bad reading teaching -am I powerless?

[camicaze]

I've been into dd2's school a few times to help with reading and I'm quite shocked. Well over half the children in this reception class don't seem to readily recognise individual sounds or know how to blend them together. I'm talking about kids on L3 ORT that can't recognise all the letters in 'stop' or sound it out and kids on L2 ORT that can't read 'can' or 'red' and seem stumped when asked to identify the sounds within the word and then when I sound out for them have limited ability to work out the word.
I ended up doing alot myself with dd2 so she is making very nice progress but even if shes OK I don't want her in a class of weak readers and I'm pretty certain the majority of reception children should be able to do this. They have all been taking reading books home since Christmas, its a school with virtually no children from stereotypically difficult backgrounds, lots of parental support but very few children are beyond ORT L2.
I asked the class teacher afterwards if she wanted me to ask the children to sound out words they didn't recognise and she said 'Oh Yes'. I said that lots didn't recognise letters and found sounding out hard and she answered that its a very hard skill and needs lots of practice.
The funny thing was that this week the assessment file for one boy that could recognise hardly any sounds or soundout was open at my desk and I could see that the teacher had ticked the chart to say he knew all his lower case letters!
The head at the school has been very defensive and unhelpful when other reception parents have raised concerns this year and I suppose the governors would listen to her and the records which I'm guessing say the children know their letters.
So the thing is I'm pretty certain I'm powerless in this situation...

[allchildrenreading]

Thromdimbulator

This is very interesting about East Sussex - and the same applies to West Sussex. As a remedial teacher I was the financial 'beneficiary' of such malinstruction. But it made me very angry for the children who suffered. And it's certainly not just feckless parents, 'labelled' children. Some children who came to me were the children of editors, writers,teachers - and many were from highly literate families and many from families who read to them every day.
Most children are OK - it's the 20%-30% we should ALL be concerned about.
But SP helps all children - it helps to understand how our language is constructed, helps with second language learning, helps with spelling.
What doesn't help is an over-zealous concentration on phonics and decodable books when children are ready to move on. Until teachers are properly trained, there will be some who don't have the confidence to use their own judgement.
It would help enormously for parents who care about the children who slip through the net now to have a good read of www.dyslexics.org.uk.

[katiestar]

rthe trouble we have found this year with DD2 (reception) is that they are taught to read very phonically and then given non-phonic reading books.I have started my DD on phonic books at home especially Dr Seuss and she has zoomed ahead.

[mrz]

camicaze you say you don't think they have had daily phonics lessons has your child brought home a sound book to practise at home? Do you know which and how many sounds have been taught this year? How long did your child spend in reception?

In the school where I teach all children start school full time from day one in September and start phonics on the first day. I teach at the rate of a new sound each day and begin blending words for reading and segmenting words for spelling the second week. We have a daily lesson plus lots of practise of skills every day. We don't use ORT books for beginner readers as this just confuses children but I do realise many schools can't afford to replace a complete scheme however I would suggest that even buying the early stages of a good phonics scheme would have significant impact.

[sarahscot]

As an experienced infant teacher, I think that the teaching of phonics is vitally important. The average and above-average kids will learn to read regardless of which method is used to teach them, although in my experience phonics-based schemes get them there faster. However, the children who struggle are most likely to gain success through phonics. Of course, everyone is different and phonics don't work for everyone. A few children genuinely do better with the 'look and say' method.

For anyone looking for phonics-based reading books for home use can I recommend the Ruth Miskin 'Read, Write, Inc.' scheme. The books are self-explanatory and have a list of activities to do. My school has has huge success with this scheme, and we have a very socially deprived catchment area.

[ShoshanaBlue]

This is strange. We started Jolly Phonics in Term 2 in Nursery (with a sound book sent home) and the reading scheme (school uses a mixture of various - mostly ORT and Ginn) in Term 3 of Nursery. Reception was just a continuation of that.

I thought all schools had to teach phonics, we were told it was an important part of the curriculum. Each class teacher has to give the parents a curriculum talk close to the beginning of the year and she spent a lot of the time explaining the teaching of SP.

I don't really know the progress of other children in the class, but our school is probably quite economically deprived and has a high proportion of EALs, but I would say that our children seem to be making more progress.

We are too poor to live in Sussex!!!

[maizieD]

Teaching phonics is not statutory. It is government guidance.

[camicaze]

At dds school they did initially teach all the letter sounds but went straight onto ORT. I did lots myself with dd but I guess that lots of the other children in the class forgot all their letter sounds because they never used them in their reading books. I noticed that the guidance at the front of the reading record doesn't mention sounding out. Anyway the fact is that lots of the children didn't know their letter sounds in July and couldn't sound out despite being L2 and 3 ORT.
The thing is that although not every one is very pro pure phonics I didn't think it was controversial to expect most children to know the sounds by the end of reception and for sounding out to be a strategy they can use. Surely its really bad that dd's class- mates can't, by any standards?

[Malaleuca]

I thnk some teachers think they are doing phonics when they teach the basic letter/sound correspondences. That was very typical practice I believe pre-Rose, and evidently still is. It's all in the blending and children only need a few corespondences to get going.

It's like setting up a filing system - get that right at the beginning and away you go.

And as you have recognised ORT does not do the job.

Luckily ther are other books that do the job of developing the blending, based on knowledge of very few correspondences, and gradually building up. I think I've mentioned BRI books from (www.piperbooks.co.uk)but there are other programmes doing the same thing.

[mrz]

Unfortunately what you describe isn't unusual camicaze has your child been taught /ai/ /ee/ /sh/ /ng/ etc or just the sounds for the 26 letters of the alphabet?