letterland versus jolly phonics versus oxford reading tree biff and chip: save me from going ever so slightly mad

[Greythorne]

I am lost.

I am abroad and trying to make sense of how to teach the DC to read in English but seem to be going round in circles.

We have this Letterland book which I thought was good (got DD1 to recognise all the letters, plus she enjoyed the stories and chartacters.

But now I see there's from Jolly Phonics and wonder if I have made a mistake teaching the alphabet sounds (buh for bouncing ben, tuh for talking tess, fuh for fireman fred etc) because we now need to do the phonics phonemes which are not the same :( .

So, do I jump into Jolly Phonics or songbirds

We are abroad so cost is an important factor, as everything comes from amazon and obviously delivery costs bump up the price.

Any help gratefully received. Thx

Blimey! I have assessment aswell, but I know Senco is huge, especially in your school.

Ok, thanks all

I am off to investigate Phonics International

Jolly Phonics CD Rom is good because you can hear all the sounds as they should be pronounced which is great when it comes to blending.

I think when parents say their children started phonics after already doing reading and didn't 'get on with it', thats because its not the easiest route. Its only natural to take the path of least resistance and guessing from cues like first letters(especially in ORT) is easier. Whenever my dd has been doing alot of ORT from school (we all love magic key), her desire to guess gets worse and worse. When I do reading at home that is more decodable she HATES it to start with because guessing difficult words is so preferable to laboriously sounding them out, but after a little while she ends up very quickly really decoding the difficult words, its no longer a laborious process and therefore REALLY reading the words on the page and I think she then tends to take a leap up in her reading.
I don't know if people agree but I think that because the school is using 'look say' they keep dd on easier books, I guess to really embed the sight vocab. But it so winds me up because she forgets all her decoding skills after a while. So I finally ditch the school books for a while as I said and do my own thing. I find that it helps to often do harder books (not always) as she gets lots of decoding practice and her reading ability seems to rise to the challenge.
BTW I agree that loads and loads of reading will help most children but phonics is tops for getting most children reading quickly and no matter what is going on at home.

maverick you say:
For a list of the approx. 100 HFWs with singular or rare spellings which need to taught directly and systematically -see D.McGuinness. Early Reading Instruction p58.

There are only seven HFWs words , , , , , and , that may need to be memorised as whole units i.e. are true, high frequency 'sight' words, though no English word is completely phonologically opaque.

are you saying there aren't even 100 HFW which are not decodeable, only 7?

'are you saying there aren't even 100 HFW which are not decodeable, only 7'

I'm saying that all HFWs contain at least one grapheme?phoneme correspondence which is straightforwardly decodable, but many HFWs do contain a 'tricky' bit (a singular or rare grapheme being used to represent a particular phoneme).

Do not teach any HFWs as global wholes except, perhaps, for the 7 listed above.

Instead, 'Systematically teach children to learn the frequently used words that have an unusual spelling by blending, identifying the awkward part and learning the correct pronunciation' (RRF committee advice)

All words are decodable once you've learnt the code.

HTH

As mavrick says teaching /learning the lists of 100 HFW (followed by the next 200 HFWs) is a total waste of time
the 100 list contains such (extremely difficult)words as

a
am
at
in
it
on

Mrs
thank you and thanks for your inbox messages :)
I have been remiss in not saying thx

maverick
thx for clarification
are you a teacher too, out of interest?

From my own experience - my son is 7 and a complete book worm. He learnt the letter SOUNDs through jolly phonics on his 4th birthday. It took him about a month (10 mins a day) and by the time he started school he could read lots of CVC words and also words like Balloon/Free. At school they continued phonics work but also introduced words to learn called high frequency words - see link www.highbury-prim.portsmouth.sch.uk/docs/pdf/Highfrequencywords.pdf
My son loved bringing books home to read and now reads 5 years a head of his age. He is a free reader and reads in his bed a lot!

PS - Jolly phonics also seemed to work with the rest of the class too. They are all reading well above their age but i do think that often how quickly they advance in reading often realates to how much interest they have in reading.

"i do think that often how quickly they advance in reading often realates to how much interest they have in reading."

Being able to read (that is, being able to work out what the words 'say') is a pretty sure way of advancing reading

I work with KS3 'strugglers' who don't read because they can't read, not because they don't want to...

(maverick is like me, except that I do it in a school and she does it privately... )

ClenchedBottom - whats wrong with letterland? why the shudder?

I used to see lots of children who had been utterly confused by Letterland - 10 year old lads who would peer doubtfully at a letter and whisper in an embarrassed tone, "Erm that's the one about the wicked witch isn't it?" - not exactly helpful!

Clearly these were children who found reading difficult anyway, but why confuse things??? I was sooo glad when it seemed to fade into non-existence.......

Bookmarked this as I a mildish (untested)dyslexic, trying to teach my son who on the surface has the same problems!

Not a teacher, only experience with my own 3 dc. Strongly in favour of phonics teaching,and HATE Biff Chip books. But I did have some letterlands books as well and quite like them. Even for dc1 I will sometimes use it. When he is in another room it is easier to shout across "It's MUnching Mike" then "mmmnnnnn"

Beenbeta: 'Its all about sheer volume of reading not phonics. The more that a DC reads the more they just 'remember' what a word looks like. The sounding out letter stage is just a crutch to get them there ASAP.'

Have you any idea how many parents seek private tuition for their privately educated children ? As less and less phonics teaching was taught, the dyslexia industry flourished - in the 1980s it used to called the middle class disease. An all-through-the-word phonics approach enables virtually all children to take off into reading.

Some children simply need more time to acquire foundational skills. I taught part-time in school and privately and many of the children outside the school where I was working came from private schools- some from feeder schools for Eton, some from Steiner, many with parents who read to them daily. Some had phenomenally high IQs. The one thing that they had in common was a poor phonic foundation - oh and terrible loss of self-confidence and self-esteem, of course.

allchildren I am a product of non-phonic reading at school with foreign parents to boot. I am only now discovering how the english language works (can't even spell language with out spell checker ever)Strange I can read Spainish very well with no formal teaching! Lose of self-confidence and self-esteem in writing has held me back. BUT on the other hand I would have gone into advertising if I had those skill and might be a coke addict now!!! Life throws curve balls!

ops! allchildren Thank for the info.