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 it is enormously beneficial for children to learn to concentrate at a young age. What I don't get is why the British think that concentration and learning skills can only be acquired through the three 'Rs.

When I and my friends started school at 7 we had excellent concentration skills, though at least half the group were unfamiliar with the alphabet. We had spent our first 7 years baking cakes, riding our bikes, building toy boats out of wood- all of them skills which require concentration if you don't want to get hurt. Concentrating on learning to read was a relative piece of cake.

I wish we could follow that in UK cory and not have this obsession with starting formal education so young.

10 - 15 mins fun phonics out of a day of learning through play does not sound quite as scaring as 'formal education'.

Think of the implications of children not starting school until age 7. Or would the state still have to childmind them from age 4?

They wouldn't be starting formal education until 7 yrs-this doesn't mean they aren't starting education.

When does education become 'formal'? Or, put it another way; what would 'formal education' look like?

When the sit down at a desk and write.

And that's what you believe 15 minutes of phonics a day entails?

Who said that phonics had to be formal?

Mathanxiety, several times - and I thought that's what you were implying, too. Glad to stand corrected.

Maizied - the state shouldn't have to 'childmind' at all but at the ages of 4-6 a good pre school is very beneficial. The long days at school in this country are just to suit working parents.

Formal education is learning to read and write with a lot of whole class teaching and adult directed activities where there are targets to tick as opposed to being able to explore and play. Children still learn when they play and it is very important they get time to do this. We are one of the few countries starting formal education so early while everyone else is doing it later and getting much much better results. The evidence can't be ignored. This country has got it WRONG. It is totally arrogant of this country (what a surprise) to ignore how it is done across the continent.

Ymeyer - I am sorry to hear about your experiences of the education system. I do not think parents who help their children at home are competitive. I think all parents should be involved but what I oppose to is the way some parents hot house their children in an attempt to make them more 'academic'. Of course, if your child is falling behind, you would help him/her - I just don't think children need lots of strutured clubs/ tutoring so early on that's all.

Formal education is learning to read and write with a lot of whole class teaching and adult directed activities where there are targets to tick as opposed to being able to explore and play.

If you were to visit my school magdalene using your definition you would see very little formal teaching up to the age of 7 just as it is in many many schools in the UK.

And a lot of those countries which don't start school until 6 or 7 have compulsory nursery.....

When you look at the world education rankings Canada and NZ are almost top.

In NZ kids start school on their 5th birthday (ie actually on the day they turn 5, not at the start of the term) - so only 6 months older than the average UK kid.

In Canada it seems the starting age is dependent on the province and is between 4?7 years.

So it does not seem that starting school at 4 or 5 harms kids education...

Australia also does very well and starts school at 5.

It's easier to begin formal education later when the language is transparent - then it is a doddle to teach children to read.

What I don't understand is why 30 minutes a day of phonics instruction should destroy a child-centered ethos? Surely it's not beyond the wit of humans to draw a balance?

Neither should it be beyond the wit of heads to insist that student teachers are professionally trained and are equipped with the knowledge to teach children to read.

It is so much easier to begin when children are 4-5 years old, than it is to leave it until they are 6-7. Or are we prepared to see up to 50% of children unable to access the secondary curriculum in some parts of the country? An incomplete knowledge of how the alphabetic code can be structured to help all children to read is surely a far better option than the one Yvonne describes.

In my own relatively small circle of reading tutors - we've had children of lecturers, writers, poets, distinguished broadcasters, editors, teachers. These people can afford to pay. What about the children with parents who can't afford to pay? Unless they have some muggins like me who charged a pittance if parents couldn't afford fees, most end up on the scrap heap. For 40 years of mix and match teaching and 'children will learn when they are ready' we've sat complacently by and let up to 20% of children go to the wall.

So let's leave it until they are 7? Label 30%-40% as deficient and offer them expensive 'tailored' programmes? I don't see any of those calling for total play-centered immersion until 7, offering any robust solution for the children who have inevitably picked up guessing habits by then.

mathanxiety seems to want to ignore the fact that England has had a play based curriculum since 1999 and that learning phonics is only a tiny part of the day.

Ymeyer -- the programmes tested in Follow Through were put into practice in American public schools, which accept children at age 5 at the youngest. Kindergarten is the youngest grade at which you can start in an American elementary school. (In the 60s and early 70s, many children didn't even go to Kindergarten, but started at age 6 in 1st Grade.) Headstart (preschool for disadvantaged children) is not part of the public school system though it is administered by the Dept of Education.

Zig Engelmann taught his own twin sons to read and do maths at a young age and filmed them. Is this what you saw on Youtube? His role in Follow Through was not to teach, but to design his DI programme and train teachers to implement it, and persuade schools to adopt it.

You keep on bagging away with that term 'evidence-based' but have yet to provide any evidence that 4 year olds are suitable candidates for phonics lessons.

Your child's complete lack of progress in reading sounds extraordinary, btw. Maybe it's your experience with him that is blinding you to the fact that most children can and do learn in several different ways. It is obvious from your posts that you do not understand what cognitive skills involve or their importance in learning to read, do maths etc. Cognitive development is 100% necessary and 100% complementary to the phonics approach.

'In the last decade technological advances in brain imaging have allowed cognitive researchers to incorporate neural processes into their analysis of behavior. This increased resolution has helped researchers to refine theories in many areas of cognition and education. For example, the Dual Route Hypothesis assumed that reading is composed of two distinct processes: visual word recognition and a phonological process. Traditional behavioral experiments have failed to confirm or invalidate this hypothesis. Neuroscience evidence has helped us realize that there is an interaction and contribution of both pathways (Booth, et. al, 2004) and that an understanding of these processes may help in the development of effective interventions (Shaywitz, et. al, 2004).' From Education and Neuroscience (pdf)

Feenie -- To suggest that SP or any phonics instruction (as in Jolly Phonics, etc) is not formal is disingenuous. It is teacher led by design, and therefore formal. It is formal whether you do it at 3, or 4, or 5 or later. SP involves teacher-led and teacher-directed activity for however long each day it is done.

Some neuro-biological and neuro-psychological studies on cognitive development:

'The rapid development of child neuropsychology

'The concept of developing the brain: a new natural science for learning and education'

'The cerebellum and language; the story so far'

'Cerebellar disorders in childhood: cognitive problems' 'Neuropsychological studies reveal a relation of dyslexia and attention deficit disorder with cerebellar functions.'

'Role of the cerebellum in cognitive and behavioural control: scientific basis and investigation models'

'Cognitive functions, their development and modern diagnostic methods'

An adequate field test of a programme prior to its inclusion in Follow Through would have included actual training of teachers and implementation on a classroom setting, with stated goals and clear methods outlined as to method of teaching and also measurement of the effects of that particular method. This would have prevented some of the errors in classification of methods from the outset and perhaps even prevented some programmes from being included.

So, let me get this straight:

SP is formal, no matter how many teachers tell you about the songs, games, etc they use to teach it. We know this because you have swallowed several books and you say so.

SP is not SP the way we teach it, or the way Ruth Miskin teaches it, or any other designated expert, because, again, you have read lots of books and you say so.

It is obvious from Ymeyer's posts that she doesn't understand what cognitive skills involve or their importance in learning to read, do maths etc. Ymeyer, even though she is his mother and has swallowed easily as many books as you have on the subject, has no clue about how her son learns.

Have you any idea at all how arrogant you sound?

As a matter of interest mathanxiety would you be opposed to your child singing nursery rhymes or sharing stories?

The disingenuous remarks on SP again seek to disguise its nature. My children all sang nursery rhymes and songs. They were all read to. They did not however sit down and write letters at the command of a teacher at age 4. They did not sit (or stand or skate around, etc) with cards or books and try to do the letter-sound correspondence that the OP in the thread linked to above ("Phonics - grrrrr") complained about, at age 4. Clearly your classroom is an exceptional one where a very special breed of SP is taught, because the experiences of Reception mothers and children here on MN feature a lot of distress and frustration at the phonics experience. It surely must have occurred to you that not all teachers are created alike?

Ymeyer has poopoohed all play-based prereading activities and has cast aspersions on everything except straight phonics throughout this thread, based, it seems, on only her own DS's experience. She sees value only in what worked for her own DS. What worked for him is what will work, and what will only work, for all children apparently, an attitude that is more than a little ill-informed and in fact pretty arrogant. She may well know how her son learns, and hats off to her for her strenuous advocacy on his behalf, but just because the approach in her son's schools didn't work for her son doesn't mean other children won't benefit from it.

Oh dear a raw nerve... surely by your definition of DI singing a nursery rhyme as it is teacher led is DI. Reading a story is teacher led so therefore DI, building in the block play is DI making cakes is DI playing in the water tray is DI ...

No my classroom is much like other classrooms but I would venture to say mums like the OP (Phonics Grrrr) are victims of inadequate training of some teachers and the bloody L&S phases!

I've worked with many bright boys who can't read or write at primary level and secondary. They have some how fallen through the net and it has effected their behaviour, confidence and attendance to a huge degree. The plan with my own kids was to be supportive and encourage a love of reading. They are book worms now and are always picking up random books to read.From the early days they got a buzz out of learning new letters and words.

Ah so it's people who make mistakes but the system and the rationale behind it are always right? (Like Communism...)

No, I haven't defined DI in that way -- singing with my own children, etc. took place if and when they felt like it. Not for the 10 - 20 minutes a day I might have wanted to do it or when it might have been convenient.

A very loose definition of what phonics is, like yours, would include every episode a baby was spoken to from birth onwards.

In the case of the thread you chose to highlight (Phonics Grrr) yes it was a person who made the mistake as you will see if you return to read the OPs post.

So if I sing with someone else's child it is DI but not if I sing with my own...is that right?