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.

I think Maggiethecat's experience with struggling readers and her suggestion that at some point it comes together for children is very apropos here.
unfortunately neither you or maggiethecat know what happened in Y2.

Now, in year 3 I have been pleasantly surprised at the improvement by most. Many who struggled initially are not far behind those who had flying starts. The boy who would guess wildly still struggles

MathAnxiety - maggieTheCat said it only 'came together' for most children (ie not all). In year 3 some children were still struggling.

Not acceptable. By year 3 all children should be reading fluently.

Here is Maggie's post again:

'Now, in year 3 I have been pleasantly surprised at the improvement by most. Many who struggled initially are not far behind those who had flying starts.' She started in Y1, left off in Y2, and resumed in Y3. One boy is still struggling but apparently not guessing wildly any more based on pictures -- possibly this boy has a problem

Nobody knows what happened in Y2, but we do know what age the children were in that year, and since this is the age group where most children across the world are taught to read formally if they haven't yet figured it out for themselves, then maybe it can be assumed that the formal teaching they were getting in Y2 finally clicked, or they learned by themselves despite the formal teaching they were receiving? The most likely age for it all to 'come together' is 6-7. Yes, some will still struggle; this is likely because not all children have the same wiring, and some have difficulties processing symbols.

Or unknown to maggiethecat the children had been doing intensive reading interventions all through Y1 and Y2 ...

MathAnxiety - you all know how badly my DD is doing. Reading is not 'just going to click for her'. Even the SpLD EP doesn't think that.

She was behind in nursery and every year since.

If I hadn't stupidly thought 'Oh, she's young, she'll catch up soon' - She might have already caught up by now.

As it was I didn't start to panic until she finished Y1. ( 6 1/2).

So I have been searching for help for her for almost 2 years now. And I have very almost cracked it.

If instead she started being taught at 7. Then I didn't start panicking until she was 8. Then it took me another 2 years to crack all of her problems - she'd be 10 before she learnt to read!

There is a lot of advantages to finding out which children are struggling to learn to read early. And I kick myself every single day for thinking 'Oh she's young. It's this stupid English school system that tries to teach kids too young'. It wasn't that at all. She had a load of underlying difficulties that I'm having to unpick one by one....

And the biggest disservice everyone did to my DD was tell me 'Oh she's just young. All kids learn at diff rates.'

I hope this doesn't come across as hardhearted, but should all children be put through too-early teaching of formal reading like some sort of massive shape sorting machine just in order to find who has problems?

Your DD's problems might have been identified through other avenues besides reading difficulties if those other areas were the focus of her early educational experiences anyhow -- or are the problems confined to reading? (not being nosey) Were the difficulties in diagnosis solely due to looking for answers at age 6.5 or were there institutional delays and could it all have been assessed properly in a shorter time if the 'system' was less full up, etc?

Some diagnoses have to wait until an appropriate age for testing. 5.5 is the youngest for dyslexia for instance (not implying your DD has dyslexia). And exposing children to phonics for years will not help in the case of dyslexia, which is the most common cause of delayed or poor reading/writing.

Mrz, I would like to suggest that Y1 and Y2 children wouldn't need the reading 'interventions' and the parental worry associated with that if they all started on phonics at that age (somewhere between 5-7, average 6. Are school resources wasted fixing problems caused or misdiagnosed as a result of teaching SP too young?

The point is mathanxiety they may have had interventions and that could be why they have made progress rather than they have become ready ...impossible to know.

I know what your point was. My point about your point is that if you can't tell whether the children's reading improved due to intervention or because of 'readiness' then maybe you really don't know if SP for 4 yos has any basis for it (and expressing a deep-seated national fear about the future of Britain or garnering votes for the party that brought it in are not good reasons to have 4 yos exposed to formal teaching of reading). If it's impossible to know at this point (Y1/Y2) whether children are ripe for reading or whether exposure to teaching, ready or not, is doing the trick, then the 4 yos of Britain are involved in a large and risky experiment.

You keep saying SP and 4 year olds and I've answered both points ...

Hardly an experiment - I've made sure we've used phonics in my school for around 15 years, and I know mrz has too. I wouldn't call 450 odd successful readers an experiment.

But you don't know if the skill is age appropriate to teach and if there is the possibility that by focusing on the reading they are missing out on other areas which should be occupying their time before Y1. You don't know if it could be done in half the time with just as much success and a fraction of the angst if you waited til Y1 or Y2. (Actually you do know that because that's how it is done elsewhere). You haven't commented on the negative effect that formal classroom teaching can have on boys (moreso than on girls) in early childhood, or on the effect of performance anxiety and frustration in general on children who want to please but who find it beyond them at age 4/5, who might have a happy and successful experience at age 6, or the effect of feeling like a failure or a success in reading at an early age. Both are risks. It's a poke in the dark whose repercussions may yet be felt and appreciated.

An experiment in education is not to be judged solely on whether the task in hand is accomplished but on its long term effects. And as was pointed out earlier, because it can be done doesn't mean it is optimal.

The link to Hirsch's glossary dropped off my previous post. I have copied both the link and the explanation of 'developmentally appropriate' below.

www.nychold.com/hirsch-termin.html

Developmentally appropriate

If a teacher uses this term, he or she is suggesting that a child's innocence needs to be preserved by not exposing the student to early hard work. The child will learn when he is "ready."

This term, according to Hirsch, is "devoid of scientific meaning and lacks scientific authority," especially as millions of kids across the world have been exposed to and benefited from early hard work.

Yet some teachers feel such work is "developmentally inappropriate" for our kids! This has a particularly disastrous effect for disadvantaged children.

Specifically, he says "many advantaged children receive in their homes the early practice and knowledge they need, whereas many disadvantaged children gain these preparatory learnings, if at all, only in school.

The learning processes involved in the unnatural skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic are inherently slow at first, then speed up cumulatively and exponentially. Because of the cumulative character of school learning, educationally delayed children rarely catch up.

When an elementary school declines to teach demanding knowledge and skills at an early age, the school is unwittingly withholding education differentially from different social classes." Students with poor or disadvantaged homes suffer the most, and social injustice is perpetuated.

Mathaxiety,

Please don't misquote me. I never said that teaching reading at 3 was fine. Nor have I ever said that teaching reading should begin at 4.

What I said was that in order to learn to read, a child must have sufficiently developed the ability to hear the seperate sounds that make up words.

This ability starts to develop around 18 months and, in most children, is sufficiently developed to learn to read at around 3 years. I am not aware of any reading scientist who advocates starting formal instruction in reading at 3 years of age.

However, I know many middle class parents who make sure their children can read before starting school and they start formal instruction at home when their children are around 3.

Most countries start formal instruction at 5 which is why I stated that this was the most common age.

Since you are clearly unfamiliar with the evidence-based literature on beginning reading, I suggest the most user-friendly place for you to start is the Children of the Code website.

www.childrenofthecode.org

Click on 'Interviews' on the banner headline and scroll through the list under the heading, 'Learning Sciences & Ed Research'. Many links are provided for you to continue your reading.

You may also care to Google the USA report of The National Reading Panel (2000) and the Australia National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (2005).

"You haven't commented on the negative effect that formal classroom teaching can have on boys (moreso than on girls) in early childhood, or on the effect of performance anxiety and frustration in general on children who want to please but who find it beyond them at age 4/5, who might have a happy and successful experience at age 6, or the effect of feeling like a failure or a success in reading at an early age."

I don't recognise your description of phonics teaching - games, songs, actions, etc are not formal teaching in my book. I don't see boys struggling, or children who feel like a failure - I see happy, confident readers who love learning through songs and play.

Continued from previous post...

I said there is no optimal age to start formal instruction in beginning reading. One of the most damaging 'memes' that exists in the Education Establishment is that if a child doesn't learn to read in the first two years of formal schooling, they will never learn. This is, of course, absolute nonsense but a 'meme' does not have to be correct to be accepted as 'truth'.

Children who receive inadequate and/or incompetant instruction can still learn to read regardless of their age once they start to receive effective instruction. Many adults, who did not receive adequate schooling during their childhood, learn to read late in life.

However, our schools often waste the first couple of years on pointless 'play-based activities' and 'busywork' and then assumes that any child who cannot read is unteachable and gives up on them.

To address the notion that formal instruction somehow damages young children, watch any parent of a child old enough to walk, teach their child how to cross a road safely and you will see them use direct, explicit, intensive and systematic instruction;

"Hold my hand, stop on the corner, wait for the green light, do not cross until I tell you...etc".

This instruction is content-specific and does not, in any way, reduce opportunities for child-centred, play-based activities, ie, when parent and child get to the playground, the activity changes from requiring formal teacher-directed instruction to child-centred play.

Effective beginning reading instruction requires 20 minutes per day, every day, of explicit instruction in sound/letter correspondences for the first two terms of the first year of formal schooling.

In what way can 20 minutes per day of explicit instruction take anything away from the child's school experience?

To address the notion that formal instruction somehow damages young children, watch any parent of a child old enough to walk, teach their child how to cross a road safely and you will see them use direct, explicit, intensive and systematic instruction;

"Hold my hand, stop on the corner, wait for the green light, do not cross until I tell you...etc".

I hardly think so. It would be totally inappropriate for a one-year-old.

Mathanxiety,

You are convinced that there is a 'developmentally ready' age in which children are able to learn to read and that, as I understand from your posts, you believe this age to be 7 years.

The following quote is from Dr. Martin Kozloff's essay, Fad, Fraud, and Folly in Education:

"... The phrase "developmentally appropriate" is a rhetorical device by which self-styled "child-centered" educators and publishers try to convince gullible education students, teachers, and parents that what they sell ("inquiry learning," "discovery learning," "constructivism," "whole language") is good, and that direct instruction, practice, and teaching elemental skills first are bad.

There is no serious research whatever to support claims about what is developmentally appropriate.

Instead, the validation is nothing more than repetition of this vapid phrase -- a chant. The pernicious side is that advocates of "developmentally appropriate practices" believe that preschool and early elementary age children (even young children with known disabilities) should not be taught language and reading in a systematic fashion because this would be unnatural.

Consequently, advocates of "DAP" either do not know (are so blinded by their beliefs that they do not care) that disadvantaged students and students with disabilities will be denied exactly the sort of instruction they need to catch up with advantaged peers. (See Hart and Risley's Meaningful differences .) This is how "educational philosophy" means the same as "the higher immorality."

CecilyP,

My son was not walking at 1.

Sorry, incomplete post above.

CecilyP,

My son was not walking at 1 but at 1, I was giving him direct, explicit instruction to not stick his finger in the power point.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have started giving him explicit instruction in sound/letter correspondences using the synthetic phonics approach at 3 years of age.

Instead, I trusted the 'expert' advice I received from teachers and waited for reading to 'click'. He had started developing a bank of sight-memorised whole words which he could 'read' from 18 months and could always deliver the minimal amount of 'reading' that his teachers expected from him.

However, I was aware that he was struggling and his anger and frustration was not resolved until I went outside his school and found a retired teacher who gave him explicit instruction in sound/letter correspondences when he got to the end of Year 5.

At the end of Year 5, he was spelling at a Year 2 level. After 12 hours of explicit instruction, his spelling improved 3 year levels bringing him up to Year 5 level. After a further 20 hours of instruction, his spelling improved to Year 7 level, so he started Year 6 at primary school spelling at Year 7 level.

Had I continued to trust that his school and teachers knew what they were doing, he would have left school after 13 years still spelling at Year 2 level.

I might be simplifying things but some children are ready and able to learn to read at three and some aren't.

Just as some are able to ride a bike and some aren't.

Fwiw for those who can learn early and find doing so enjoyable, I think you open the door to a world of knowledge and entertainment for them early and I can't see the downside at all. The problems start for those children who aren't ready.

Indigo Bell, The problem is that children do learn at different rates. Had u pushed your daughter into reading much earlier, u might have made her really miserable and turned her against reading for much longer.

But reading is essential for other learning. And, in English-speaking countries, there is plenty of evidence that early readers tend to do better academically than those who learn later. So ideally children should start to learn to read as soon as they are able to, but, unfortunately, quite a few still need to be helped to become reading-ready when they start school.

The Rose review concluded, "...for most children, it is highly worthwhile and appropriate to begin a systematic programme of phonic work by the age of fice, if not before for some children, the way having been paved by related activities..."

(and couple of pages later) ...an appropriate introduction to phonic work by the age of five enables our children to cover ground that many of their counterparts in other countries whose language is much less complex phonetically do not have to cover.

Like most people, he confuses language with spelling. (The English language is one of the simplest in the world but its spelling is one of the most irregular.) But his overall reasoning re starting age seems quite sensible. Given the lousiness of English spelling, it's good to start children reading as early as possible, but they are not all able to make equally good progress from the same age.

One big advantage of starting early, for children who are able do so, is that they imprint many of the phonically irregular spellings (man/many, woman/women, lost/most) on their memory before logical thinking kicks in. It's probably easier to memorise such words without noticing the stupidity of some of their spellings.

In other words: help children to become reading-ready as early as possible, and as soon as they show signs of being able to cope, help them learn as much as u can.

And Rose also said, "the use of decodable books should certainly not deny children access to favourite books and stories at any stage and particularly at the point when they need to read avidly to hone their skills, as the focus shifts from learning to read to reading to learn."

But you don't know if the skill is age appropriate to teach and if there is the possibility that by focusing on the reading they are missing out on other areas which should be occupying their time before Y1.

You are the one who is saying schools are focusing on reading no one who works with young children is agreeing with you...

Indigo Bell, The problem is that children do learn at different rates. Had u pushed your daughter into reading much earlier, u might have made her really miserable and turned her against reading for much longer.

You too are missing my point. She was being taught reading at school every day at 4, same as every other UK kid.

The problem is that when kids don't learn to read, instead of looking at the quality of the teaching, or looking at what the problem might be, everyone just says 'Oh, she's too young' or even worse 'Oh, she has dyslexia.'

DD does not have dysleixa (although she does have a diagnosis of dyslexia).

So far I have found 4 seperate underlying problems which were stopping her learn to read. All of which have to be fixed seperately.

But if I had started looking for these problems at 5, she would be already reading now....

And if these very common problems were screened for more often, an awful lot of stress and heartache would be saved.

Indigo
She was being taught reading at school every day at 4, same as every other UK kid.
That is not true. In the last 2 yrs my three grandchildren all started school the term in which they turned 5, i.e. just a couple of months before their 5th birthday.

And I am sure that I am now not the only one who is really curious to know what your dd's problems are.
Can't u share at least some of them?

It's hard to grasp what u are getting at without that.

Mathanxiety and others concerned about the early introduction of SP:
Have a look at the Jolly Phonics Activity Books(no commercial interest!) www.jollylearning.co.uk

They are very sweet and have all the essential ingredients for teaching beginner readers. They are entirely appropriate for little children. For that matter so are the books I promote as they introduce sound-letter correspondences incredibly carefully and slowly . Little children really engage with the animal characters and instantly understand the connection between sound and letter. www.piperbooks.co.uk

Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Campaign for appropriate training of student teachers so that they have an understanding of our alphabetic code. My children were educated during the zenith of progressive education in London when children didn't learn to read until they were developmentally 'ready'. It was disastrous for 20%-30% of children. If you don't start gently to instruct children when they are young, some will inevitably pick up habits of guessing, looking at shapes, look and say etc. This can be very hard to put right later on.

Like all skills, some children need more practice and those that do need the extra practice can be picked out after only a few weeks of SP instruction.

I've had too many children referred to me from non-SP teaching schools, Steiner Schools and other alternative schools for comfort. Some of those children will be damaged for life.

Do a search, Masha - Indigobell's dd's problems are very well documented.