Phonics? Dc can learn to read without it? Surely? Those that don't get it.. ANY positive stories?

[Imnotthrowingawaymyshot]

My dd doesn't get phonics.
She just reads the words.
The school is still plugging phonics. Could there be an issue with my dd ie dyslexic? Or something else if she doesn't get phonics?
I just read the old fashioned way. Anyone else have dc who are fine but didn't get phonics? My older dc has very different brain, very ordered she got phonics and it helped her read like formula... Younger dc just bumbles along.
Year 2

@Rainandclouds Come over to the Primary Education area if you want some advice/tips for your child. I know phonics sounds confusing at first, but it's really not too bad once you start using it, and there are lots of things you can do to help a struggling reader.

I don't think he really got it either. Cat doesn't sound like Kuh-ah-tuh.

Nope. It doesn't. The technical name for the insistence it does is "shite sounding out".

I learned the same way as you. I went from not reading at 4 to chapter books at 5. I've taught phonics. It can be really useful for decoding later on but it isn't the end of the world if someone just doesn't get it.

I work, mainly, with kids with dyslexia (or other LD). One child last year, went from not reading at all, using phonics, to reading fluently in the space of 6 months. I ditched the phonics and went for books that interested them.

If your child is ready to read, then they will learn - just make it fun.

Amazed at people saying phonics is a waste of time! It works for about 95% of children perfectly. In my kids primary the phonics teaching is excellent and get reading fluently quickly. I have one DC who just ‘read’ whole words, and another with poor memory who simply couldn’t do that, phonics was a godsend for her and she’s a good reader BECAUSE she’s learned to decode.

OP if you understand light, bright, etc.

Do you also understand:

Rain
Pain
Gain

May
Play
Way

Make
Rake
Cake

Rice
Nice
Ice

Station
Creation

If the teaching is good, phonics should be very easy to understand as a system to access reading, starting out. There are some ‘undecodable’ words which you learn by experience and usage.

@MrsKCastle we're you the SENCO at my DS1's school?

It's a fact that not all children learn well with phonics. It really doesn't matter that 95% do if your child is in the 5% that don't; no amount of forcing phonics onto them is going to help.

Maybe OPs child is in the 5%. I'd say she probably knows her child better than a stranger on the internet.

Teachers being forced to teach all children the same despite their different learning styles is absolutely the problem with the school system.

If even the teachers aren't teaching it properly, as you imply, then you have to wonder why it's continuously pushed into kids who do not get it either.

It's pushed because it's the best method. That's it. And while.it is possible that some children will never 'get' phonics, it is known for a fact that many children will never 'get' reading with other methods.

Of course it needs to be taught properly, and sadly, not all schools do this. Which is why I'd recommend any parent to find out more about how it should be taught. When my eldest started in reception, she was taught mixed methods. I knew that wasn't the best way, so I made sure that when I read with her, I absolutely insisted that she didn't guess words. Parents should be reading with their child 5+ times a week, they are in an excellent position to teach reading, even where the school doesn't do it so well.

As for being in the 5%, well, it's probably a lot less than 5% in reality. But yes, the OP knows her child best. Which is why I've been trying to find out more, to see if I can be of any help.

Phonics, I believe, started out as an intervention for children struggling to read. Years ago, when I taught eyfs, most children, found phonics confusing, as they didn't need it. We were supposed to still plug away at it...pointless waste of precious learning time imo. People of my generation tended to learn to read without it. Sounding out words detracts from the meaning of the text and can delay a child's natural grasp of reading.

The teaching of phonics doesn’t preclude children from sight reading. Phonics is a basis for children to learn the sounds that letters make and start to read. If children sight read, no decent teacher is going to make them sound out and blend a word together. If they know the word, that is of course, great. Phonics gives them the knowledge to sound out unfamiliar/unknown words (whether they’re a good sight reader or not).
As a child of the 80s, I was taught ah buh cuh duh etc. which I suppose was an early/unofficial sort of phonics.

I used the Ladybird, Peter and Jane books with DS, although the focus was on developing his speech and sentence construction before learning to read. The sentences build up with repetiton and rearrange around.

He clicked with reading after a visual stress test picked up that a particular colour assists his visual tracking and settles the text. With hindsight, that was the reason why he initially failed the pre-school sight test, and further optitcian appointments shows that while there is nothing wrong with his eyesight, he does pick up characters from surrounding lines. The outcome of the dyslexia and dyspraxia assessment pretty much stated the obvious to me! He's a chronic reverser too.

His school obviously has to teach phonics because of the y1 assessment, but they treat the common exception words as sight words to be learned seperately.

I would have been the sight words era. I can remember sounding out an unfamiliar word when I was in y1, so did have the skill to break a word down, but I think I did just pick words up and link them to their meanings having learned letters from Sesame Street!

My most avid reader did not ‘get’ phonics. She learnt to read with my old Peter and Jane books, has just aced her GCSEs and is studying English at sixth form. She never has her head out of a book.

Omg am I completely thick? What is phonics?

Okay I've googled, how else would you learn to read if you don't learn that way?

I didn't use phonics. I used to get so frustrated at being told to sound out words, as like your daughter I could just read them.

My experience was the same. Not everyone learns in the same way. If your daughter is progressing with her reading then it's fine

Phonics is not kuh ah tuh, it is the sound k (with no vowel following it, a, t (with no vowel). The c and t are almost like a clicking noise. DH (who has a teaching qualification) has been completely unable to grasp this simple principle so I can understand parents struggling with it. Children are not made to sound out words they can already read, it's just used to help them decide words they don't know. And a vast number or words are 'tricky words' which can't be sounded out and have to be learned.

I'm not a phonics fan. As mentioned, many English language words are not phonetic. And my daughter is bored to tears with the shyte read write inc books.

@MrsKCastle I think you addressed your post to the wrong person. There was nothing about my dd having reading difficulties.

That is demonstrating reading comprehension skills nothing to do with phonics

I could understand phonics, but learned to sight read very young, so my dyslexia wasn’t picked up on until much later.
Still can’t really do phonics, my brain just doesn’t work like that, and I have a degree, it was just a case of finding strategies that worked for me.

@couldntcareless I don't have a clue about phonics and I'm 35
My mum read a lot to me and I had alphabet and flash card everywhere. Nobody taught me, I was just a v early reader
My eyes move differently to most people when reading so I can view two pages of a book at once and I read around 1200-1500 wpm

It's weird apparently a teacher asked my mum who taught me to read and my mum was "er. She just read?" It's caused me nothing but trouble my whole life

It's not really a question of 'learning styles'. It's a question of what reading is and what writing system we have.

We have a language with a written form. Not all languages have written forms. In ours, we don't have individual pictograms, hieroglyphs or cuneiform for every English word that all have to be memorised, and I rather think it would be more work for us to learn to read if we did. Learning to sightread a few thousand pictograms isn't going to take less time than phonics!

We have a system of just 26 tiny signs, which we borrowed from the Romans. Each of these little signs represents one (sometimes more than one) sound that is found in our language. As there are more than 26 sounds in the English language, we developed a system of using the signs in conjunction with each other, in order to represent the sounds left over. One example (already given in this thread) is igh. Nigh, night, high, light...

For various fascinating historical reasons, there are a load of words that don't follow the usual rules and have to be memorised. They are a pain. But they will not be made less of a pain if we give up on phonics and teach children purely to memorise the aesthetic appearance of 100,000+ English words as if they were hieroglyphs!

Queeble, caltie and blonk

If you didn't need to use a youtube video to work out how to pronounce those nonsense words I just made up, you use phonics. You may not have been taught it, but you've developed it along the way, through longterm exposure to a language with a phonetic writing system.

Actually @JamieVardysHavingAParty I worked them out not using the way phonics is taught in the national curriculum, but by analytical phonics:

Analytic phonics
Where synthetic phonics focuses on sounding out the individual phonemes then blending them back together – reading ‘all through the word’ – analytic phonics teaches children to look initially at the whole word and break it into chunks that they already know. Words can often be split into two parts: onset (the initial part before the first vowel) and rime (from the first vowel onwards).
Reference:
www.teachearlyyears.com/learning-and-development/view/beyond-phonics

There are so many ways to learn and learning synthetic phonics is not how the majority of those over 25 learnt.

I do not recall telling you or anyone else what type of phonics you'd developed.

Your post reads rather as if you think you have a Gotcha moment there, and I'm not really sure why you think so, if in fact you do.

My eldest couldn’t understand phonics and had an IEP throughout primary. They were clearly a bright child but it wasn’t reflected in their work.

Got 12 GCSEs at A-B, and AAB at A level now doing a Masters in a STEM subject at an RG uni.

I'm coming on here to say that if phonics is taught systematically and thoroughly, it can have a higher than 95% success rate.
In my school, 100 % of children passed the phonics screening this year, and I've seen this at other schools too, where the reading practitioners are particularly skilled and experienced.
The objections on this thread seem to have been raised by people who don't fully grasp how phonics works - for example ph represents the same sound as f and ff. If this is explicitly taught, children do understand it.
It's possible that OPs child is being taught by a less than skilled or experienced teacher. Sadly this is what happens when experienced teachers are let go, and replaced with cheaper NQTs. Teaching phonics properly requires the teacher to be fully trained.

Most children will learn to read with some degree of competence using a variety of methods, including the old look and say, and lots of exposure to books. Its the children who don't pick it up by osmosis who actually benefit most from the systematic teaching of phonics.
If the OP wants to help her child, get packs of phonics cards and make sure that the child knows the various combinations of letters, and what sound they represent. Practice blending and segmenting ( dyslexic children sometimes struggle with this and need more practice).Speak to the teacher to see if she / he can pinpoint specific difficulties, and if funds allow, consider a specialist private tutor if you don't feel the existing teaching is clear enough.

Fostering an enjoyment of books and reading is also important, but its not an either/ or situation- time at home can be the child reading with the parent, or parent reading to the child, it doesn't have to be a battle, but an opportunity to do a calm activity together.

I'm not sure where the Phonics works for 95% of children came from but it's totally untrue. In every class of 30 I've had at least 6 that's simply couldn't get it, that's 20%. It's pushed because it's the thing of the moment with masses of materials and contracts behind it. So before that we had phonics on rotation with whole word and look and say which was far
more successful for reaching all children. Before that look and say was massively popular. The same processes have been rolled out time after time by various administrations who proclaim about education failing and need to change things so re push a different method. Truthfully all methods have their own issues. Many dyslexics struggle with phonics, hard to understand if you aren't dyslexic but they simply can't hear the sound blends or break them down. Look and say is a nightmare for children with retention issues. Whole word is often good for dyslexics as you can use shapes and patterns but is limited as it doesn't help as much with decoding new words. The only successful way is to teach many different methods and hope you reach all children enough, however that's almost impossible at the moment when just phonics is being so strongly pushed. Mention dyslexia and schools will push something like stareway to spelling (I don't rate this personally) on you. Personally I'd let them carry on the phonics at school and then at
home is being doing lots of reading to the child, whole word and look and say work.

I couldn't get phonics at all. I am a speed reader and one day could just read words. It definitely doesn't work for all children