Advice on reading books please?

[lilystar]

DD is in Reception. She's currently on the red book band, and the school only use the ORT books at this stage.

The problem is that she isn't decoding the harder words, she's guessing at them from the context and the picture. There is also the problem that as she can remember the whole thing after reading it once, it appears that she knows words she's guessed at.

Are there are books I can get (either from the library, or to buy) which will require her to actually work out the words properly? I'm concerned that she's not really learning and is going to come unstuck at some stage.

Any ideas?

What Malaleuca said.

You don't annoy me, Mashabell, you amuse me. It is ironic that in trying to make learning to read transparent, you end up confusing even experienced teachers with your gobbledegook.

Bunnywunny - have you actually read this thread, or any of the research?

'They like it to remain mysterious'
What an extraordinary statement! In truth the synthetic phonics advocates have done their upmost to make the teaching of reading totally transparent. DebbieHep and others have provided endless information, free resources and advice for years.

The TES has a bias against synthetic phonics -the piece in the latest TES was taken out of context, Masha, as you would have discovered if you'd bothered to read the actual report rather than relying on the TES's reporting of it. The report was not talking about analytic phonics v synthetic phonics, but between different synthetic phonics programmes.

I have read the thread, and yes some of the research. However, research can be skewed to prove whatever the researcher wants to prove.

Yes, apparently there were schools not using phonics before current guidelines were introduced, but there were many that were. The gov is using this research to force all schools to use phonics (and rightly so)

I have taught children to read for 10 years, using largely phonic based strategies. It is vital. But I have never met a child who relies on it exclusively without learning some whole words, and never expected them to.

Children have been learning to read for years using a range of strategies. I wonder what will be happening in 20 years?? How will children fair differently to children from the past based on their solely phonic introduction to reading?

Not that children do have a solely phonic approach. Any child that has been read to regularly has already deduced a lot about reading before they even start to be formally taught. They already know that the text is related to the illustrations, that it must make sense, that words can be memorized- how else can they read their own name?? It is silly not to build on these skills as well as learning decoding strategies.

My dd is learning to read using phonics and decodeable books, this doesn't stop her guessing from the pictures and memorizing
words, she still mixes up similar looking words like was and saw demonstrating that she is not decoding these but sight reading them, even though she hasn't been taught to do so. If she spent more time learning these as sight words she probably wouldn't be still mixing them up.

My take on it is that many readers will learn to read whatever the method. Phonics may be better but for many children it really does not matter. Our school adopts the approach of having the ORT scheme by default and then doing more phonics based books for the weaker ones. I think this is mad but you have to go with what the school does.

I did try doing more phonics based reading with my ds but he hated it as was out of his comfort zone. For many children things need to be hard enough to challenge them but not to hard to scare them. He was used to ORT but put off by some of the longer unfamilar words in the phonics books at the same level. Those at a lower level just bored him.

He has now just finished level 7 ORT (he is in year 1) so doing more than fine. I think sometimes you have to let the teachers teach even though you might do something different

You're spot on BunnyWunny.

As to how children learned before, they did even less than they do now.

ut because there are very few jobs left now which require no literacy, governments in all English-speaking countries have become more worked up about it. Illiteracy now costs lots of tax money, hence the greater pressure on schools to teach it better. But with English spelling being what it is, there is a limit to what teachers can achieve. To learn to read and write English competently, u have to be brighter than u need be in other languages, although some bright people have trouble with its illogicalities too.

I put together my website and blogs to help people understand it all a bit better, but the sellers of the latest magic cure hate me for it.

Actually Masha is wrong illiteracy levels have remained around 20% for the past 60 years or so neither better or worse but remember the Rose review hasn't had time to impact on levels.

I'm not selling anything (unlike Masha) and don't hate her but she will never ever persuade me that it is desirable to spell you as U or that her crazy suggestions won't cause more confusion to the 80% who somehow manage to read and write perfectly well with our quirky system.