To not practice for the phonics screening?

[PlinthOfSoap]

Over half term it was suggested we look at past papers and practice with DC. I ignored this as we were relaxing and having fun.

Now a letter came home in the bag last night, asking us to practice over the weekend with past papers.

Am I being unreasonable to not bother, and just let DC have a go at it next week? Assume they have been doing all the necessary prep in school so DC isn't going to be completely blind sided.

I don't see why I would want to try and coach DC to get a better score, or am I doing him a disservice? I thought the results were important for the school but not really for DC, and I don't really want to make it a big thing by practicing past papers.

But surely parents know if their dc can read new words or not? I don't need a report to tell me that because I get my dc to read to me. And if he struggles sounding out a word we practice the sounds it's made up of. It's far more fun reading the BFG and seeing if he can read snozzcumbers rather than grilling him for a test.

Another thing about Phonics. They don’t work for all children.

Evidence based teaching, really?
What evidence is there for jumping on a bandwagon of someone's pet theory? Which is what has been happening ever since the National Curriculum was introduced by Kenneth Baker.
Phonics can be useful for decoding new words but THAT IS ALL. I used to teach phonics to Infants because they need to know the correlation between letters and sounds but that is actually most use for spelling. Oh and practising for spelling tests is also a waste of time, there are far better ways to learn to spell.
Some children learn to read without phonics. I did. I was reading before I started school, decades ago.

I commented up thread about DS who was identified early on as being a child who phonics just didn’t work for and learnt sight reading instead. What’s been interesting with him, is he’s developed a passion for Classical Civilisation. 9 at GCSE, predicted A* at A level and planning to read Classical Civilisation at uni. I asked him how he managed with all the names of Greek/Roman Gods, the mythology, reading The Odyssey (in English but still a lot of ‘weird’ words), just an awful lot of what look like ‘nonsense’ words. He looked at me like I was quite mad and said ‘I can read mum’ and he’s right, he can. He just accessed reading via a different method. I’m pleased school identified early on he needed to be taught differently.

Phonics does work for the majority of children, hence schools use it as their primary teaching method, but if we’d coached him to pass, and continued down the phonics route, I suspect he still wouldn’t be able to read and the subject he loves so much, would have been inaccessible for him. The end goal is that children can read. Some kids might need to take a different route and screening helps teachers identify that.