To think that schools should teach reading properly

[Reallytired]

My son has been really lucky, he has had an excellent reception teacher and has been taught how to read properly by synthetic phonics. His teacher followed Jolly phonics logically with great results.

He has a little friend who is at a different school. She is 6 months younger than my son and has had only 2 terms of school. This girl has been taught to read by sight words and a reading ladder. Because she started after christmas she got taught the letter sound "ch" before being taught "s", "a", "t", "p", "i", "n".

The result is that this poor little girl is still on Oxford Reading Tree level one and hates reading. Her mother is convinced that her daughter is dyslexic because the little girl is extremely bright in other areas of the reception curriculum. I think the reason the little girl can't read is that the teaching she has recieved has been a mess.

Shrink, they should of brought some in from the year above. Typical!

Shrink - that's really bad! Since DS1 has 'grasped' the concept of reading and phonics, building up words etc he's been flying through his books and several times this school year I've seen written in his reading record book "xx read his book very well with lots of expression, moved him up a level".

Singersgirl, I'm not explaining it very well, but the Dutch example did work as a good analogy. When you see it written down, you can see its common roots with English - I'm sure they chose a subject to have a good comparator. Obviously you cannot have a direct comparison as you cannot go back to a "non-reading" situation. But DS's head teacher (who is also a SEN specialist) said that trying to ignore pictures was a common mistake parents made. Obviously this was only a session for 4-5 year olds, and I'm sure that they need to be phased out at a pretty early stage.

Do they still have recommended reading books by Yr 5? I think that here they just choose library books for reading in school. Mind you I guess they are grouped by age.

I had the same problem with DD2, but her Year 2 teacher let me use books from home in place of the school's books. Which was great until she started Year 3 and the teacher moved her back into the school reading system at the point she'd moved outside it two terms previously, didn't hear her read for the first three weeks of term, and then wondered why I went in and complained. Fortunately now all three DDs can read what they like .

"Tut,tut! It really makes a difference to read the reading book with them every day.

I can see a big difference between the kids that do and dont."

I suspect that is not always true.
My ds is above average at reading. We don't read the reading book every day. That's not to say he doesn't read every day - but the reading books? No.

I can't remember what ORT level one is all about but the only thing that would concern me about the original post is that the child hate reading. Even then, two terms is very early days.

My feeling is that Aloha's right on the importance of synthetic phonics. Based on observations of my friends - I was lucky as a 70s child to go to a village school that had no truck with trendy theories and still used phonics. My friends who went to schools that taught 'look and say' had a much harder time reading and many of them really struggled with spelling, in particular. I know English isn't phonetic, but being taught c-a-t really helps children begin to grasp how it all works from the start. (Mind you, that other trend in the 70s to spell everything wrong before you learn how to do it correctly probably didn't help them.)

God I agree about the phonics. I taught secondary age children to read, pretty much from scratch, using a phonics programme and it worked wonderfully well on the whole.

"I think the biggest laugh about the education system and the expected input from the parents is that nearly every parent I know does not know what the kids are being taught or how they are being taught."

Tenalady, we held literacy sessions for the parents in which we outlined how we approached the teaching of reading, when we introduced ERR (a very rigid system of teaching synthetic phonics, sight vocab and reading in context) we held meetings to discuss what we were doing and how parents could help - the turnout for all those meetings were pathetically low - the great majority of our parents were apathetic. We did similar for maths.

My dd's future school has produded their own booklets on how they approach the key curriculum areas with sections on what parents can do to support that learning.

Not all schools are crap, not all teachers are - a lot of us try very hard indeed.

iirc level one is the first one with basic sentences ie "Run, Floppy, run" . It does seem a bit early to say she hates reading. In whose eyes I wonder ? Perhaps she does n't fancy sitting down with mummy to look at it which is rather different !

There are a lot of children with less than perfect circumstances. They have loving parents, but their parents cannot teach them to read for many strong reasons. For example the parent might be ill, can't speak English or have other major caring responsiblites.

Children spend 6 hours a day at school. Surely there is no excuse for them learning absolutely nothing. Yes, parents should support their children, but are parents expected to teach reading strageries or just listen to a child read?

My friends little daughter is very resistant to reading. She will do other things like colouring, writing and is extremely well behaved. I find it sad that she has been put off reading so heavily,

Anchovy, I think some schools (and some proponents of synthetic phonics!) use other alphabets to make the point that 'look and say', or whole-word recognition, is actually very difficult. For example, if I see a text in Arabic or Thai, I can't read it, and it is amazingly difficult trying to pick out one word you know.

Actually I used to cover up the pictures for DS1 as he spent so long looking at them he never looked at the words. Obviously I didn't cover up pictures in books I was reading to him, and I certainly didn't do it once he could read.

Both my boys learned to read easily and well, but I taught DS2 via synthetic phonics before school, and it makes so much more sense than the way DS1 was taught. DS2 is much less likely to guess at unfamiliar words than DS1, even though DS1 is a nearly 9 year old with a reading age 5 years above his chronological age and DS2 is not yet 6.

One bright and articulate Y1 boy I listened to actually said to me of his ORT reading book, "I can't really read this. I just look at the pictures and try to remember what it said last time." He knew he hadn't been taught to decode, even if he didn't know how to express it.

But TBH, my ds was, not exactly resistant to, but showed zero interest in, reading during reception. He did JP and we gesticulated and whatnot, but he had no real desire to sit and try to read. He did love being read to, and as I sad, we did, and still do, do that a lot. Over the summer holidays after reception, with no real input from us, it clicked. He read signs in shops and at the zoo etc. And when he went back to school he was whizzed up several levels.

Not wanting to read herself is not necessarily a bad sign.

Reallytired I think that perhaps too much is being expected of her, epseically in comparison ot your ds - she is just 5ish and maybe being advanced in other ways leads people to assume this will follow when in fact it hasn't yet. Next year she'll probabaly have a different teacher whose approach may be more in tune with her stage of development and her reading could literally happen very suddenly. If she is writing voluntarily already then it is unlikely she is dyslexic and she may be taking more in on the reading front than you realise whether she wants to sit and read her "set" book or not. Audio books(which you can borrow from the library) may be an alternative way of developing more of an interest in books.

DS starts school in Sept and we've been roundly told off for his reading (which, mea culpa, we taught him, all our own fault but largely because he was so interested).

I find it sad that schools still put restrictions on reading (ie he'll be allowed 1 book a week from the library from the age appropriate section - most of which he's read already). I get that they're dealing with more than one kid but surely they can see that encouraging reading is only going to pay them dividends when the harder stuff comes along?

Singers, I think you are right. Whole word recognition is something that develops once you have learnt to read. Trying to start with whole word recognition was putting the cart before the horse - madness.

People who know how to read do recognise whole words, especially in lower case with capitals only at the start of sentences and as appropriate - you recognise the shape of the word, with ascenders and descenders (that's why whole words or sentences in block caps are harder to read). But you can only do that once you are a confident reader.

I've got a booklet from DfES called something like 'A Guide to Supporting Reading for Parents'. It's got lots of different ideas of informal/fun things you can do at home to support your child's education (it also discusses writing and spelling).

It doesn't mention any particular teaching method.

dd is in Yr1 and they have been doing Ruth Miskin all year. The reading books make no sense to me whatsoever - but dd likes them!

Actually the booklet is called 'A Guide to Supporting Reading for Parents of Prmary School Children' and was written by hte National Literacy Trust and the Parent Centre.

Just curious - do people not feel that there is a need for a sight vocabulary? There are some words which are so phonically irregular that the only way to learn them is to, well learn them

For example, one, was, said, their, there, are

what is JP??

Jolly Phonics

Gosh we get bloody Ginn at ds1's school. WOuld love them to do ORT. I 'borrow' them from work for him. He also likes the 'green banana' and 'yellow banana' books and read it yourself ladybird books.

The reading book gets read quite a bit but he reads tons at home himself. he is in reception and is nearly 5 (August) and has really taken to reading. Taught Jolly Phonics from Nursery informally then just got absorbed in the whol thing

Sorry - Jolly Phonics