word so they can fill it in.

I found reading marvellously relaxing at 5 because no one was making me sound out every single phoneme.

We are in Scotland so Dd is P1 (reception age.)

She found phonics and the school's books quite dull and so it was hard to get her to do them.

We bought a Julia Donaldson phonics books pack from book people (was about £20 and you get about 30 books in) and the stories were a lot less dated and it allowed her to practise what she was learning in school in context.

I don't think she understood why anyone would want to read if it was the dull stories she was reading in class.

She's top of the class now and a very enthusiastic reader.

split the reading skills up. read to him and talk about the book for the comprehension aspect.

make up some phonics games to make the decoding fun.

the rest will come together when he is ready.

this is the approach I took and he is "reading" chapter books now he is in year two. I say reading as he reads in his head and I am not sure how much he reads accurately, enough to make it worth reading for half an hour though...

Nobody needs to sound out every single phoneme if they already know the word, even at 3/4/5 years old. If you were reading for pleasure you probably already knew enough words that it was fairly effortless. If you hadn't and didn't have the skills to be able to work out those words how pleasurable do you think reading would have been? How much reading for pleasure do you think the average 5 year old still on pink/red level in year 1 does?

I'm not really sure why phonics teaching should suck the joy out of reading. It should do the opposite shouldn't it?

As other posters have said, using phonics to decode words is exactly what he should be doing--please, please do not start encouraging him to look at pictures and guess! Speed and fluency will come with time. At the moment he is just getting the mechanics sorted out.

Of course outdoor play is super important, but a little reading time every day is surely not going to prevent that. If you want to increase the amount of time he spends outdoors.... does he spend time watching TV or using screens? Because that would be the obvious thing to cut out, not the reading.

"How would a phonics reader know how to read TRY, BUY, LIE;"

When phonics is being taught correctly, children are taught to break words down into individual sounds, and then map them onto letters and combinations or letters, with the teaching teaching them, stage by stage, that a sound is "most often" shown in such-and-such a way, and "less often" shown in such-and-such a way, and so on.

So you would teaching children, to start with, that the sound in question is most often spelt "i~e" (as in kite, fine, pile) or "~y" (as in try, my, by).

A bit later on, the teacher teaches the kids that the same sound is occasionally spelt "~ie" (as in lie) or "~uy" (as in buy).

There are books and charts which clearly set out the more likely/less likely spelling and the order in which they are to be taught.

That is how teaching phonics works.

I think that the OP should support her child's school if they want to take a phonics approach and not undermine the teacher. Ideas change in education all the time and it's clear the OP is not up to date in her knowledge. Phonics is best done little and often. There is no need for it to be boring or torturous. Learning to blend words requires a lot of encouragement and praise. If a parent is bored or frustrated it will demoralise a child.

This thread is really helpful to me as my reception age daughter just doesn't want to read. At all. She can sound out to write , so I know her phonics knowledge is getting secure, but she refuses to do anything at home involving her reading words out to us.

I'd sort of come to the conclusion that giving her a love of books is more important right now than her progress reading War and Peace, do good to see others would seem to agree

When mine were at that stage (DS just a few months ago), I would get him to read just a small section at a time, to keep the story moving. For example, he read the speech bubbles or we alternated reading every other page. Sometimes they want to know what is going to happen in the story so I read it all to him, then just pick one word from each page for him to decode. At this stage, they are using so much energy decoding each word that it is hard for them to remember the previous word, and actually remember they've read a whole sentence. It won't take long before it clicks.

I think you're overthinking this OP. As a family you obviously value reading, your son enjoys books and he has regular and enjoyable exposure to the written word via library visits, bedtime stories etc.

This is all far, far more important than reading practice for a child who sounds like he is not completely ready to learn to read, and who in almost every other country in Europe would still be one to two years away from even entering formal education.

My experience is that - assuming good teaching and no learning disabilities and that they poor little buggers haven't been put off by excessive pressure at home and school! - reading is a skill that "just clicks" when the child is ready. My daughter took no more than 6 weeks from her first attempts to sound out words to being a fluent reader. My son took a couple of years to get to that point. They are both bright kids who are strong readers (top sets at secondary) - it was simply a question of readiness.

Also, both of mine love to read signs and labels so got in a lot of practice that way. For example, "jam" whilst eating breakfast, "exit" at the doctor's yesterday, "taxi", etc. One word at a time and so pleased with themselves that they read a sign!