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.

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.

Perhaps your maths isn't too good Masha but that means they were FOUR and in most schools would be involved in some phonics/reading activities

Some of those children will be damaged for life.

And the main cause of it are the phonic inconsistencies of English spelling which make learning to read so exceptionally difficult.

No it isn't. Do you ever read and respond to anything properly, masha? You are like an automaton. When this thread dies a death, I have visions that you will be the last person posting the same repetitive dross.

I wondered when U would get back to that.

Children like Indigo's daughter would struggle no matter what orthographical system was used but because people kept excusing her obvious difficulties because of her young age. Indigo has faced an uphill struggle to get her the help she so desperately needs.

I agree with what you say about Indigo's daughter, mrz, but could there be some childrent who have what appear to be similar reading difficulties at 4, but who would have no such difficulties if teaching reading was left until slightly later?

I think most children being taught to read are nearer 5 than 4 but of course there are exceptions.
In part this is due to all children starting school in a single intake in September, so younger children may start at just four while their older class mates will be almost 5. I also believe many parents want their child to learn early and schools (and nurseries) comply with parental wishes. Many schools send home a reading book right away with no thought to whether the child has any skills needed in order to read it. Personally I would like to send home quality story books for an adult to read to their child.
Teaching phonics in an early years classroom should take up a small part of the day and is nothing like the image of Gradgrid.

Mrz
Your claim that
Children like Indigo's daughter would struggle no matter what orthographical system was used
is simply wrong, and blindingly so.

Countries with more regular orthographies have far fewer children with reading problems. They also all start the teaching of reading later, because they know that it does not take long and gives extremely few children problems.

The Rose review admitted that. So does the L&S guidance for teachers. It recommends that Phase Five should take about a year but also explains,
Phase Five would not be needed if there were a perfect one-to-one mapping between graphemes and phonemes. ... English is unlike most other languages, however, ... that is to say, most phonemes can be spelled in more than one way, and most graphemes can represent more than one phoneme.

There is no doubt whatsoever that fewer English-speaking children would struggle with learning to read and write if English spelling was more consistent.

U may, for example, be extremely attached to all the words which don't spell the short /e/ sound with e, but they undoubtedly help to make learning to read English harder than other orthographies:
Bread, breadth, breast, breath,
dead, deaf, dealt, death, dread, dreamt, head, health,
lead x2 [led/leed], leant, leapt, meant,
read x2 [red/reed], realm, spread, sweat, thread, threat, wealth.
Longer words with : Breakfast, cleanliness, cleanse, endeavour, feather, heather,
heaven, heavy, instead, leather, measure, stealthy, treacherous, treadmill, treasure, weather.
Friend. Leisure. Against, said, says, every, Wednesday.
The following are also without a doubled consonant after short /e/ (compare ?penny, teddy, jelly):
Any, many;

Already, jealous, meadow, peasant, pheasant, pleasant, ready, steady, weapon, zealous;

jeopardy, leopard; bury; heifer. (Masha Bell 2011)

Using for both the ee sound and short e is extremely silly and does nothing except make learning to read and write English harder. I don't pretend to be an expert on how best to enable children to cope with such a silly spelling system, but I do know which spellings make learning to read and write English much harder than need be, and much harder than all other European languages.

Masha do you have the slightest idea what difficulties Indigo's child has? I suspect not!

I've asked Indigo to tell us.

But this is largely irrelevant to the present discussion. Because English spelling makes learning to read harder than all other alphabetic spelling system for all children, but for anyone with any kind of problem, much more so.

No it isn't irrelevant at all so before you start spouting your same old, same old take a minute to search and find out!

First of all everyone (including me :( ) said she was just young and she'd learn in her own time. Then half way through year 1 everyone suddenly started to say she was dyslexic.

As well as a formal diagnosis of dyslexia from an Ed Psych - the SpLD team, 6 teachers, 3 SENCOS, 2 Opticians, 1 SALT, 1 Audiologist and 1 GP all put her learning difficulties down to 'dyslexia'

But through extreme preservation (so far) I have found that she actually has / had:

• Vision problems ( Convergence, Vergence, Accomodation & Accomodation Rock)
• Cross dominance
• Auditory Discrimination problems
• Auditory Processing Delay
• Hypersensitive Hearing
• Slow cognitive processing
• Retained Reflexes
• Attention problems

All of which we've cured, or are in the process of curing.

However if I'd believed everyone, I would have a child who would never have learnt to read.

I would be very surprised if everyone who is currently diagnosed or supected of having dyslexia doesn't suffer from either poor teaching, or problems like DD has, or a range of other visual / auditory / attention / cognitive problems.

It is not the English language which is hard to learn. What is hard is to get anyone to take reading difficutlies seriously, because there are so many easier (and cheaper) scapegoats ( too young, bad teaching, bad parenting ) to blame it on.

But Masha, you are the first person (I have heard) who is blaming it on the language itself being too hard. Yet another person being totally unhelpful to the cause of getting all children reading.....

CecilyP I know a young woman who is now a medical student (DD1's bff) who would have fallen into that category you suggested. She learned to read in 1st Grade, at age 6, when phonics were first formally introduced in school.

For the last time, Ymeyer, if you could for one minute let go of that box you're trying to put me into -- I have nothing against phonics. My DCs learned to read with no exposure to formal phonics instruction or very small exposure. The rest of their classmates learned at age 6, fast and with very few exceptions and very little fuss. My objection is to teaching it at age 4, sometimes a very young 4, in the UK.

Your labels and boxes are not helpful. Kozloff's rant consists of a series of straw men set up and then demolished and concerning the foibles of an education system where the chronic underachievement of African Americans underlies most pedagogical debate on the fringes (for 'failure of whole language' read 'failure of big city school districts to achieve results in teaching African American students'). Not only are some of the philosophies he sets up 'politically correct' (hiss, boo), some of them are (gasp) 'Marxism' masquerading as pedagogy. (Which in the American context is the apogee of evil, like gummint health insurance, 'socialised medicine'; the NHS). His thoughts on 'special education' and political correctness do not ring true from my observation, but this is anecdotal -- in the high school that DD1 attended a very vocal parent group took the district to court to force inclusion of special ed students in mainstream classrooms, with the school contending that this wasn't in the best educational interests of the students involved.

"'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'."
-- You have made up your own straw man there. I very much doubt the existence of such a 'meme' except in your own head.

'Children who receive inadequate and/or incompetent 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.'
-- I don't think anyone has claimed otherwise (see straw man comment above).

'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.'
-- none of this is true, and your misapprehension of what those play-based activities are there for (i.e. to pave the way for reading readiness) is glaringly obvious. It is really only disadvantaged children that benefit from early SP instruction, in order to make up for the deficits (lack of paving of the way) in their homes by bypassing the play-based learning that other children have access to.

The relatively enriched environment that 'advantaged' children enjoy prior to school prepares them eventually for reading, mathematics and the other subjects they will encounter in school. The foundation they receive and the attitude and behaviour they see modelled prepare them to succeed in school. The majority of children do not fit into the 'disadvantaged' category, and since there is no research indicating SP is appropriate for that majority at age 4 (or early 5) I want to know why it is practiced when additional 'paving' for this large group could be of immense benefit and make the transformation to reading much faster and less of a struggle. If other skills besides reading were a priority, in a 'play-based' curriculum without the tunnel vision attitude that reading is the only worthwhile aim, then students like Indigo's DD might have been spotted and helped earlier.

I know two students who benefited enormously from therapy they were referred to at age 3 from preschool in the US (one received a mild autism diagnosis and the other had a panoply of social/emotional, self-help and speech difficulties that were subtle but which the play-based programmes were partly designed to identify). When reading is the be all and end all in an early years curriculum it is tempting for both parents and teachers to adopt a wait and see attitude, because not all parents will accept that their child may have a problem and not all teachers will insist there is one in the face of parental denial until there is some undeniable issue with performance in the formal environment. If priorities other than reading are present in early years education then some problems can be identified and dealt with earlier.

Allchildrenreading, because of the vagaries of English, there is a lot of commitment to memory of individual words involved in reading it's not all straightforward phonics. I do agree with the take I think you have on Steiner schools (lose your teeth/learn to read; gnomes/maths). Again, I have nothing against SP it's just the age at which students are required to tackle reading that baffles me.

Mrz -- Parental wishes have very little to do with education policy or practice in the classroom. It is after all because of lack of parental interest that there are children who arrive in school educationally disadvantaged and needing the intervention that SP constitutes.

You know this Mathanxiety because you have never been asked by the parent of a reception child when they will be getting their reading book?

Why not just tell them they will get it in good time, when they are ready and to keep on reading to their child themselves and doing all that excellent foundation-laying in the meantime?

Teachers and schools are not shy of telling parents about homework policy or uniform policy; many parents baulk at both but schools manage to persuade them that they are going to do things their way and not the parents' way. Same goes for the cost of school trips, etc.

Are you saying that if some parent approached you and said she thought her little Johnny should be doing multiplication of decimals at age 4.5 that you would seriously consider this?

I do but there are a lot of NQTs or less confident teachers who give in and even some headteachers will overrule the teacher to keep parents "happy".

Out of interest have you ever visited the preschool forum?

because of the vagaries of English, there is a lot of commitment to memory of individual words involved in reading --

What we are trying to tell you is that this is not so. There is committment to memory in SP teaching but it is of the letter/sound correspondences and the words they are specific to. This may appear to you to be the same thing, but it isn't.

But then, your definition of 'phonics' is completely different from, say, mine, Feeenie's and mrz's. It is not easy to achieve any sort of understanding if there is no agreement on what the subject being discussed actuallly is.

and I know there aren't 3 'l's in 'actually'...

Or three 'e's in Feenie

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/preschool/1130227-Please-tell-me-about-Jolly-Phonics-etc-etc
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/preschool/903049-3-5-yr-old-DD-can-39-t-write-her
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/preschool/818545-Are-you-teaching-your-preschooler-to-read-this-year
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/preschool/1082406-I-have-just-been-told-off-for-teaching-my-child-to-read
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/preschool/438919-phonics-at-preschool

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/538745-is-it-possible-anyone-know-to-start-your-child-in

You keep on telling me it's all phonics, but you are no closer to being right.

'it is of the letter/sound correspondences and the words they are specific to.' Please pay attention to your own words here.

Perhaps you would like to define phonics

I don't understand why it matters so much, mathanxiety?