Hi ladies ? although it?s always interesting to compare, the stage at which your child is at on the reading scheme is pretty much only an indicator of how well they can read that particular scheme? and to be honest, it may only be superficial ?reading? anyway, as the repetitive and predictive nature of the texts often hides the fact that the children can?t actually read them at all. All children are capable of learning to read, but these schemes really don?t do the best job ? in fact, it should be the teachers teaching the children to read and the supporting reading material just serving to reinforce and use the skills and knowledge they are aquiring.
If your child does seem lower down the stages than you would expect do be concerned. They will not necessarily catch up. The way it is taught in most schools these days, as it has for decades, means that not all children learn to read.
Most of the schemes mentioned here ? particularly Oxford Reading Tree and Ginn use whole word teaching methods. In ORT, the stories are predictable and the pictures provide lots of clues ? so the children can use this as a support to work out what the words mean. It is then assumed that by encountering these words enough times and by guessing correctly enough times, the words will stick as whole in their memories. It might look like the children are reading and the children might feel like they are, but it can often be quite hit and miss as to how much is really going in and sticking. Often, it doesn?t equip the children with enough skills to read outside the scheme. In Ginn, words are introduced at a painfully slow rate and with tons of repetition with the idea that, if a child meets words slowly enough and then often enough, they will stick. So, children have to remember words like ?where? before they can even read ?cat.?
These strategies are woefully inadequate. They are responsible for up to 25% of children failing to learn to read. Often, because they are looking like they can for so long, it goes undetected until later, by which time, too much damage is done and then they can be labelled as dyslexic.
Our language, although complicated, is quite logical and systematic. There are a bunch of sounds (about 45) in our spoken language and we use combinations of our 26 letters to represent these sounds. Children just need to learn to understand and discriminate these sounds; match the various spellings to them and then be able to recognise these words and blend the sounds to hear words. Then, they can really read ? anything. Not just a scheme book. They can become fluent; recognising whole words because they understand why they say that; not just relying on an unreliable memory or unpredictable guessing. Because they can then access the words fluently and independently, they can read with meaning and understanding, because their time isn?t taken up struggling to work out what the words are.
Of course, many children learn to read fine through these schemes ? so if your child is ?high up? it just means they are very good at making sense of all the chaos themselves.
You really need to be asking yourselves:
can my child identify the 40+ sounds of the language?
Can they recognise more than one spelling for each sound?
Can they blend the sounds all through a word to read it e.g. not just recognising what a word starts with.
This method of teaching reading is all in the news again ? you might have seen articles recently, or caught ?Newsnight? last Friday. Hopefully, the Government will do something about the appalling methods promoted in the National Literacy Strategy in light of all the recent research.