calling all parents with child in Year 1re: Oxford reading books

[marinda]

My DS is in Year i - they read these Oxford reading tree books and he has been given stage 4. I find them awful as the pictures give the words away and encourage him to guess rather than work out a work. Also they seem to contain a lot of difficult word (like suddenly) which are then not repeated in the next book. Do any parents find this and what stage is your child on ????

Well, yes. I also find them pretty dull. But I'm 35. Ds isn't impressed when I offer to read the paper to him when he asks for a story. But he does like Biff and Chip.

I bought my daughters the whole pack off ebay and she loves them

shes 3 in nov

For me if they like the book thats a big plus in getting them reading

oh and half the fun is, as an adult, looking for the puns and unrelated details in the pics which go right over the heads of the kids !

As regards spelling we are encouraged to do them at home using the Look (read and spell out), Cover and Write (from memory) method a few times during the week.

There are three basic ways for children to work out words they are not familar with. Using the pictures as clues, sounding out and then finally reading on and working out the word that will make sense (not always easy). As a teacher I find ORT first 5 stages not very interesting but they do teach the words. Schools are now moving towards mixing schemes because if children find one scheme boring it may put them off reading. I change books when a child has read it at home. (Children actually choose their own book out of a basket at their level) if a child has a longer book (tends to be stages 5 onwards) and they find the book boring I let them change the book, I also encourage parents to help their child change their book - tends to be children who read every night and may have chossen an easier book from their basket. Sharing Library books is always good and bed time stories.

Loopy

ORT gave the names Biff (the girl) and Chip (the boy) because it was unlikely that there would be children wih those names!!

For the spelling you could try this site to practise the Look Cover Write method - you can put your child's spelling words in & practice them & make flashcards.

And another version of Look - Cover -Write here

Excellent links rustybear - have saved them for ds1 to use as he starts spelling homework this term.

my yr1 and yr2 children love the ORT books. they have never been big on the phonics-style books, which bore them.

dd1 was level 2 at the beginning of yr1 last year (she's on level 10 a year on). dd2 is starting yr 1 on level 10. there's an enormous variation in what's normal I think.

I was just able to check what level my ds is at because I forgot to pack his books into his book bag! Naughty bad mummy! He's got one level 2 and one level 3 and a note in his record book to say that we should go back to working much more from the pictures with the level 3 one. I try to be incredibly relaxed about reading his school books - he's only 5 and in lots of countries he wouldn't be at school at all yet! There's years of school to be stressed about, don't use it all up in year 1! And I know whereof I speak - I've got a year 6. If yo think learning to read is an issue, wait til secondary transfer!!!![curlew retreats, wibbling]

FWIW and just to relieve the boredom in the early stages of ORT - there is a chap who keeps appearing in the ORT books from about stage 2 or 3. He's some kind of caretaker and wears glasses and a baseball cap (I think it's a self portrait of the author) My kids have all had great fun spotting him in the pictures. He even pops up in the later stories in which the magic key transports the children back into history (e.g. dressed in a toga in the Roman story!!!)

Ds is in year 1 and also on stage 4 ORT. We have also been annoyed by the occasional difficult (and non-phonetic) word which then doesn't show up again...but ds seems happy enough with them.

oh, I am so bored with Biff, Chip, Kipper et al. (I have an older child so we've already read them.....)

ds is in year 1 and has been put on level 5 of ORT which is a relief because that is when the magic key stuff starts. makes it a little more interesting to listen to!

Marylou, we refer to him as the "nosy neighbour"

Have any of you heard of the Rose Report on the teaching of reading?

www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/rosereview/report.pdf

Schools will now be required to ditch all the appalling guessing and memorisation which causes untold damage to many children, and instead teach reading properly, using systematic synthetic phonics...first,fast and only in the early stages.

ORT does not fit with this new approach. As many posters have indicated, the premis behind ORT is that children will look at the pictues, guess and memorise their way through the book.

By level 5 and the magic key stories, they are fine and a lot of fun. But the earlier levels are actively damaging the reading habits of many, many children.

I'd ask my child's teacher how they can justify using ORT in the light of the Rose Report. If you get a blank look, be worried!

Momsoon I think you are partly right - but surely teaching children different methods of reading is good. Not all words are phonetic - thus this method is not good by itself! Also just because you can read a word doesnot mean you can comprehend its meaning - again you need pictures for clues. Therefore a mixture of reading book schemes is good! But don't forgot most schools simply cannot afford to ditch the reading scheme books in light of 1 report - in 5 years time it may have swung round to other method again!!!

Hi Cazzybabs,
When you say not all words are phonetic, I think what you mean is that not all words seem to follow a regular sound-symbol spelling correspondence. The actual number of words which are to a degree, tricky, is actually very small.

The mixture of methods has been a disaster for 25% of our children who leave primary school unable to read and write properly.

Visit these two sites to get background info on this debate.

www.rrf.org.uk
www.syntheticphonics.com

The rrf has a very good messageboard with lots of parents posting.

I agree with you about schools not being able to afford to change over to decodable reading books straight away, and the government should be giving schools a large injection of money to fund this.

Also, you cannot comprehend a word if you can't decode it first! After that, comprehension is more to do with the spoken vocabulary of a child, with words that are within their experience. That is the really important part played by us parents when we read stories to them.

well on this one we wil have to agree to disagree!

My dd has just started Y1. She is on ORT Stage 7 but only becasue the teacher insists she treks all through the stages - at home she reads Dick King-Smith, Enid Blyton, the Milly Molly Mandy books etc.

She was well grounded in the initial 26 phonics in nursery, but once she started school got the ORT books; she got very demoralised by guessing the words and getting them wrong, so we decided to teach her the extra sounds for long vowels etc and bought the Jolly Phonics DVD, CD and books. She picked it up really quickly and soon went ahead very well with her reading once she could actually sound out the words like 'fence' and 'ice cream' that were in the early ORT books she was supposed to read.

As an extra, my 3 yr old ds taught himself to read by watching the DVD, listening to the CD and the Jolly Phonics books and he can now read appropriate books really well - we bought the Jelly and Bean Reception set of books for him which he loves as they are about two cats and have captivating, but simple, pictures and he has reached the end of this set.

From my own experience phonics works really well for both of them - I read some resarch which says that a multi sensory phonics approach is best for boys as it ues both sides of the brain and develops the side which is weaker in boys than girls. Certainly has worked for my ds!

The ORT books from Stage 5 onwards actually get much more interesting for those that find the early ones dire!

My dd also has spellings every week - she has no problem with them as most are easily decodable so she only has one or two of the 'tricky' HFW words to learn and generally there is only one small bit that is tricky. She soon remembered 'because' last week when we 'tweaked' the pronuniciation so the 'au' sounded like 'au' in August, and this week she has nothing to learn as they are all phonically regular - a week off!

I think the 'range of strategies' is mainly for comprehension skills which people muddle with actually being able to understand what the print says. My dd can read words she does not understand and hence has to ask the meaning (or infer it from the context), so our role now is to increase her vocabulary. There are virtually no pictures in the books she reads, so no point in trying to infer it from them!

Marinda - please make an appointment to see your child's teacher: You are not confined to just open evenings! However, I would suggest that just before school isn't always ideal, unless prearranged. Just because she isn't very smily, doesn't mean she's unapproachable.

Besides spotting the school caretaker in various unlikely Magic Key scenarios, we also hunt the dropped glasses which appear in most books. dd2 also thinks there are bones for Floppy in one of the pictures in every book (we're not quite sure but there do seem to be a lot of bones around).

And we do wonder if the dropped glasses belong to the witches (level 5 book about them) who were turned back into frogs, leaving their glasses behind.

DS did the Oxford tree books, and I'm with Polyanna, the pictures are supposed to comple
ment the words.

The stories are a bit weird.
My guess is that the author has to use a specified list of words, and has other constraints in subjects, lengths etc.

I suspect the "names" are there to be multi-cultural.
Rather than common British ones, they choose them to be of no culture at all.

However, to me, they are far from sufficient for teaching kids to read. They are dull.

My boys like pirates, thunderbirds and cookery.
So I make sure they get access to fun reading matter.
To me, success is when your child picks up books by choice, and can understand them.
I believe motivation and "love of learning" is seriously under achieved in our system, hence the disgraceful statistics.
(except when Ruth Kelly's interference stops them from even producing the numbers at all).