Another sight reading problem...

[SpiderManMum]

Hi, I have read other threads with interest and didn't want to hijack so if anyone has any advice I'd be very grateful..

DS has just started Reception and knows all the letter sounds from following Jolly Phonics in nursery. They have now moved on to blending sounds and decoding words all of which DS is struggling with. The teacher even called me in to see her the other afternoon to ask if we could have a hearing test as she wasn't sure if he can actually hear the sounds that make up a word. For some reason he has no problem hearing the first sound in any word, but cannot get the others (or if he does, can't put them in the right order).

The hearing test results are all fine but I'm at a bit of a loss of how to help. He has a very good memory so can sight read quite well which isn't helping matters.

Is the Sound Reading Solutions the way to go? I see that it is a US product, is it available in the UK and are there any problems with children understanding the American accent?

I'm already starting to worry about dyslexia, which deep down I know is a bit silly at this stage but I can't for the life of me understand why he just isn't getting it!

I am going to repeat largely what I just said on another thread.

U can make a big difference yourself.

The ultimate aim of reading instruction is to be able to read all common words by sight, instantly, without decoding. Learning to decode is just the first stage, but some children do better by skipping it and going straight to learning words by sight quite early on.

U could try a mixture of phonics and sight word reading with words like
at, cat, sat, mat, rat, pat, spat, that rap, tap, trap, strap...

if u get the idea. - It would not matter if he learns them without sounding out, as long as he learns to read them.

The Learning to Read page on my (free) website has lots of common words with regular spellings from which u can choose a few at a time. After a while your ds might enjoy working through them by himself.

The other thing u could try is teaching him to read the words in the books he really likes. He may just memorise the book, but u can make sure he learns to read the words by printing out 10 - 20 from them in various orders and see how he goes.

Parents can waste a lot of time, energy and money on getting assessments and outside help which they could spend far more profitably on helping their children themselves. Masha Bell

There are 3 programs that help build children's auditory processing.

Earobics
HearBuilder
Sound Reading System

The only one I have tried is Earobics, and I like it. But they all looked good to me.

I would definitely choose one of them and do it every day with him. If your child struggles to hear properly he will struggle with reading.

A normal hearing test only tests if he has hearing loss, it doesn't test auditory processing problems.

The gibson test is a simple auditory processing test. For £20 I think it's very good value. Just remember to enter the birth date in American (month first) order not UK!

The Sound Reading System is a UK programme -and the website is
www.soundreadingsystem.co.uk -not the one given by Indigo above.

Sorry, I did mean Sound Reading, not Sound Reading System.

Sound Reading helps with auditory skills.

Sound Reading Skills is a synthetic phonics program.

Sorry for any confusion.

Thank you very much for comments it is much appreciated. We will have a look at the 3 programs and see which one he likes the look of and also visit your website Masha.
Am so pleased to have found you ladies, thanks!

Hi
I was in a similar situation. My ds in reception knows all his phonics but can not blend to make words. (his teacher said it was probably too early for him to blend as this happens more towards the end of the year)
However as well a phonics they learn sight words from flash cards and he seems to do this very easily. He has been learning 10 a week so knows about 60 words now which enables him to read the stage 1+ oxford reading tree books. This has really improved his confidence.
I would definitely do what mashabell suggested and try learning words by sight as eels to have worked for us

Gawd! Just wait until he's in secondary school and can still read just 60 words!

There are about 250,000 words in the common English lexicon. The limit for memorising words as wholes is about 2,000. What one is supposed to do about the remaining 248,000 is a mystery.

I sincerely hope that you are not on here complaining that your ds is dyslexic in a couple of years time...

There are about 250,000 words in the common English lexicon.

That is an enormous exaggeration. The Dictionary by Jollyphonics, for example, contains just 6 000 entries and includes fairly sophisticated words like 'exaggerate, execute, location, pleasure' and 'rhombus'.

Ok, so even if we go with Masha's rather simplistic theory that there are arounnd 6,000 common words, learning 10 by sight per week means that in a school year he will learn 390, so 2730 by the time he reaches yr 6, another 7 would take him to A levels with 5460. Nearly there then ( perhaps he could polish of the remainder whilst at University)

All I am saying is the school he is at uses a mixture of phonics and sight words to get children to read as different kids respond differently. When I was little I read using sight words and it hasn't hampered me. Also the school he is at is one of the best in the country (it runs from pre prep through to senior school) so they must be doing something right.

I did raise it with the teachers at parents evening as I thought they were supposed to be learning using phonics (so I didnt understand why they were doing sight words) and was told that they do a mixture. They use sight words to get the children reading then as they get more confident and older they use phonics to decode new and harder words.

There are about 250,00 in your combined lists, Masha, I swear.

Or it may be 250,000 times you've posted them a propos of nothing, I am not sure.

masha you continue to argue about the number of words in English

Oxford English Dictionary says

This suggests that there are, at the very least, a quarter of a million distinct English words, excluding inflections, and words from technical and regional vocabulary not covered by the OED, or words not yet added to the published dictionary

if we go with other sources www.languagemonitor.com/

The number of words in the English language is : 1,010,649.7. This is the estimate by the Global Language Monitor on May 24, 2011.

2littlecherubs,

I must apologise for my rather acid closing comment. It's just that I work with secondary children who have been taught by methods similar to those your son's school uses and the end result is a very significant number of children who are completely baffled by reading, who are barely literate and who think reading is difficult and boring. Not to mention the parents who believe that their poorly taught child is 'dyslexic'. It is much harder to remediate a struggling reader than it is to teach them properly from the start. And they have lost valuable 'reading' time which can never be made up.

I'm afraid that your child's school has got the whole process the wrong way round. Phonics comes first. Teaching decoding and blending comes first. Reading words (and then text) through decoding and blending comes first. Whole words taught by flash cards come nowhere if phonics is taught (properly) first because children need no other strategy for reading known and unknown words.

I think that mnetters should be aware that mashabell is a retired secondary English teacher who has never been professionally involved in the initial teaching of reading. No secondary English teacher I know (apart from one, who I trained) has any idea how to teach beginning reading because it is not part of their job. masha has been around many message boards for years as part of her campaign to change English spelling. For some reason she has suddenly set herself up on here as a phonics and reading 'expert'. Her 'advice' apalls people like msz and feenie who do know what they are talking about as they are professionals involved in the initial teaching of reading.

I am profoundly sorry that any thread dealing with reading ends up in a rather acrimonious exchange with masha, but she wants children to find reading difficult; the experts, on the other hand, would like all children to be successful...

My DS learnt via whole words - and I really regret it now. (not that I taught him - school did)

He's 'brilliant' at reading. Is on the G&T register for it. Reads widely and large amounts. Would easily be the best read kid in his class. May well get a level 6 in his KS2 SATs this year.

But actually he isn't. If you listen to him read aloud you realise how bad he is at reading. He has no decoding skills at all and just guesses any new words he sees.

(He does have a very good memory)

Unfortunately school haven't noticed. And I only recently noticed. And it doesnt make our 'top 3' list of problems, so I can't fix it.

But anyway, my point is, make sure your child gets a good grounding in phonics in the infants. You might save them a lot of grief when they're older.

Maizie - I am profoundly sorry that any thread dealing with reading ends up in a rather acrimonious exchange with masha

So am i, but i am not the one who makes personal attacks, or responds with Arrrrgh! and emoticons, or with totally unfounded assumptions like
she wants children to find reading difficult.

The fact that so many threads on here are by parents who are worried about their children's reading proves that plenty of them find learning to read difficult, even when they have supportive parents like the posters on here. Have u ever wondered what learning to read must be like for children whose parents are among the 1 in 5 adults who are illiterate?

There is no doubt that learning to read English is difficult. Even most of the main current phonics gurus - Dianne McGuinness, Debbie Hepplewhite, Ruth Misking - have often admitted that. All I have done, and will continue to do, is explain what makes it so and to improve understanding what learning to read English involves.

This does not suit those who believe that reading difficulties are due just to insufficient use of phonics, or those who are trying to sell a phonics course to schools, or have had a hand in developing one. I make it harder for them to sell their piggies in a poke.

2littlecherubs - there is nothing whatsoever wrong with using
a mixture of phonics and sight words to get children to read.

Children don't just learn to read. They learn to write as well, and they need and use phonics for that.

But even for writing, phonics is of limited use in English. The hardest part is memorising the tricky bits which vary from word to word, e.g. on fun run - gone, done.

Mrz - The reason why I continue to argue about the number of words in English
is because many phonics fanatics keep arguing that u cannot learn to read English by the sight words method (although millions of children have done so and continue doing so) because there are too many words to learn.

The count that concluded
The number of words in the English language is : 1,010,649.7 is totally irrelevant to what children have to learn. That count would include all names for foreign currencies and foreign words like 'dirndl, posada' and 'lederhosen' which most people will never ever use. My Oxford dictionary is a hefty tome (like the one Susie Dent uses on Countdown) and claims to have 350 000 words, phrases and definitions. Among them are the likes of 'dirndl' and also as separate entries: Port-Gentil, Port Harcout, Port Hedland.

I have a book by OUP which most secondary schools bought until about a decade ago,
the Oxford "Spell it Yourself" which was supposed to 'Help children teach themselves to spell!"

It has an alphabetic list of just over 7000 words. But many of those are compounds like 'weekend' or 'backpack' and repetitions like 'take, took, under' and also 'undertake, undertook'. Any 11-yr-old who can read roughly the 3000 most used English words would be an excellent reader.

but i am not the one who makes personal attacks

So it wasn't you who was warned by MNHQ the other day for making repeated accusations that other posters have had your links to websites deleted because they 'want to hide the truth from parents'?

Masha, if you had one shred of experience in teaching reading then you might be able to debate sensibly with those professionals who do. But all you are interested in doing is feeding your compulsion to post endless lists, meaningless soundbites and 'information' that's so wrong that it's actually damaging, all the while evangelically maintaining that you 'help' parents. You don't, you just muddy the waters further.

"Any 11-yr-old who can read roughly the 3000 most used English words would be an excellent reader."

Really? How do you know that? What are you basing your assertion on? Do you know what being an excellent reader at 11 years old means?

Even The Sun uses around 8000 words, for example, and that's estimated to be around a level 3 - far short of an excellent 11 year old reader.

Indigo you could be describing my son and how angry I feel with myself for letting him down.

I have no interest in selling phonic courses or any other vested interest apart from my own knowledge of DD1 who is dyslexic, and one of her main problem areas is auditory processing and phonic awareness.
She has trouble defining close consonants, so for example the word frog, she only hears the f, not the fr, therefore she hears fog. That's a simplistic example, but she has problems with the commomly confused words that some dyslexics regularly do. Pacific-specific, renember-remember etc.
I was concerned about her in reception, and she was tested for dyslexia (her DF is) but came back inconclusive as she was too young, an auditory processing test would have been far more usefull at that age.
Like I say, no vested interest anywhere, just wanted to give you my experience of it.

IndigoBell's post here...Thu 20-Oct-11 10:21:56
is very usefull.

This does not suit ..... those who are trying to sell a phonics course to schools, or have had a hand in developing one. I make it harder for them to sell their piggies in a poke.

The only person I know of who posted advice about synthetic phonics on Mumsnet and who had developed their own programme was DebbieH, who no longer posts. And I seem to recall you being extremely unpleasant about her..

As none of the rest of us have anything to sell the only thing you are making harder for us is keeping command of our tempers when you come on here talking complete rubbish about learning to read.

And all your posts which imply we try to sell or promote stuff, masha - we are all just ordinary teachers who teach reading day in, day out, and know exactly what works and what doesn't through vast experience.

You are a retired secondary teacher, who has never taught anyone to read, and who bullishly posts misinformation, ignoring anyone who tries to put you straight.

And when you were allowed to post weblinks, all you were interested in was selling your stuff and promoting your spelling reform tosh.