DD's teacher says that "bright" children don't need synthetic phonics instruction.

[Avocadoes]

DD1 started Reception two weeks ago. Last night was parents evening (already!). I asked for advice on how to help DD learn to read. She already knows her individial letter sounds. The teacher just said to read with her for 10 minutes every day. In teh teachers words "She is very bright, she will learn without special instruction".

I was a little surprisied by this advice. I asked if I should concentrate on teaching she the sounds of specific letter combinations like sh, ch, ou etc. The teacher said there was no need to. She said that approach amounted to synthetic phonics instruction and DD1 would not need that kind of "intervention".

Is it true that synthetic phonics is only useful in helping slow readers? I am really interested in how I can help DD1 learn to read and enjoy reading.

Synthetic phonics is not the 'latest fad'. It is merely more focused teaching of the alphabetic code. Teachers who understand how reading works find it no more difficult to teach than a well-trained musician who approaches the teaching of the piano with similar care and systematic teaching from simple to complex.

To deny children the 'tools of the trade' that enable them to become confident readers and competent spellers is an example of the dumbing down that's done great harm.

But SP has been / is being sold to teachers and government ministers as the latest wonder cure.

I agree that it is only what teaching children to read and write English has always had to be, as James Dunn put it in 1766:

1. Begin with the words that are absolutely regular, in the sense that they are pronounced in the way children would expect.

1. Build into the exercises material that unobtrusively revises earlier work.

1. Give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g, the first big difficulty.

1. Introduce other difficulties progressively.

That's how all sensible teachers have always taught, and as they still do.

Masha, SP is the best reading method we have at the moment -in schools up and down the country it has been shown unequivocally to get more children reading than any other method or mixture of methods, that's why this and the last government want it used.

BTW, you're a retired secondary teacher and have no experience of teaching large numbers of children to read using synthetic phonics, or any other method/s for that matter, isn't that correct?

Well, dd didn't come across synthetic phonics until she started in Reception. She had been reading pretty confidently for over 6m.

I think all children should be taught phonics as one technique but I don't think that it necessarily teaches all children to read and I don't think it should be the only approach.

I am pretty sure that DS1 didn't learn phonetically. He was always completely rubbish at decoding, sounding out and blending - he made no progress at all with reading when that was the only approach. His reading took off when he just memorised words - we worked on the keywords initially and it went from there. His teachers seem to think that isn't that unusual. FWIW he has a reading age well over his actual age and reads all the time so it has done him no harm. His spelling isn't bad either.

Using one method of teaching reading isn't enough and why the DSs' school use a variety of approaches including SP (I know because it was A Big Thing when DS1 started school and I asked).

That said as a parent I didn't do phonics with either of my children (DS2 was the complete opposite and sounded out and blended with ease). My job as a parent was to read with them and give them practice, not to work on phonics specifically.

Many children have learned to read without specific phonics teaching - but 20%-30% struggled and were left floundering in secondary school, without the ability to decode to automaticity. It's not those of us whose kids learned in phonics-free times, or as part of a 'mix'. Surely it is the children who cannot read fluently without SP that we should be deeply concerned about?

Without a phonics focus, spelling deteriorated dramatically - look at the numbers of teachers who can't spell and were taught in a grammar-free environment. Spelling has hugely improved with SP - and reading has become accessible for those who formerly were left out in the cold. And children who learn to read with ease get great satisfaction from understanding how the alphabetic code works.

It's a credit to both this gov. and the last, that SP has been taken on board. It's just the training colleges/Universities who turn their backs and are complacent about the numbers of children they have failed.

But surely the mix is important so that all learning styles are accommodated?

I doubt my DS1 could read now at 10 if he were forced to learn SP first. It didn't suit him - he didn't get it, he still can't sound out a word. A system that only has SP would fail just as much as one without, just a different set of children.

Not when the mix has been shown to confuse many, many children, in that learning mixed methods has actually compounded their difficulties (particularly methods such as guess using picture clues).

"A system that only has SP would fail just as much as one without, just a different set of children."

No - it fails far, far less children than any other method. I've only ever known it fail with three children, all of whom had a statement for autism. They of course needed lots of intervention anyway, and learnt to read using sight words - which took them up to a point.

My DS has AS so maybe it is just his brain. Sight reading has been his main way of reading. He was bottom of the class at the end of Yr R when they did only SP, top by the end of Yr 1 when he got the hang of sight reading.

I am surprised though that a mix of methods is found to be detrimental. That hasn't been born out by the school's results overall.

Ds and dd have autism and both learnt to read through sight reading ds as early as age two and later diagnosed with hyperlexia so at the extreme opposite of difficulty reading.He was taught before SP was in vogue so he never had any experience of it or any confusion
Dd learnt to read before nursery again through sight reading and then was taught SP and still is tbh. It hasn't confused her but it isn't her default choice so she memorises words and spellings effortlessly but can use SP if it's a word she hasn't memorised already and she memorises the SP rules and does what she should during phonics lessons but it hasn't really enhanced her learning. She has learnt two different styles and uses the style that she is most comfortable with .

My son has ASD and reads by sight (before the age of 2) but struggled with spelling. However I'm still a firm believer that phonics (personally don't like the synthetic bit in the name) gives every child the best start possible and even those very few children who are natural readers (all the ones I've met are on the spectrum) benefit.

How does anyone know that their child is only learning to read by sight? And how do these children automatically read words correctly they have never seen before if they are learning by sight??? Or are they recognising whole words that look similar to words they have heard said and not recognising any words they have neither heard said nor seen written down at any point? Surely they are recognising that certain letters and letter combinations make particular sounds most of the time?????

I learnt to read at a very young age and must therefore have begun the learning process by learning to recognise words by sight. I didn't stick to that method alone, though - once I knew enough words off by heart, I started to comprehend the "rules" and their exceptions, because I could grasp the rules for myself from the words I could already read and spell.

My ds1, who is on the spectrum, also learnt to read very early on by sight but has also picked up the phonics rules pretty naturally for spelling - but then he is primarily an auditory learner (whereas many children on the autistic spectrum have difficulties in learning this way), so was maybe particularly sensitive to the sounds hidden within words???

My son was one of those children who remembered words just from sharing books at bed time with no active teaching going on not even pointing to words. He seemed to work the concept of words himself and the relationship between what was on the page with spoken words. He also read complicated words he had never seen before effortlessly. He claims he doesn't see separate letters just the word but can't explain how he reads.

Dd I think learned as you did got enough sight words and then applied the "rules" Dd is a visual learner with a near photographic memory and she memorises the shape of the words not the individual letters. When she was first learning to read/spell she used to use her fingers to make shapes which were as though someone had drawn a line around the outer edge of the letters in the words with no indication of the letters within
I'm used to their odd ways though because ds memorises routes not by watching the way we go but watching for which turn offs we don't go down

What happens when two (or more) words are the same shape?

I am also intrigued by the assertion that 'visual learners' can't learn to read with phonics. If reading isn't 'visual' what on earth is it?

Hasn't it been found that people who are dyslexic often have a poor ear for all the sounds in the English language? ie that learning to read normally requires a good understanding of the connection between what you hear and the symbols that you see (so that the symbols can make sense), rather than just a good memory for letter shapes?

No idea it's a mystery to me just know that the shapes she made related to the words she spelt and she very rarely if ever gets a word wrong that she has made a conscious effort to memorise and rarely gets a word wrong that she has read.
I think it's a mystery of autism tbh in much the same way that I didn't know ds at two could read until he used his magnetic letters to spell oracle (he wanted the text on the TV) I didn't know he was reading the text because he couldn't talk. Now at 16 he can barely string a sentence together but writes very eloquently with perfect punctuation and spelling.

To add I don't know if either of my visual learners would have learnt to read successfully using phonics because they taught themselves before phonics were ever mentioned. I do think though that if a child has a photographic memory as my two have then they will obviously take the easy option. Why work out the sounds and blend when you have seen the word before, remember it and reproduce it effortlessly?

I think phonics definitely have their place. My DS learnt to read almost by osmosis. I never did phonics with him, and he can read almost anything accurately now. He's just, for example, read the Narnia books (and understood what he was reading too, judging by the conversations I've had with him about them). He's not quite 6.
What he couldn't do, until I introduced phonics to him (which I did long after he learnt to read fluently), was spell. At all. He could read a word on the page, but he simply couldn't picture it in order to write it down. Sure, some of his spelling attempts are a touch on the phonetic side still, but at least now he can use the basic tools he has to make an attempt at a word. Phonics have given him that confidence. As far as I'm concerned, it's more important that he feels free enough to write independently than that he learns to spell every single word he uses correctly the first time he uses it. And, in fact, once he's put a word on the page, the visual memory of what it looks like in print seems to kick in and help him to spell it, because it's no longer an abstract. Also, irregular spellings can always be learnt separately. After all, if you're learning, for example, French or Latin verbs, you'll learn the regular verbs, then you'll have to memorise the weirdly irregular ones separately. No reason why the same principle can't be applied to spelling.

I'm surprised - my DD started school a fluent reader but the whole class has gone through phonics and the blended sounds. I'm sure yours will become the same, the teacher is probably right, but can't see the harm laying the building blocks in case! We started DD with letters and sounds but the sight recognition took over very, very quickly.

op, I interpreted this like pointythings did - that the teacher wasn't necessarily saying that bright children didn't need to learn phonics, merely that you didn't need to worry about teaching this at home, and the best way to help would be to continue reading and sharing stories with her instead.

Don't all schools teach phonics now in any case?

mrz - re your comment that all the natural readers you've met are on the spectrum, ds2 isn't on the spectrum, not even slightly, but he is a natural reader (albeit he was reading text-only chapter books to himself when he turned 4, which was a year later than his brother). Of course, he does have a ds on the spectrum, though! I wonder if it's not more to do with having an exceptional memory, which is quite common in children on the autistic spectrum, but not confined to them. Ds1's memory is photographic (if a perfect memory for what you have heard can be described as photographic), whereas ds2's is merely exceptionally good but with better contextual understanding at a younger age (ie understanding the gist of things without focusing on memorising the precise words). Ds2 also can't do the accents...

Actually I would agree with you Rabbitstew. DS's AS is very very mild so I am not convinced by the presumed link between sight reading and ASD, but he does have an extraordinary declarative memory - he just absorbs facts and seemingly words.

Sadly that isn't matched by his procedural memory which means he struggles with maths but which isn't surprising given his dyspraxia.

I was never taught any phonics at all and was a fluent reader by 6.

Most children learn through a combination of learning whole words, phonics, understanding context. There's probably a few other things but am tipsy and not in 'work' mode.

I teach dyslexic children (am a TA not a teacher) and they struggle with phonics generally.

ALL children learn by understanding context, maninbmc. Dyslexic children struggle with reading and writing generally, not phonics, but a one to one phonics program taught well is still what Dyslexia Action recommends above everything else.