Peter and Jane books ...are they...

[winterfox78]

...any good for helping a 4 year old learn to read???

I was given a box set recently...

Im after recommendations of books you have bought that has helped your 4 year old learn to read.

Thanks

They can be.
As PP have said: they drill kids on the most common sight words in the English language.

DD had a big problem getting the hang of blending which prevented her from progressing with phonics.
So I switched to Peter and Jane for a while.
It meant she could make some progress without being stuck on that one skill.

Eventually she did get the hang of blending and was able to switch back to Reading Eggs, which is phonics based.

It's definitely not confused her to learn two different methods. Even though she's now working on her phonics, it definitely helps her to know a lot of the common words by sight rather than laboriously sounding them out.

If they are the same as the Peter and Jane books from the seventies then they will have very outdated attitudes. Jane will help mummy do the cleaning and Peter will help Daddy. So for that reason alone I would say they are not suitable.
I wouldn't worry about teaching your 4 year old to read. Just share lots of lovely picture books with her so she has a love of stories. Also play matching and sorting games with her. Being ready to learn to read is more important than teaching her before she goes to school

I'm very sceptical about this. I have two children, both now adults, both university graduates. My son had speech therapy after delayed speech because of chronic glue ear (which fortunately resolved when he was 3). He went to a wonderful nursery school where the environment was very rich in text and we read with him a lot but nobody ever tried to teach him to read. He was always very good at working puzzles out, he has an excellent memory, and when he was 4 and a bit he just suddenly started reading out words around him on billboards etc. He was reading fluently by the time he started Reception. Phonics teaching was irrelevant in the process unless it was what he did himself to work out how to read.

My daughter spoke early and fluently. She had a big vocabulary when she started Reception and loved books. She really struggled with reading. She wasn't reading fluently until early in Year 2, when she was 6 and a half. I vividly remember hearing my husband trying to read with her a year or so before that. He asked her to say what the letters were in a word, and she could do that. 'P, A, T'. 'So what does that say?' 'I don't know.' 'Sound them out. P .. A... T...' 'I don't know!' <tears> The conceptual step she couldn't manage was blending the sounds. It may be relevant that she was later diagnosed with Asperger's and when we finally got an educational psychology report she was found to have very poor working memory and processing skills. I am absolutely certain that when she finally did start reading fluently it was because she was recognising whole words, not sounding them out.

I mainly just read to my child and they eventually picked it up but I was probably lucky. I found all reading books extremely boring including Peter and Jane, although I still have ours and enjoy them for the nostalgia. I preferred other old ladybird books, like the easy Read It Yourself such as Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood. And Talkabout e.g. School. Then we liked things like the Garden Gang. We also read a lot of old Topsy and Tims!

Ps Ladybird do a boxset of new Read it Yourself which are lovely.

Imagine people continuing to study how learning happens and improving the educational techniques generation on generation

Surely we should just do what we did thirty years ago because it worked for some people then?

They were the bane of my primary days

I still don’t understand why they wouldn’t let me ‘prove’ I could read them and then move me on to free reading. They would send me home with learning to read books with about 25 words in the whole book, same book all week supposed to read it aloud at home each night! Sometimes I’d have the same book for 3 weeks until my mum phoned to complain!

i could have read the whole series in an hour! I was reading chapter books at home!

i was so distressed at the age of 4-7 that my alopecia flared for the first time and I was taken to a therapist who diagnosed me as ‘frustrated I wasn’t learning at school’

The new method of learning to read means that a child can decode and read any new word without having seen it before.

Children always went on to phonics though, well in my experience in the 50s and with my kids in the 70s (with my oldest ones.) The thing with look say was it got them started, then they built on that with phonics.

@Trinity65 i’m 48 so little big younger, I’ve always had a good memory and can remember being a baby and loads of stuff from early childhood but as I’ve got older I’ve found I can now walk into a room and forget what I went in there for!!!

Mine had a similar teacher year 2, he’d taught himself to read before school and was reading chapter books for enjoyment and teacher insisted he had no comprehension skills and was just reading words which he used to get annoyed about. Turned out he just didn’t like answering her questions so said he didn’t know. He’s autistic so abit of an outlier

It makes me wonder why some people choose to work with children.

I learnt to read with Peter and Jane books!

If they’re in good condition you might be able to sell them mind.

I’ve taught phonics - realistically i don’t think many kids learn to read through pure phonics or else they’d never get past ‘the’. All the exception words ‘tricky words’ etc are look and say words. I know IN THEORY they aren’t exceptions they are different sound spelling links - but It feels like a a moot point when there are six(?) ways of spelling the sound /ae/.

Me too, I was a very early advanced reader and got through books at a rate of knots, still love books and reading, always had a higher reading age than my age.

Also … for the interested… this thread has reminded me of this report which suggests we go back to using more of a variety of methods than stick to phonics amp.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-phonics-to-teach-reading-is-failing-children-says-landmark-study

How do you think children worked out words when they were learning in the 70s as well? They learnt to read, they had parents or carers who read to them so they learnt letters and words and when you come across a word you havent seen before, you can work it out because you can read.

Do you think children of the 70s had no other way of decoding words without having each and every single words they now know explained to them because they didnt know phonics?

I'd be genuinely interested to know how a phonics approach works on this set of words.

Tough
Though
Through
Thorough
Trough
Thought
Plough

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g this is the ‘extended code’ I was teaching - tbf, we know that -ough is never ‘og’ because we know ew, uff, oh, aw, ow can be spelt - ough. This comes up in the sequencing of a phonics programme. It does ‘make sense’ in that it can be categorised but to me is absolutely an example of when picture clues, word shape etc would be more of use than ‘well let’s try out 5 or 6 different sounds until I tell you which one is correct’.

cos you’re right that you can’t ‘know’ how one of those words is going to be pronounced until someone tells you

I still have my 1970s Peter and jane books this is the guidance from the beginning

I’d recommend just getting some magnetic lower case letters for the fridge and start off working on recognising letters and saying their sound, start with the letters of their name. Then once they recognise the letters start writing the odd word on the fridge and getting them to sound it out.

Rather than rushing straight into getting them to read books start with the basics. Read books to them every day and once they’re familiar with all the letters, point out some of the cvc words you are reading and see if they can blend and read them.

I taught ds to read along the same lines of Peter & Jane books, he was reading fluently before he started reception. He found phonics boring as he already knew the words & sounds.

My dc all learnt to read using the look and say technique and the "Jane and Peter" series between age 2 and 3yo. They loved the books and they also loved that when they'd learnt the words they could read a whole book to themselves.
They went to school and learnt phonics with no problems at all, if anything it gave them a head start on phonics because once they had the bare bones of phonics they also used words they already knew to work out phonics they hadn't been taught.

The phonics over-enthusiasts seem to forget that as adults we use the whole word recognition most of the time, only using phonics if we come across words we don't know on paper.

That really is amazing

I think my first memory is around aged 3/4 . Mum pushing me in my buggy past a local Fire Station and they were all wolf whistling Mum and shouting out "Hey Blondie" whistle whistle lolll
That was 1968

Peter and Jane books helped me learn to read. School were useless we all had to stand at the teacher's desk and read to the teacher. While the rest of class did they're work. I felt anxious I didn't want to. My mum taught me to read with those books. She told them I could read but one to one with nobody else in the room.

I had to go to the library and read with a specialist teacher. I went from bottom of the class in reading to top of the class. By the time I was 6 I was reading books aimed at 10 year olds. Still love a good book now.

He's still only young most children that age tell the story by the pictures from what they can remember when it is read to them. I wouldn't worry just tell her to stop boasting. Like I said I went from bottom of the class at 5 in reading to top of the class at 6. Reading books aimed at older children.