Why is MN so obsessed with reception reading?

[skiphopskidaddle]

It's a marathon, not a sprint. It doesn't matter if Johnny is on red and Amy is on lilac as (a) different schools go at different paces and (b) children develop different skills in different order.

I can't quite believe the number of reception reading threads I've seen this week along the lines of "what colour book is yours on?". I'm going over to the behaviour/development board now to check for obsessive posting about when children learn to walk. Cos it doesn't matter either, in general.

What an interesting subject/debate I won't pretend to understand half of the jargon,but the whole learning to read thing fascinates me.

Dd seemed to pick it up by osmosis somehow, she was always asking what things said etc. By the time she went to nursery she could sight read quite a lot of words, I was a first time parent and had no clue about phonics so A was A not a. She did lots of phonics in nursery and was reading fluently by reception.

Ds1 is a different kettle of fish, so I imagine I will get to experience the whole painful process .

Has the whole teaching of phonics been done away with in nursery?

Dd had a whole book of phonemes with pictures for actions etc. They had 15 minutes literacy time each day. She would often come out doing some bizarre thing which represented a letter/sound.

Ds1 seems to have not even encountered letters in his nursery life, not sure if it has changed or not?

It needs to change back if that is the case.

All teaching methods are based on a theory of how children learn, not on the subject matter itself.
Really? Teaching history is quite different from teaching English mainly because of the subject matter. The fact that English literacy is still taught largely as first recommended in 1776, before learning theory was invented, also suggests that the subject matter has much to do with it.

Languages in which just learning the sounds for all the spellings of the language is enough to be able to read it, teaching children to read is much simpler and takes much, much less time. This removes pressure to start early.

There has been so much debate about literacy teaching in English only because learning to read and write English is exceptionally difficult. I have tried to establish exactly what makes it so - what causes the slower learning and the need for extra teaching.

Teaching of history is started slowly according to the ability of the children to absorb the information. They are presented with very little text and simplified information. They may be invited to draw pictures about the subject matter. THey may be invited to dress as a character from a period they are studying. Information is related to them personally, and critical thought is not required at these early stages. They generally do not learn anything about very distressing events that they might be afraid of or unable to process emotionally, like the Holocaust or the World Wars. It is incremental and aimed at teaching different skills with each stage.

As children progress through school they are exposed to a greater volume of information, nuance, and detail, and different subject matter in history class. They answer questions from texts and write their own versions of how events occurred, and are gradually encouraged to develop their faculties of critical thinking and advanced writing skills.

It most definitely is graduated according to the intellectual and emotional stages of the children, and this is done because ultimately the point of teaching history is not just mastery of certain facts about your own country's past but the development of critical thinking skills and writing skills, aims that cannot be accomplished when children are 5 and they start exploring the idea that people have been around for a long time and that the lives of people long ago were different from ours, studying the cave men or whatever point their syllabus starts (I recall learning about the Iron Age in Ireland way back at age 6, progressing up to WW2 and the broader European context in secondary school).

So to sum up, learning theory is central to how history is taught, what is taught, and when.

I am very surprised that someone who works in teaching every day does not apparently know much of the theory of learning that underlies her daily work.
Yes I'm well aware of the work of Skinner and Bruner and Vygotsky and Piaget and Maslow and Bandura and Dewey and Gardner and Uncle Tom Cobbly but you would be hard pressed to find a classroom that is organised as purely Behaviourist or purely Genetic Epistemology or purely Tabula Rasa Personally I'm more of a fan of Wertheimer than Bruner

Oh, mrz. Don't you think we are incredibly lucky to have a poster on here who can put us all right about every little detail of the teaching process and all its theoretical underpinnings?

I certainly am. Lord knows how I have managed to teach all of these children to read so successfully without paying attention to any of this bollocks.

You mean you don't give serious thought to theorists before you plan your lessons? I'm shocked!
Seriously the only time I dust off Piaget, Maslow, Bruner et al is when I'm wearing my mentor hat and supporting education students for local universities and they need help with assignments.

Oh good googling, mrz.

And MaizieD and Feenie, I am cut to the quick.

I remain very surprised at this bald statement:
'No phonics stems from speach and is based on language.'
(In the spirit of Maizie and Feenie, I would like to point out that speech is spelled with two Es and no A.)

And also the lack of punctuation after 'No'.

It's a valid point though, mathanxiety - why are you quoting theory at teachers who teach reading - and very successfully - every day?

I didn't need to google it mathanxiety it's all on my laptop to support students in addition to all the theory books in the bookcase from my MA in Early childhood Education they come in useful as I'm currently mentor to a final year BEd and a third year Education & Early Childhood Studies student (two different universities).
You have a very narrow view of how teachers work if you think lessons fit neatly into single theories.

So to sum up, learning theory is central to how history is taught, what is taught, and when.
Except your description isn't how history is introduced in primary schools. You have begun in the middle of the process.

I did so because I find it alarming that a teacher is unaware of the theory behind her method. I'd like to think a teacher had more intellectual curiosity than that. I also wonder what sort of training a teacher experienced if she doesn't know the basic theory behind her work.

'You have a very narrow view of how teachers work if you think lessons fit neatly into single theories.'
I don't think lessons should fit into single theories. If you do SP to the exclusion of any other method then your lessons fit neatly into one theory, behaviourism.

I disagreed with you that phonics 'stems from speech and is based on language', an assertion that gives the lie to your statement about all your theory books. If you're going to apply different methods flexibly in the classroom (which you did not indicate you do up to your last post) you need to know what those methods are, what research they are based on, who they are most suitable for and in what circumstances. A good teacher who can be flexible in application of various methods to suit the needs of individual children understands what she is doing and why her method or methods are appropriate, i.e. the theories behind it/them.

As for the teaching of history, I have omitted learning to talk and then to read, but my very basic description stands, and was concerned with pointing out the incremental way it is taught in any case, in answer to Masha's post. It is not all piled on at once.

Thankfully, your concept of a good teacher, who knows all the theory behind the practice 20 years after qualifying, does not match anyone else's. I can't see annual proficiency tests on Piaget or De Bono being brought in any time soon.

That doesn't mean that good teachers ignore all intellectual stimulation beyond qualifying. When I did qualify, I couldn't wait to teach children to learn to read using the searchlights methods advocated at college. I dutifully applied this sight/context/grammar, etc, methos to teaching children, and found it was successful in 90% of cases. Not enough. I became a Literacy Co-ordinator, desperate to make sure that no child ever left our school unable to read ever again. I read up on the work and the success of Debbie Hepplewhite and Jolly Phonics, got together with the Reception teacher, got very excited and implemented a synthetic phonics teaching programme from Reception. After seeing for ourselves how successful it was, we implemented it across the school gradually, until we taught phonics systematically up to Y6. That was in the mid/late nineties, and we have never looked back - and children never leave our school unable to read. We typically achieve around 70% level 5s in reading.

Colleges still turn out students who have no idea how to teach SP systematically or properly - it's scandalous. Still, as long as they know their basic theory, eh?

Schools that teach reading more successfully than others simply teach it more: more consistently, with more testing, more support, better resources. I applaud all that.

But to call all the stages which mrz listed ?phonics? is simply stretching the meaning of phonics way beyond what is normally understood by the word. Only stages 1-4 are phonic, not 5-6. The last two are simply teaching little groups of words as exceptions from basic phonics. They take far longer than 1-4 (for spelling about 10 years) and would not be needed if English spelling was not so irregular. The government scheme 'Letters and Sounds' even says so.

Stage 1:- One letter one sound (yellow) ? children need to understand that sounds are represented by letters for reading and writing
Stage 2:- Building Longer words (orange) Children need to understand one letter (letter string or grapheme , e.g. ?ge = j) to one sound correspondence.
Stage 3:- Multi-Syllable words (blue) ? Children need to understand that longer words are made up of blocks of sound (syllables)
Stage 4:- Sounds represented by more than one letter (green) - Children need to understand that a sound may be represented by more than one letter.

Stage 5:- Categorizing Sounds in Single-Syllable words with Orthographic Diversity (red) ? Children need to understand that a sound can be represented in more than one way and that the same letters may represent more than one sound.
Stage 6:- Multi-Syllable Words with Orthographic Diversity (purple) ...

Children have no trouble understanding ? that a sound can be represented in more than one way and that the same letters may represent more than one sound.?
What takes time and causes them difficulties is imprinting on their minds in which particular words letters behave in these unalphabetic English ways. To insist that this is also still a matter of learning phonics is just a lie. ? It?s just old-fashioned teaching of reading and writing by the drill method.

mathanxiety can I ask what your experience is of applying theory in a school with 4 year old children?

But who are you, masha, to dismiss what I and other experienced teachers do successfully every day so readily and so easily?

I am not denying that schools which teach reading tenaciously and allocate a great deal of time and resources to it, as yours appears to have done, achieve better results than those which don?t.

But it?s very misleading and confusing to call this approach ?synthetic phonics?, because it clearly involves much more than that. And not all schools can afford enough support staff and other resources needed for it. They are also expected to teach many other subjects as well, not just reading.

If English spelling was not so inconsistent, children would learn to read and write much faster, and with much less effort from them, their teachers and parents, and at a much, much lower cost. Nor would we continue to have so many pupils still needing support at secondary level, despite the vast expenditure of time, effort and money.

What bothers me most of all is how the inconsistencies of English spelling affect children at the lower end of the ability range. They learn to read much more slowly than the majority, yet they need more time for all other learning too. English spelling guarantees that they leave school knowing woefully little - much less than more learner-friendly spelling systems enable them to learn.

So are you actually advocating, Masha, that the whole of the English language be dumbed down to accommodate less able children?

I agree with some of your comments about how children learn to read, but really??

Yes, learning to read is a complex and tricky skill for young children, but the English language is a complex and wondrous thing to study in it's own right, that it what sets it apart form other languages and makes English literature so rich and varied.

It's interesting that it is assumed that it is only 'less able' children who have problems with learning to read.

The whole concept of 'ability' is very questionable to start with as much of what is characterised as 'ability' is a product of what has been learned, rather than an innate quality. As reading is a key element in acquiring and extending knowledge, vocabulary, and understanding of abstract ideas and concepts, sophisticated use of which is taken to indicate 'high ability', then until a child can read and apply what it has learned it is difficult to guage their 'ability'.

It is also a myth that only 'low ability' children struggle with reading (by which, for the purpose of this post, I mean the very basic decoding and blending skills ). I have worked with many children of average to high ability who have struggled to acquire these very basic skills. It is, in fact, quite easy to teach decoding and blending skills to automaticity; it is only when these are learned that you can start to form an idea of a child's real 'ability' from how effectively they are able to use those skills.

Bunny, Spelling is just a way of recording language, not the language itself. The English language is one of the simplest, it's just its spelling that has ended up chaotic for reasons which I have explained in a post on englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com

Why would improving English spelling, so that more children can learn to read and write and become better educated, 'dumb things down'? Would repairing broken windows in an old building also be 'dumbing down'? Improving a spelling system that has fallen into disrepair is no different.

But irrespective of that, I think it?s good for people to understand why learning to read and write English is exceptionally difficult and takes most children a very long time, including some very bright ones. English literacy acquisition involves a huge amount of rote-learning, and even quite a few very bright people are not good at that.

But everyone already knows that English is full of irregularities and is not easy to learn, so what is your point?

BunnyWunny U know deep down U want to spell like Masha don't fight it!