Quietly admits, "I need help!"

[blackeyedsusan]

Can anyone recommend a website or book to help with teaching reading. Trying to teach my daughter to read has made me realise that I could do with some professional development as I feel woefully out of my depth and really out of date. I will need to go back to teaching at some point in the next couple of years and need to update my skills, especially with y1/2.

You need to get up to date on synthetic phonics ans this is now thought of as the best method for teaching reading.
The government "Letters and Sounds" information is here:
nationalstrategies.standards.dcsf.gov.uk/node/84969 and describes which grapheme/phoneme correspondences are taught in which phase.

For more straightforward but thorough info on synthetic phonics, I'd recommend Phonics International
www.phonicsinternational.com/ - free info to download if you scroll down the page - but please note this scheme introduces a lot of the graphems in a different order to "Letters and Sounds"

It is easier though to get your head round it, if you are unused to SP, if you can see some of it in action in a school. Could you volunteer to help with reading/literacy in a year 1/2 class at dd's school. I bet they'd bite your hand off. You could be up-front about wanting to get up-to-date with latest methods and explain you would like to sit in on teaching as well as doing some!

My Mum taught from late 1950's until 1997. She was in on the wave of "real books" and "multiple methods of getting cues for reading". She is amazed by the latest SP techniques and describes it as "teaching reading like they did in Victorian times!" She isn't against SP, just rather surprised at how what was considered very old-fashioned practice when she trained, is now best practice again! So it might be best to get some professional development as you might have to wait another 80 years ago for your training to come round again!

Thanks sarah... going to look into professional development closer the time.. I'll spend time reading up though. we did do Thrass at a couple of schools so the concept isn't new but not up to date with the details.

I would wait a few months. I would expect some kind of training will be funded as the govt is v keen on it. If you join a school, they'll have a programme which should include training. As sarahfreck says letters and sounds is a good start, that was prev govt's scheme.

Things will no doubt change again before long. Teachers of oder children are beginning to say more and more that the overuse of phonics is resulting in many pupils failing to learn to spell correctly and continuing to spell too many words phonically.

While u are thinking about returning to teaching, u might find my blogs interesting to read, especially the ones about teaching:
[http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com]
There is an index to all of them at
[http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2010/05/another-blog.html]

Sorry. I did not put enough brackets round the links.
I'll try again:
englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com
There is an index to all of them at
englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2010/05/another-blog.html