Ooh my word, so many things to add - and I really don't want to go on for as long as I did in the first message!
(Wallace, I did start responding to you but had to save it before my power supply ran out and I now have a broken lead SO I am now on another PC with no access to my mesage so far so will retrieve asap.)
Mo2 - children don't have to be challenged all teh time by reading, I feel. DO we only read books that are demanding to our reading skills? Your DS is obviously a very capable reader and so I wold just encourage him to enjopy his abilitities and explore all the wonderful books out there. I wouldn't limit him by trying to follow a complimentary scheme. WHilst I think it's a bit cheeky for your school to say they don't like ORT being used at home - how can they dictate to you? YOu can do what you like!! - I can see their point if the children have already read everything they try them with in school. ALthough it might give them the hint of how good he is, schools do have legitimate resourcing issues, so I can see where they are coming from....
I also beleive you can confuse kids by teaching them the wrong stuff the wrong way, but it seems like ds doesn't actually need to be taught much - he has the natural skill to be able to pick it up pretty much on his own.
enid - it would seem as if your ds doesn't have the skills or the confidence to work out unknown words which is why she looks at you rather than them. Children who know that it is just the letters that tell them the word and who know they have the skills to decipher them will be quite engaged int he word until they have worked it out. Sonds like you are doing just the right thing, though, alongside whatever method they are using at school.
lockets - sorry, never answered before; I teach in Kent, although am on maternity leave at the moment. Never made it to Lit co-ord; and I don't thnk I ever would have. There's too much pressure from the Government to do it their way and I was a bit of a rebel in the reading stakes!!
ghosty - thanks for the welcome! I do hope to visit other forums here but there is so much and I haven't left this one yet! I think you are right - it doesn't matter when you are taught to read, but how. It is being taught accurately adn effectively that is important, but it has eben proved time and time again that most chldren are ready at 4 and are very keen. Of course, this is never all chidlren - particularly those with poor speech and language development.
Jude - Mo2 answered for me - because phonics, taught properly, makes sense of everything, it can only complement any other method being used to teach reading and will make much more sense to children.
However, I would add that fun and interesting doesn't necessarily impart the right skills and knowlegde to children - although, of course, I am not suggesting my teaching of reading was ever not fun and interesting! I just think it's important to make the right stuff fun and interesting, rather than present inaccessible fun and interesting lessons to children. However, most children find the ability to understand adn read text independently so fun and interesting, it's all you need!
tamum - it is a common held misconception that so many words are not phonically regular. Once you understand all the 40+ speech sounds and their spellings, there are far more regular ones than you would think. Howerver, in traditional phonics teaching, they would seem irregular. 'done' and 'write' are quite regular. 'done' has three sounds - d, u and n. the d and n are represented by their most common spellings. The u sound is prepresented by oe - what is known as a 'split digraph.' A digraph is a sound spelling a 2 letters = a trigraph is a sound spelling of 3 letters e.g. igh in night. In many, many words, digraphs are split with the e at the end. In done, the oe represents u as it also is in come, some, love, glove etc etc so it's quite regular according to that group of words.
'write' has 3 sounds also - r, igh, t. The 'r' sound is spelt by 'wr' as in wriggle, wrong, wrestle - you know many others, so that is quite regular. the 'igh' is spelt with split digraph i_e and the t is spelt with its most common letter.
I hope this sheds a bit more light on how our written code works. It means that with the right sound/letter knowlegde, so many more words are accessible without being tricky, irregular of having to learn them in an alternative way because they are deemed too difficult.
LIZS. you make interesting points when you say " Schools use a variety of methods - phonics, whole word and so on - precisely because individual children respond differently to different methods. MIL used to be a Reception teacher and said it was hard to gauge which was the best approach as for many children a combination worked best and they would suddenly be able to read without it being particularly clear what had worked for them."
Learning styles are a big think in education at the moment, but there is absolutely no proof whatsoever that a) you can even begin to identify in young children what their preferred style is and b) that trying to match these reaps any majorly improved rewards.
SO many subject areas demand different skills adn I think it's important that children learn to explore all sorts of areas - visual, auditory and kinaesthetic. Plus, so many areas demand one or two particular skills and children need to develop their strengths in these areas. Music is largely auditory - visual once you start reading music. Children need to employ both these skills to experience music. Art is visual. It is important to develop children's visual skills, even if they aren't very strong. Reading is an auditory and visual skills. Both areas need to be developed. ANd I think we've all heard the saying - I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand." Kinaesthetic activities are always important, even to those who purport to be other kinds of learners. I think as we become adults we are more aware of what sort of learning works best for us - I am very visual and need to se things - hearing things only really makes me forget. But we still have to use other areas - the world can't be tailored to each of our specific needs!
aloha - thank you for summarising my point re: word recognition - can I quote you here just to reinforce it: "recognition comes after we learn to read, not as a step towards learning to read".
This is it exactly. Some children do go through this phase very quickly - they have a strong memory for word recognition but also to understand how the ewords are made up so it seems as if they are whole word learners but this can't be done without understanding the component parts. Trying to teach words as a whole first just blows the memory eventually! - there are just to many to learn! (analytic phonics, incidentally, teaches words as whole first and then looks at why the letters are there; for what sounds.)
Mo2 - must also comment on your thoughts that "The Phonics 'stories' seem much less engaging, as they of necessity have been constructed around repetition of certain sounds (e.g. Oliver has an Octopus in his Office)" as this is a very commonly held view.
First of all, 'phonics stories' do seem less engaging to us adults but really, what is important and the most engaging for children is that they can do it themselves. YOu can have the most exciting and engaging story in the world, which will be nothinig more than frustrating for the child that can't access it. I have used some books which seemed really dire in presentation and language to me, but I tried them as I had a limited resource issue. The kids loved them - because they could read them themselves! As long as you are still experiencing exciting stories, beautiful illustrations, realistic characters etc elsewherem what matetrs in the teaching of reading is that the children practice the knowlegde they have and see success through whatever material is necessary to aid this.
More later - dd crying for lunch! - and she has been so patient so far...!