Oxford Reading Tree words

[schmee]

My twins are supposedly learning to read with phonics and are just doing phonics at school (learning the letter sounds) but they are coming home with books with lots of sight words in them. I think they are say and see books?? Apologies this is all very new to me. One is using the Oxford reading tree (they are in different classes).

Should I be doing something to reinforce the words they don't know? At the moment it seems quite random. Also, I've lost track of the new sight words or tricky words (e.g. ones with sounds like "ay" and "ow" that they haven't learnt yet). Does anyone know if a list exists that gives the words in the order they appear in the ORT?

As they are using different books in the different classes, I find it really hard to remember whether each child has encountered the word before!

[camicaze]

I agree with Blackeyedsusan. If schools will insist on sending books home that don't back up the phonics they learn you either use different books or work around it. I mainly just got hold of phonics books but used the school ones a bit. The really key thing is that a child is aware that words are made up of sounds that you can decode left to right. When you encounter 'tricky words' do your best to emphasise this approach to the child. Telling them the sections of the words they can't decode is a good way of doing this.

My ds is just at the stage of sounding out 3 letter simple words. He seems able to read tricky words he has encountered as wholes, so much quicker than sounding out. Thats until you introduce another similar word and then he gets muddled, e.g. 'no' and 'on'. It becomes clear that to him these are interchangable. This sort of thing carries on for some children not grounded in phonics. Much better to keep slogging on sounding out decodable stuff because thats the foundation to great reading.

[Mashabell]

he gets muddled, e.g. 'no' and 'on'. It becomes clear that to him these are interchangable. This sort of thing carries on for some children not grounded in phonics.

He gets muddled because the letter can have more than one sound:
on, no, do, once, other, woman, women.
If always sounded as in 'stop on hot spot', he would not get muddled.

[maizieD]

Oh don't be daft, masha. Even my extremely poor KS3 readers are able to cope with the different vowel sounds in 'on' and 'no'. The problem they have is reading them the right way round because they have not been rigorously taught to start reading a word on the left...why haven't they been rigorously taught this? Because they have been taught 'sight words' as 'wholes' alongside decoding and blending...

[strandednomore]

Wow I had no idea that phonics was so controversial!
FWIW I am not a fan of phonics, it seems very faddish and complicated to me. But I guess that's because both myself and dd1 learnt to read the good old-fashioned way (by sight/memory) before we started school. Now she's been taught phonics her spelling is atrocious!
No doubt one of you clever teacher people will now come along and tell me why what I have written above is wrong but that's my thoughts.

[mrz]

I'm wondering about why you find it "faddish"

[strandednomore]

It just seems like one of those things that someone has decided is the way to go and everyone else has jumped on it, even if it isn't the best thing for all children. Dd1's reception teacher (who retired last year) was quite frustrated by it as she recognised that it wasn't necessarily the best thing for all children. From what I can work out it was developed to help children who didn't necessarily find it easy to learn to read the old way, but now it's taught to everyone whether they need it or not.
However big disclaimer here I am not a teacher and have very little experience of learning or teaching to read so bow down to the better judgment of all your learned people on here

[teacherwith2kids]

stranded,

It is very very rare to learn to read by sight alone - there are simply too many words in the English language to do that. So although your daughter may 'appear' to have learned to read by sight / memory she must either have been using other skills or she may hit a barrier at some point as she sncounters more and more complex words.

My son appeared to initially learn to read by sight / auditory memory - he began by reciting long picture books (e.g. the Little Red Train series) word for word, then 'matched' the word he was saying from memory to the word he saw on the page, then could recognise that word in other contexts. However, he was then taught Phonics very thoroughly in reception and it turned out that he had internalised the majority of the phonic sounds even though it appeared that he was reading only by 'whole word recognition' (as in he knew the sound that e.g. ee or igh represented in isolation, and in every word in which they appeared, not just in the words he had already encountered). He was and remains an excellent reader and an exceptionally accurate speller (he applies both his phonic knowledge and word recognition skills to spell - he can both identify the possible options to encpode a sound AND can identify the one that 'looks right').

What I am saying is that I do not believe that a child can learn to read and develop their reading to an adult standard without any knowledge (whether inherent or explicitly taught) of phonics. I do believe that a child can learn to read to this standard using phonics alone, and therefore would absolutely endorse all children being taught phonics well - even if they have, or appear to have, other strategies that 'initially work' but which may cause problems in the long term.

[strandednomore]

Ok really stupid question then and I am sure there is an obvious answer but how did we learn to read as children? We certainly didn't have phonics. I sat next to my mum as she taught my older brother and learnt to read that way, then I just picked up books and read them. If I didn't know a word I skipped over it, worked out what it should be or asked. I guess eventually you work out how to put words together phonetically by yourself? But doing it this way didn't hold me back at all - I was always at least a year ahead at school until the others caught me up. Dd1 is the same. I am annoyed with phonics because when she first started to read she spelled the words as she saw them. Now the spellings are crazy because she has been told to spell them as she hears them.

[strandednomore]

Sorry teacher - have just re-read your post and you do say that phonics can be inherent - I assume you mean picked up naturally rather than taught explicitely? This is what must have happened to me as a child. But are more children learning to read today than were when we were taught in the 1970's (up until whenever phonics was introduced)?

[teacherwith2kids]

Stranded, I would also say that your 'old way' - mixed methods, look and say - did fail about 1 in 5 children.

I feel - you may not agree - that that is an unacceptable high failure rate for something as critical as learning to read.

Reasearch into PROPERLY TAUGHT synthetic phonics suggests that it does reduce the failure rate (badly taught, combined with other methods and not supported by proper materials it probably causes even more confusion, but that's another story!) and therefore is surely worth it? OK, not all of the 80% who would have learned to read anyway might NEED such a heavy emphasis on phonics and would have gone on to become literate regardless, but if half or three-quarters of the otherwise non-reading 20% do learn to read fluently using phonics, surely that's worth it

[maizieD]

It is odd that phonics should be described as 'faddish' when for hundreds of years it was the only way reading was taught and it is, in fact, 'whole word' teaching (originally developed, I understand, for teaching deaf children to read) which is the 'fad' which caught on in a big way in the latter part of the 20th century! What is even more ironic is that whole word teaching has absolutely no scientific basis; it is merely a theory based on the apparent reading behaviour of skilled readers with no consideration of the mechanisms by which these readers became skilled in the first place.

[mrz]

I'm afraid you are wrong about it being developed to help children who didn't find it easy to learn to read. In truth phonics is the old way and using phonics to teach reading has been the system in England since the 16th century.
Phonics was banned in American schools in the 1940s and as in most things the UK followed a few years later. Since then there have been a number of fads with the government "Searchlight model" being the last up until the Rose Review into how reading is taught.
Teaching phonics isn't new it's a return to the old tried and tested system that has been around for 500 years

[maizieD]

Snap! msz

[strandednomore]

Ok well I'm learning a lot and I'm sure there are plenty of other parents who are also frustrated by phonics who will be interested in this information. We don't have much choice as it's the only way reading is taught now, I just wish her spelling wasn't so rubbish

[teacherwith2kids]

Stranded,

Research from Scotland on synthetic phonics vs analytic phonics (it is possibly worth saying that there are these two 'flavours' of phonics teaching, with synthetic phonics being the one currently advocated):
www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/02/20682/52383

It states that the proportion of children reading words more than 2 years behind their chronological age was only 5.6% by the end of Primary if the children were taught synthetic phonics at the beginning of P1.

There is more research out there, just google 'synthetic phonics research'.

'Look and Say' - definitely a fad! Phonics, in its various forms, has been around a lot longer.

[teacherwith2kids]

Oh, and stranded, yes I did mean that when I said 'inherent', it was a poor choice of word to explain what I meant.

DS 'translated' his knowledge of what whole words said into a self-taught understanding of phonics BEFORE he was explicitly taught phonics when starting school. As an observer of his early reading, I did not know that this was happening - he appeared to be recognising whole words (though in retrospect he was able to read even words NOT contained in his originally-memorised books). It was feedback from his Reception teacher about his excellent knowledge of even unusual phonic sounds during systematic phonics teaching that indicated what had happened.

[strandednomore]

Well I will be interested to watch dd2's progress. Dd1 learned to read in preschool because we were overseas and she was encouraged to do so by her teacher. She also just seemed to pick it up - I did nothing to "teach" her apart from reading lots to her. Dd2 has had the same attention from me but we are now back in the UK and she is at a preschool here where, as far as I can tell, they don't really do anything to do with reading, not even letter recognition (now I guess a real no-no!). She is just as bright but is already "behind" where her sister was at this stage. However, she will go through the phonics system alongside her classmates so we can see at what stage she "catches up" her sister!

[mrz]

Letter recognition in pre school isn't a real no no ... and it is quite common for second children to be "behind" mine certainly took longer over every developmental step including reading.

[teacherwith2kids]

Stranded, if it is of any reassurance - DS could read fluently (self-taught) before he started school.

DD could recognise her name ... and that was about it.

I would say that DD caught up with DS at around the end of Reception / beginning of Year 1, and at 8 she is now more of a bookworm that DS is.

[snowball3]

DS1 knew most letter sounds before starting Reception, DS2 didn't know any and couldn't really blend until into Yr 1. By the age of 8 he had a reading age of over 14, had bypassed his elder brother and never stops reading even now!

[BabyGiraffes]

With my dd one of the ones slow in 'getting' the whole reading thing (well, she is only 4 and one of the youngest in her year) I find it very reassuring that early reading ability does not seem to predict either intelligence (anecdotally from friends) or later reading ability . Phew, we might yet get away with it but I hate to see her so confused.

[BabyGiraffes]

Oh and I hate all the threads in the line of 'my pfb read shakespeare before he could walk... why is he not given proust to read in reception??'

[BabyGiraffes]

Thanks particularly to maizie and mrz for reassuring everyone new to this learning to read business

[Mashabell]

Mrz: using phonics to teach reading has been the system in England since the 16th century.
General teaching of reading did not begin until the start of state funding of education in 1833. Many children were still not taught to read until the 1870 education act.

Until Henry VIII sanctioned the printing of English bibles in 1539, the percentage of children who learned to read was miniscule. After that most learned only to read the bible, mainly with lots of repetition in Sunday schools.

A 1766 handbook for
'The Best Method of Teaching to Read and Spell English' recommended:

1. "?begin with words that are absolutely regular, in the sense that they are pronounced in the way children would expect;"
   
   
2. "?build into the exercises material that unobtrusively revises earlier work;"
   
   
3. "?give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g, the first big difficulty ??.introduce other difficulties progressively."
   
   Would u say that this is a good description of phonics?
   To me it seems more like a 'mixed method' approach.

[mrz]

1) "?begin with words that are absolutely regular, in the sense that they are pronounced in the way children would expect;" apply phonics
2) "?build into the exercises material that unobtrusively revises earlier work;" apply phonics
3) "?give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g, the first big difficulty ??.introduce other difficulties progressively." teach alternative grapheme representation of and

what do you find mixed masha?