Key Words Rant

[crazygracieuk]

My youngest is in Reception.

At our school they get a variety of reading schemes as their reading book which is good and key words to learn.

Key words are sent home in groups of 10 and the teacher sends home another set once they are mastered.

The problem that I have is, the teacher does not consider the words to be mastered if the child sounds it out. I think that's crazy. As an adult I scan all letters in a word before saying it out loud which is surely a form of sounding things out?

Ds is at pink level reading so (quite rightly!) sounds out most words. According to the teacher he's supposed to recognise the word based on it's "shape" .

My motivation in complaining is that ds is getting discouraged and thinks that he's not a good reader as the teacher has sent home the same key words for the last 2 months and he likes to practice them.

AIBU to think that it's perfectly ok to sound out keywords?

no I don't mean teaching children to read whole words I mean applying knowledge of phonemes when they encounter new words. So if they know the tricky part of was is the letter a represents /o/ they can apply it to other words without the need for being taught long lists of words.

I agree that children need to learn to do so, but calling the teaching of that 'phonics' is giving a completely different meaning to the word.

Do you actually know what a letter/sound correspondence is masha?

It is becoming rather surreal here on MN; being lectured by masha and mathanxiety as to what phonics 'is' and finding it is, according to them, something completely different from what all SP practitioners have believed, and taught, for years

if they know the tricky part of was is the letter a represents /o/ they can apply it to other words without the need for being taught long lists of words.

But every time they meet 'wa', they have to stop and think how to pronounce it, e.g. "was, swam, water." They can't pronounce them all as 'wo'.

The same goes for the 'wo' spelling: won, woman, women, woggle.

Learning to read words in which letters keep their main sound (went, west, wept, swept, wet)is quite different and much, much easier. I am puzzled why SP advocates insist on denying this?

Masha when they are just 4 years old and have been in school for just 4 months believe me they have to stop and think about most words ... you really do need to visit a good reception class.

Sure,Mrz, because many are nowhere near reading-ready at that age.

But that is beside the point.
All learners, young and older, find regular patterns easier to cope with than irregular ones,
'bee, see, tree, free, deep, sleep, sheep'

easier than
eat, great, threaten, treat, dream, dreamt, speak, spread..
and especially 'read, lead, tear' with their different pronunciations in different contexts.

It's a very sensible suggestion, mrz, but masha won't take you up on it. Actually knowing what she is on about might get in the way of her argument.

I disagree Masha it is because it is a new skill ... children don't suddenly stand up and walk without a few wobbly attempts first ...they don't suddenly talk in adult sentences without a great deal of babbling first and they don't master reading on the first day.