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 don't get why mathanxiety insists that 15 minutes per day of games, fun activities and songs alongside a play based curriculum is somehow damaging to young children and is willing to harangue teachers who actually doing this day in, day out, without any evidence whatsoever to back up her claim.

mathanxiety England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have had a play based curriculum since 1999.

masha the only confusion I can see is caused by you as you continue to peddle your lists of misinformation

stoatsrevenge yes it is idealistic and not what happens in reality (I'm not sure it should happen) I don't explicitly teach words when I read a story to a child or group of children but neither do I stop them looking at the words. I want them to know the words are what I'm reading after all.

And again with the posts that don't interact with any poster, don't help any MNers one jot and just state the same things over and over again, Masha (you forgot your list of words, btw).

"I am going to have to take a break from this for a bit" Really? Fantastic! Perhaps you should only come back when you have more than two different possible posts you can choose to make - and maybe you could lose the lists altogether. Fingers crossed.

To SP evangelists my word lists are like the cross to the devil, because they show what English spelling is really like, and reveal ridiculous claims about the teaching of reading and writing to be what they are: ridiculous.

Anyone who claims that the following 21 can be 'decoded' is verging on the insane:
bough, bought, brought, cough, dough, drought, enough, fought, hiccough, nought, ought, plough, rough, slough x2, sought, thorough, though (although), thought, through, tough, trough.

Ditto re teaching to spell phonically:
any, many, said, friend, believe, head, every

Shortest break ever!

every is extremely straightforward, Mash.
Head is the same as read, thread, bread, etc, etc.
And.....oh, I can't be bothered - it's not like you will respond in any meaningful way, you'll just list me again.

Cross to the devil, rofl - get over yourself! The religious imagery is way too much!

To SP evangelists my word lists are like the cross to the devil,

You are seriously delusional, masha. Your lists do nothing at all except waste space...

I bet the devil laughed nearly as much as the rest of us at that one Masha ... honestly do you think anyone will take you seriously after that little gem?
Most of us are teachers working daily with children, most of whom, despite your lists, manage perfectly well to learn to read and write. Of course there are exceptions. Those children like Indigo's daughter who have underlying difficulties which make learning more difficult unfortunately do struggle, no matter what method is used or what age they begin. But with help for their difficulties and good teaching, thankfully they can get there.

"To suggest that children can learn to 'decode' the 21 English words with 'ough' is simply ridiculous:
bough, bought, brought, cough, dough, drought, enough, fought, hiccough, nought, ought, plough, rough, slough, sought, thorough, though, thought, through, tough, trough.*
It is abusing the meaning of 'phonics' and 'decoding."

Mashabell - you are making the task of decoding the list of words above unnecessarily difficult by listing them in a "laundry list" format, rather than ordering them. No wonder you are confused yourself!

And you are mixing your religious metaphors at that - how can we be evangelists and devils? You have properly lost it this time!

Masha ? some years ago, I taught two Asperger?s syndrome brothers how to read. One was interested only in cars, chiefly his father?s four-wheel drive; the other was interested exclusively in ferrets and Bob the Builder. Other characteristics were a love of lists, and a failure to empathize with other people, to understand nuance, pick up social signals etc. The defining characteristic was their visceral dislike for each other.

It would be presumptuous of me to draw parallels ? save to say that the thousands of lists you have cut and pasted demonstrate not only your obsessiveness, but also your complete lack of understanding of the practice of synthetic phonics. You seem to be completely oblivious to the fact that you are spoiling an interesting and important debate.

Bonsoir's observation is spot on:
'you are making the task of decoding the list of words above unnecessarily difficult by listing them in a "laundry list" format, rather than ordering them. No wonder you are confused yourself!'

Truer words were never spoken.

Malaleuca -- My own DCs who learned at 3.5 surprised me, same with the DCs who learned at 4 and 4.5. I was perfectly happy to have them learn when they were taught through phonics at 6 or whenever they were in 1st Grade.

It's not a state school vs private thing either. They weren't even in school at the time they learned. The 4.5 yos were in preschool and not involved with formal phonics at all. They were there 2.5 hours, three afternoons a week using safety scissors, playing dress up, playing at the sand and water tables and trying not to eat the crayons. The other three were at home full time and not enrolled anywhere when they started.

DS read 'I Am A Bunny' at age 4, in the car. DD2 read 'The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse' at 3.5. It took quite a while. DD3 read 'There's a Wocket in my Pocket' and DD4 read 'But Not the Hippopotamus'.

I was very happy to hear them reading but a little mystified too. I do not know what would have happened if I had tried to teach them using phonics. They were all exposed to lots of reading from an early age, and lots of chat and songs, etc. They also clocked a good few hours in front of the tv, especially while I had morning sickness and didn't feel up to much.

They were there ...... using safety scissors, playing dress up, playing at the sand and water tables and trying not to eat the crayons.
sounds like any reception class in the country with the exception they will have 10 or 15 mins phonics a day too.

My son also read at a very young age (I know it was before he started nursery at age 3) with no teaching (formal or informal) involved and until my daughter arrived I thought that was what all children did.

Although I'm not sure repeating back a story you have been read hundreds of times constitutes 'reading'....

(Even if you point at the words while repeating it...)

My 3 year old ASD son would read the share prices in the financial section of his grandpa's newspaper so I don't think he'd memorised them

Sorry mrz - I was referring to this post:

DS read 'I Am A Bunny' at age 4, in the car. DD2 read 'The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse' at 3.5. It took quite a while. DD3 read 'There's a Wocket in my Pocket' and DD4 read 'But Not the Hippopotamus'.

He didn't write until Y6

IndigoBell -- They were reading. I checked as carefully as I could, asked them to read random words and even read a few words right to left, and had them read signs over shops, signs on buses and vans, etc., over the course of the following days, and simple books they hadn't seen, at the library.

That's great for your kids, Mathanxiety. But some children are not natural sight readers, and for them the best way is regular, excellent phonics instruction. Since we have established through very experienced teachers' years of anecdotes that this is not, in fact, child abuse of four year olds, I have no idea why you would wish to deny other 4/5 year olds what your children were very fortunate to experience.

Stoatsrevenge

I think that every 2 year old in the world can probably ?read? at least two words, ?McDonalds? and ?Coca Cola?.

Children certainly do start school with a bank of sight-memorized whole words. Many children have the capacity to sight-memorized a very large bank of whole words and, along with guessing meaning from context, can use these skills to ?read? all the material that is required of them in the first few years of formal schooling.

If a child only has their bank of sight-memorized whole words and guessing meaning from context to read, then they hit the wall when the demands of written language outstrip their bank of sight words. For many children, this happens around Year 4, (the famous 4th grade slump) but for some, not until they get to secondary school.

The problem is that, like any habit, it is much harder to unlearn guessing and memorising once this habit is entrenched.

The mass of evidence-based research that exists on this issue informs us that ?phonics first and fast?, ie, 20 minutes per day, every day, from the first day of formal schooling, of direct, explicit, systematic, synthetic phonics, gets children decoding and avoids the problem of entrenched memorising and guessing.

The solution devised by the anti-explicit phonics group that control teacher training is the so-called ?Balanced? or 3-Searchlights method which means lots of guessing and memorizing with a bit of analytical phonics dropped in here and there.

Reading Recovery (the remedial arm of Whole Language) describes this as ?phonics last and least?.

Requiring children to both memorise and guess and use the less effective analytical-style phonic knowledge is like asking them to pat their heads and rub their tummies at the same time. The (initially) easier memorising & guessing process will dominate, and these children will find reading a struggle that gets harder and harder as they progress through school.

I should say Feenie, that most, not some, children are not going to learn to read well without being taught, and those who appear to pick things up easily, have the benefit of excellent memories at the least.

And to deny instruction to Reception children seems bizarre quite frankly. It's pretty obvious that there is variation in what children bring to the table when they start school, and as far as possible within a mass system, teachers try and cater for individual differences. I wss disappointed when my children started pre-school in Australia that 'reading' did not begin until Y1 and the children were going on for 6 in my particular school, when it was obvious that many of the children were raring to go well before that.

Mathaxiety says ?Thousands of children learn to read every year without any formal phonics exposure.?

Here are some facts; English-speaking countries where the education system is dominated by the so-called ?child-centred? philosophy.

In the UK, DfE figures show one in four primary school boys has SEN.

In the USA, more than 60% of K-12 school children are reading below their grade levels.

In Australian, 55% of school leavers have basic literacy & numeracy skills too weak for everyday activities.

Yet in countries like Singapore, Hong Kong and India, where reading and writing in English is taught using direct, explicit, systematic teacher-directed instruction with little to none ?play-based? activities, the long tail of under-achievement does not exist.

Mathanxiety?s children may well have learnt to read at an early age without formal instruction. Unfortunately, children like Mathanxiety?s are the exception, not the rule. Most children need formal instruction in order to become fully literate & numerate.

Mathanxiety misquotes me again when s/he says that ?Your suggestion that reading to young children might be dangerous to them is incredibly bizarre?.

However, this statement does reveal that Mathsanxiety is not familiar with and/or does not understand the evidence-based science of teaching and learning beginning reading.

Success in reading, (decoding and comprehension) depends on knowing the sound/letter correspondences, being able to sound out and blend for reading and spelling, practicing reading decodable books to fluency level, and practicing writing to fluency level.

Quoted from Louisa Moats, Whole Language Lives On; The Illusion of Balanced Instruction.

Learning to read is not a ?natural? process. Most children must be taught to read through a structured and protracted process in which they are made aware of sounds and the symbols that represent them, and then learn to apply these skills automatically and attend to meaning.

Our alphabetic writing system is not learned simply from exposure to print. Phonological awareness is primarily responsible for the ability to sound words out. The ability to use phonics and to sound words out, in turn, is primarily responsible for the development of context-free word-recognition ability, which in turn is primarily responsible for the development of the ability to read and comprehend connected text.

Spoken language and written language are very different; mastery of each requires unique skills.

The most important skill in early reading is the ability to read single words completely, accurately, and fluently.

Context is not the primary factor in word recognition.

www.usu.edu/teachall/text/reading/Wholelang.htm

Mathanxiety quotes some of the research on phonemic awareness, but confuses phonemic awareness with phonic knowledge.

Mathaxiety states that , ?A child who has been exposed to a lot of conversation, songs, stories, rhymes and words in general (all that silly playing, etc.,) throughout her life will be able to learn to read using both methods, which are not mutually incompatible, but are in fact often complementary.?

In this statement, Mathanxiety confuses the ?natural, hard-wired? skill of spoken language with the ?unnatural? skill of written language.

Mathanxiety quotes research and suggests that formal instruction is harmful for young children, yet fails to mention that the largest, most expensive, longitudinal study that compared 4 year olds who received formal instruction against those that received play-based instruction found that the formal instruction programme (DISTAR now known as Direct Instruction) achieved the highest result on all levels, basic skills, cognitive and affective, ie, not only did the children learn more, but they felt better about themselves.

Project Follow Through: In-depth and Beyond
pages.uoregon.edu/adiep/ft/adams.htm

Mathanxiety states that the play-based philosophy is superior yet fails to mention that longtitudinal studies of the (USA) Headstart programme inform us that any benefits from early play-based programme have ?washed out? by 3rd/4th Grade.

'Children certainly do start school with a bank of sight-memorized whole words. Many children have the capacity to sight-memorized a very large bank of whole words and, along with guessing meaning from context, can use these skills to ?read? all the material that is required of them in the first few years of formal schooling'

Many of these 'sight' words will be decodable - e.g next, bus, exit. To the word-aware child, blends and digraphs will be introduced in words like street, shop, Boots, Marks.

This early sight reading can be enhanced by phonics lessons with the introduction of more difficult sound patterns - children will begin to allocate rules to their reading skills, which will help their spelling.

The education of children is never solved by one solution - we're dealing with little people who are all different and learn in different ways.