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.

So essentially it takes children in the UK about twice the time to learn what children in other parts of the world do in the school year? Assuming schools are in fact open for the full day and students attend for a full day..

Allchildrenreading -- I don't know where you're getting your statistics about children in the UK being better-read/ children elsewhere being 'less well-read' than children whose education systems teach them to read later.

Or where your ideas about the comparative richness of children's literature in English come from or how to quantify 'richness'..

As in any skill the time taken to become proficient varies from individual to individual. Personally I don't subscribe to the argument that we need to start earlier because it is more difficult as many, many children are capable readers within the first school year.

allchildrenreading - Sorry but your claim that children who start to read later are less-well read than English children is TOTAL nonsense! I think that is just wishful thinking! I don't actually think the teachers are at fault but the education SYSTEM is. Changing the subject slightly, have you heard of Katherine Birbensingh - she spoke out about what is wrong with state education in this country..

Many primary schools are just as Ms Birbensingh dreams I think it is less common in secondary where lessons follow discrete subjects.

I'm not too sure mrz - 1/4 of children leave primary school without the necessary reading and writing skills to cope in secondary.

We haven't sent a child to secondary unable to read or write to at least national expectation for many years but we have used phonics to teach reading and spelling for about 15 years ...

these lists are boring but you seem surprised, Magdalene. philip pullman, phillipa pearse, mervyn peake, oscar wilde faily stories, aa milne, rosemary sutcliffe, raymond briggs, andrew lang, kevin crossley holland, clive king, helen cresswell, frances hodgson burnett, roahl dahl, ted hughes, richard adams, jr tolkein, th white, allan ahlberg, walter de la mare, william nicolson, michael rosen, brian pattern, alan garner, leon garfield, hillaire belloc, richmond crompton - off the top of my head - are among the authors my kids read and many of their brixton kids read - and lots of the wonderful American picture books ...

perhaps i'm being blind and pig ignorant and there is as rich a children's heritage and contemporary literature in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Croatia, France, Italy and the other countries where children start later - and maybe - for the size of the country there is as rich a literature there, too.

Yes - I've heard of Katherine Birbalsingh - the school she refers to was only a couple of miles from where I lived for 19 years - and it was pretty tough then and very dumbed down. Guiana, where her father was from, seems to be one of the countries where the kind of dumbed down education that we have now in the UK was unconscionable.

How can teachers be responsible for the mess we are in when it is the Establishment in the form of Teacher Training Establishment lecturers who have set their face so against logical, rational teaching of literacy and maths.

allchildrenreading is spot on about the wealth and variety of English language children's literature. You only need to go to a children's bookshop in another European country to see just how much children's literature is translated from English.

Ha ! Ha! yes, of course there is a wealth of English Literature to choose from but my question is is the average Brit reading any of them?? And is the average British adult reading much either? I only speak as someone who has lived abroad and seen how education is done elsewhere! SORRY! But of course this country is so bloody insular we hardly ever hear anything about anywhere else!!

I went to school in the USA for a short time and I certainly read more than my contemporaries but the same is probably true now as I love books.

@magdalene

Are you saying that you think that people 'abroad' read more than people in the UK?

I suspect that bookshops wouldn't stock, and publishers wouldn't publish, so many books if there were no demand for them.

I doubt very much if 'reading' is in any sort of downward spiral, particulary of books (paper & 'e') - it never was a universal pastime.

I love reading and we have two rooms full of books here. When I go to lots of other homes, I don't see any books! I think this idea that we are a nation of book lovers is a myth. Perhaps it used to be true. My point is that learning to read is only one part of it; are we creating a generation of children and adults who read for pleasure? I also found that the average working class Dutch person was far better educated than the average working class Brit - and they spoke excellent English too! But their education system is quite different and more egalitarian.

I have hundreds of books but living with an OCD partner means you wouldn't see any if you visited ...

If we don't teach children to read they won't be able to read for pleasure or any other purpose ...

Of course it is up to the teachers to teach children to read. My point is that starting so young has not really turned us into a nation of book lovers. Yes, that may be the reason I don't see many books - lots of OCD men or women clearing everything away!! So when are we meeting mrz?

I disagree it is soley up to teachers to teach children to read in the sense that they spend more time out of school than they do in the classroom so surely it should be a partnership. Both school and home should introduce children to the wonders of literature. If parents don't value reading will the child?

magdalene - the British are, comparative to other nationalities, huge readers. I must try to find some statistics...

mrz - ideally parents would do all the things that school does with children in spades and then some. It is always going to be a lot easier for children whose parents role-model desirable behaviours.

Based on this type of information, general consensus seems to be that the countries ranked near the top of the charts for active readers include:

* Iceland


* United Kingdom
* Finland
* North and South Korea
* Canada 

Icelandic citizens are shown to read the most books per capita than any other nation in the world according to Grapevine.Is.

Very interesting about Iceland. Not sure how accurate this info is but willing to consider it!

Yes, of course parents should introduce the wonders of literature to their children but that just is not the case in many homes. Many children rely solely on their school for their education and this is why the state sector has to dramatically improve so that every child receives a first class education.

Mrz - most of a child's time is spent at school so we would expect the school to do most of the educating. The role of parents is not just to share books, help with homework etc but to care for and play with our children. We shouldn't put parents under too much pressure to 'teach' their children so much. Of course I may be thinking differently when my children are in year 4 or 5 but when they are very small it is important to concentrate on their happiness and to help them feel secure.

I would really love to know how reading statistics for North Korea are compiled, and also love to know what exactly they read there. Does Communist Party propaganda count? Or maybe there's a North Korean equivalent of Walter de la Mare...

'Gossip magazines and song lyrics are the favourite reading material of children aged 11 to 14, says a study.' according to this article

Results of Pirls study 2006:

• Pupils in England achieved significantly above the international mean in Pirls 2006 but significantly lower than some major European countries, including Italy and Germany.
• The performance of the three highest attaining countries in 2001 - Sweden, the Netherlands and England - was significantly lower in 2006.
• The three highest achieving countries in 2006 were the Russian Federation, Hong Kong and Singapore.
• The score for England in 2006 was 539 and 527 for Scotland, against 565 for the Russian Federation, an average of 500, and 302 for South Africa, the lowest achieving country.
• In almost all countries, including England, girls achieved significantly higher mean scores than boys.
• As in 2001, there was a wide spread in the scores of the most able and the weakest readers in England.
• In England, the performance of girls has fallen slightly more than that of boys, and the performance of both is significantly lower than in 2001.
• The fall in England's performance in 2006 is evident across the ability range.
• Attitudes to reading in England are poor compared to those of children in many other countries, and have declined slightly since 2001.
• Children in England read for pleasure less frequently than their peers in many other countries.
• More reported having a computer at home (93% in 2006 / 85% in 2001); fewer had a desk or table to work at (75% / 89%), books of their own (92% / 96%) or a daily newspaper (66% / 78%).

Is this decline in an interest in reading a relatively recent phenomenon? After the Plowden Report when progressive laissez-faire education took hold, classes became much more noisy , reading levels plummeted, the structure of the English language was ignored - the teaching of grammar was almost verboten. However, those fortunately enough to learn to read by inference, remained fairly keen readers, helped by excellent programmes such as Jackanory and the wonderful Puffin editor, Kaye Webb.

With the growing alarm at the drop of literacy - reading, spelling,grammar - a growing prescriptiveness of the primary curriculum and teaching to the test, took hold. There's not much poetry learning in primary schools, music has declined, libraries have become depleted and there are far too many 'sound-bite' books taking the place of sustained reading. Instead of reading for the joy of it - and being encouraged to do so - young children are faced with all sorts of ridiculous and inappropriate targets.

It is not 'learning to read' at too young an age that is the culprit but the completely inappropriate strictures that are placed on teachers of 6 to 11 year olds.

Nothing is guaranteed to kill an interest in poetry as fast as learning poetry in school, or the disection of poems in literature classes. (Been there and done that. I can still recite large chunks of 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' and 'Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire' )

One of those ridiculous and inappropriate targets is the Reception reading one; it puts pressure on parents and children alike and runs the risk of turning potential readers into children whose first experience of failure is encountered in Reception class, while trying hard to please parents and teachers in the context of phonics... A far cry from reading for the joy of it.

There's a difference between 'learning to read', and 'being expected to learn to read' at an age when a child's peers in another country may be spending their days working on other areas of their development instead, maybe learning to be more self-directed, more inclined to follow their own interests.

Learning poetry and inappropriate dissection of poems are two separate matters.

Where is your evidence, mathanxiety, that English speaking children should be denied the skills to enable them to learn to read? And please don't refer to non-English speaking countries ...

In the 1980s thousands and thousands of children were labelled 'dyslexic' - the middle-class epidemic, it was known as. What a good synthetic phonics approach does is to stop all those children from suffering the indignity that laissez-faire education leads to.

It is completely untrue that if children are given a self-directed environment until they are 6,7, they will suddenly become readers. Around 1/3 of them won't. As I've said until I'm blue in the face, there are many children from book-rich families who have suffered from a lack of direction and have still ended up labeled as 'dyslexic'. Running through the comments there seems to be a certain loucheness about the children who get left behind, and a certain lack of detail on how when they start to attend formal school, how you teach them to read.

The evidence I see from the progressive experiment in London, from Steiner schools, and from alternative schools is of children who get left behind. Then we blame the children, their feckless parents, lack of pay for teachers, too large classes - anything but the INSTRUCTION.

You completely ignore the evidence coming from experienced, trained teachers like Msz.

Sorry - it should be instructional direction here:

It is completely untrue that if children are given a self-directed environment until they are 6,7, they will suddenly become readers. Around 1/3 of them won't. As I've said until I'm blue in the face, there are many children from book-rich families who have suffered from a lack of direction and have still ended up labeled as 'dyslexic'. Running through the comments there seems to be a certain loucheness about the children who get left behind, and a certain lack of detail on how when they start to attend formal school, how you teach them to read.

Because quite simply reading allows a child to access ALL other areas of the curriculum an is an essential skill to learn.

I think in RL parents are guarded against talking to much about it re fear of showing off or sounding over bearing (sp?) and so on here its a free for all.

Some parents may ask questions on here they are too emabaressed to ask in RL too.