reading in reception class

[coldtea]

My Ds started school in january , he is 4.8 yrs. He has always been a bright lad but he is struggling with reading. Struggling probably isn't the right word as he is only 4 but most of his class have progressed to worded books where he is still on 'picture' books. At the moment i'm sticking post it notes all round the house with 2 or 3 high frequency words to help him recognise them then we play a game where i say 'please find mummy all the words which say mum'. I also have the elc flash cards which i'm doing but he is having difficulty accepting that words need to be sounded out , he would rather guess them. Any advice or tips for helping him would be appreciated as he gets upset he can't choose his school book from the 'same box' as his friends , which obviously he won't be able to do until he grasps the concept of reading.

My ds started primary one last August at 4.7. he - from day 1- was given books with words as the idea is that they are all readers - even from the start. First books were nursery rhymes - which the child knows - and he had to point to each word as he said it. That way he learned what "words" were. From there, he learned a few more abstract words by rote - ie the names of characters in the reading scheme, mum, dad, and, it etc. and we would make up sentences. They also use the "jolly phonics" scheme to teach sounds - but concentrate more on getting the child to recognise the initial sound and work out what the word is by looking at the pictures. Maybe you could try using nursery rhymes etc so he really feels he is "reading" and then start introducing new words?

Thanks for that , i am starting to have doubts about ds's school. All the children i know seem to have been given words to learn straight away or books with words , i want to help him but am having concerns that i am making it more confusing for him. What you have suggested makes sense so i'll give it a go. I feel like i've gone back to school

Here's a reply I just added to another thread:

I taught my son to read using a rather wacky sounding book called "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" by S Engelmann (£13 from Amazon). It really worked for us. We started when DS was 3 and a bit, did one lesson every now and again, still not finished it (I think we left it at lesson 92) but he reads beautifully and fluently. He's 5 and 3 months and reads at a Year 2 level, just as the book said he would. I should add here he's also profoundly deaf and wears hearing aids BUT the phonics method worked for us very well. Now he's also learning whole words and it's all blending in nicely. I read the C-A-T book too and got some ideas from there but the other one is the one we used.

We were warned that ds1's class would start off with picture books (ie no words at all). In the end he didn't but this was because he was such an unusual case. He had/has hyperlexia which means that he could read words but didn't really understand what they meant.

Anyway, in a sense ds1 has now gone back to the beginning. Insteading of using word recognition he is working on phonics so that he can sound out the words. For a long time he just didn't make the connection between the sounds and the fact that if you put them together they made words. What really helped was when we started making a phonics scrapbook with him. We had an A4-sized piece of paper for each sound. We had lots of magazines around the house so I looked through them with ds1 and asked him if he could see anything that began with, for example, "t". He didn't know what I meant at first but quickly got the hang of it. Each time we found a picture he was allowed to cut it out and glue it on the page. We used about 6 objects for each sound. I wrote the words underneath the objects and we put each page into one of those display-type books. The visual clues really helped and he was soon looking out for objects around the house that began with the right sound.

Thank you Christina & coppertop , you have given me some great ideas. I will definately look for that book it sounds great , i love the idea of the scrap book. Ds has 2 already , one for photos he has taken & 1 for places he has been & he loves adding to them , i really think he would enjoy that.

Before my ds started school sept (aged 5.5) we read the 'letterland book' which he found easy to remember, and sang the 'abc' song which goes to 'polly put the kettle on', and remebered that fairly easily. I find it makes a big difference to their reading age over the next 2-3 yrs if they read a bit of their school book every day.HTH

My son is also 4.8 and started school in January. So far he hasn't been allowed to bring home any books - none of the 'new' children has. Meanwhile the September children are getting further and further ahead. As far as I can tell, he can't read anything - if we try at home he just gets upset because he can't do it. My other children had all started to read by his age but the school has this new policy of not 'allowing them to fail' by giving them books too soon. I'm not happy with this - any recommendations for good reading schemes at home would be much appreciated.

Am not very computer clever or i would do a link! If you look on the wanted section under "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" i have had some really helpful responses there.

This is a website I have found before when looking for maths homework help. It has a 'reading scheme' on there I'v not tried it though.
www.happychild.org.uk/home5.htm

Thank you tigi , i'm new here & can't believe how supportive everyone is. I'm really glad i found mumsnet

coldtea, my son is four (five in July) and is in Reception. He has brought home reading books with words in - the sort where a grown-up reads the story on one side of the page and the child reads a short, repetitive sentence on the other side of the page (ie the sentence is the same all through the book). He has only recently started getting books like this.

Before this he was coming home with words to learn (maybe 10 in total, the ones he would meet in the first books), and before that Phonic Games (letters to be matched to the initial sounds in the pictures).

He studies a letter a week in school using the Jolly Phonics system. At first he was very slow to cotton on to, say, c for cat, and if you asked him to think of a word starting with c he would say "tree" or something! But he's got the hang of it now. We just practiced and I think it came with practice and age.

Hope that's of some help. Could you maybe have a word with his teacher? Perhaps she would let him have a reading book if she knew how important it was to him, even if he doesn't read it himself.

Hi everyone , i'm only on here for 5 mins but just thought i'd let you know so far during half term he has learnt 10 words! Yipee!! Tonight he's been making sentences with the words. I'm so proud of him & the most important thing is he's enjoying it.

I find it so frustrating to hear of you and your children's stories about their reading struggles - the sooner the Governemnt get this sorry mess sorted out and train teachers to teach reading properly, the sooner there won't be sad stories like this and all chldren will be reading much more quickly, totally independently and with so much confidence and enjoyment. There are so many schools implementing really secure methods and having amazing results; the latest results of major research show we can be doing much better and still we are making reading so confusing for so many young children - it can be such a turn off for so many budding, motivated readers!

Whole word learning - why should young children be overloading and stressing their memories learning words by sight when they don't understand why they say what they do?! If we were given a load of foreign words to remember by sight and shape, do you think we could - mind you, we'd have the added bonus of at least having some knowledge of how letters work.

There is one simple method - just etach kids how to interpret what the letters are that they see! Let them understand all teh 40+ sounds in our spoken language; let them learn all the spelling representations and how to recognise them adn blend them into words. That is all it takes.

Jolly Phonics is such a scheme, but to mix it with picture guessing and whole words renders it almost useless. scotlou - that sounds like what is happening in your DS's school. It's just ridiculous - why work with a perfectly good scheme and then make it harder by introducing complex and inaccurate skills! JP works quite well on its own! it's like teaching you how to drive but then labelling the pedals and the gear stick up wrong....

chocolategirl - learning a letter a week is also painfully slow and again, quite useless.

coldtea - I'm glad your ds has had some success tonight - he's probably so relieved he's made some progress in what has been such a struggle for him! There's no need - get the JP handboko and do it properly yourself.... You'll have him reading faster than the school will...

My DD is 4.8 years and can't even reconise letters let alone words. She has CP and learning problems, and we are worried about her delay in learning the simple basics of reading. When should they be able to reconise letters? And when should I be really worried?

My DS1 is now 5 yrs 8 months and in yr 1. He started reception in January and didn't do much in the way of learning anythinig - especially reading until the first term of yr 1. I was v worried and spent time with books and flashcards all to no avail. Then in the first 4 weeks of year 1 it suddenly clicked - I'd given up by this stage!! - he went through 3 stages of the ORT in 4 weeks and is now in the top third of the class for reading and doing brilliantly. He's easily reading level 7 of the ORT and is on the cusp of reading bu himself - so please don't worry - with some younger children it just takes longer to click.

Catflap, thanks for that information. I saw your other post about introducing the Jolly Phonics books and spending a week on each one - so I think I am going to get more actively involved and take this approach with him at home. He has seen some of these books and likes them.

I also found a "Fun with Phonics" book in WH Smiths which is about a Fat Cat, so we have looked at that too. It has a wheel at the back that you can spin to start the -at ending with different letters and he enjoyed doing this.

I assume I can just have a go with him and judge by his enjoyment/interest level when he's had enough?