How bad would it be if I taught my daughter to read...

[JeanBodel]

---using whole word recognition rather than phonics?

She's 3, she loves books, she wants to read them herself. She's an autumn birth so she won't go to school for another two years. I don't think either of us can wait that long for her to start reading independently.

I've got a whole set of Peter and Jane's (yes, the very set I learnt with 30 years ago). I really don't want to spend lots of money on Jolly Phonics when I know I can teach her with the books I already own.

I just dread getting into trouble with the reception teacher. I don't mean to criticise teachers or phonics in any way. I can see how annoying it would be to have a kid in your class who's shouting out the word without segmenting it.

All advice gratefully received.

It depends what you mean by excluding everything else. Has anyone suggested that everything else should be excluded?

Well yes, I think that's exactly what Maizie was suggesting.

Well I might agree if I knew what you meant by excluding everything else but as I don't I'm unable to comment either way.

Oh dear. I think it's Maizie you need to ask for clarification on that, not me.

I'd still be interested in finding out what her (and your?) take is on my questions above.

I'm not sure maizie will know what you mean by excluding everything else either

which question?

Here, but also similar statements in other places in the thread:

^... if you teach phonics you don't need to teach anything else. That is not 'you mustn't teach anything else' particulary, it is just that once you start teaching phonics you find that you don't need to teach any other word recognition strategies because the phonics does it all. But, if you've never taught phonics exclusively you will never make that discovery...^

Where this seems to me to fall short is that reading is about much much more than word recognition.

My questions are at 08:42.

OB&A,

I apologise if this point has been made elsewhere in the thread, but from your posts you do seem to think that phonics has become not only the main way of teaching reading, but also every child's only experience of Literacy / English teaching in school. Also that because a child's individual reading book might be phonics based, that the child is not introduced to lots of other books during the schiool day.

Neither is true. There IS a short, fast-paced, discrete Phonics lesson every day (in my school, all the way up to Year 2, because even once initial 'decoding' is secure, revisiting digraphs and trigraphs and variant spellings for writing is still valuable) but there is ALSO a much longer Literacy lesson (plus a story reading session) in which lots of different types of books are read and shared, children revel in plot and illustration and rhyme and alliteration and characterisation and emotional content all the rest of it.

I teach year 3, who have all been taught to read using synthetic phonics, and that extremely secure base of decoding skills actually means I can deliver an even wider experience of Literacy because e.g. reading a non-fiction text about dinosaurs or a really exciting chapter book holds no fears for the children because they have the absolutely secure decoding skills, almost all without effort, to support them. And as it happens I am currently teaching skimming and scanning for particular information while researching - and because of their excellent phonic knowledge, even my (many) SEN kids can skim a text for 'proboscis' (given verbally, not written on the board) and then read the sentence in which it appears because they know exactly what letter strings they are skimming and scanning for.

JeanBodel

I am going to use a common sense approach

I am so glad you wrote this. It's exactly what I was thinking whilst wading reading through your thread.

It's impossible to read without learning the phonetic sounds of individual letters. I don't know anyone, child or adult, who learned every single word by 'sight reading'.

Equally, not every word can be read phonetically. The RWI phonics scheme itself calls these words 'red' words to indicate that the children should not attempt to 'sound them out' in the basic phonic fashion.

How does a child learn to read the word 'I' is an example. Is it sight read or phonics?

The debate goes on.

Whilst there have been studies which 'prove' which way works best, it boils down to the individual child. There are so many factors affecting the child's learning, not just which scheme is used. Probably one of the most important being, does the child enjoy the learning?

That's very helpful, teacherw2k, and it's nice to hear (though I fear our local school is much less broad in its approach than yours sounds).

Actually my banging on and on about all this was responding to what seemed to me to be unfounded scaremongering about the potential damage of what parents might do to their children out of school, and the idea that they might somehow damage their children's reading long term by exposing kids to other methodologies before or as well as the phonics lessons they get in the classroom.

I think you are misunderstanding what maizie is saying.

If a child is taught to decode the words using phonics they don't need to be taught to memorise a long list of words by sight (because they have the skill to tackle all words not just the ones they have been taught/learnt).

What she is not saying is that decoding alone is reading.
It is an essential skill and one that leads to becoming a reader.
Readers also need to understand what they are reading, which encompasses a huge number of skills.

I teach children to decode words using phonics.
I teach them to love reading (hopefully) by sharing stories, poems, letters, reference books, posters, leaflets, signs ... every kind of text you can imagine.

We believe that every child in our setting needs a diet of 5 a day (stories that is not just fruit and veg). They see me reading and every single child I've ever taught will tell you if you ask ... Mrs S loves books!

Now if you are asking do I think children should only have a diet of letters and decoding words then the answer is no ... and if you are asking if I think the OP should teach her child to read using whole words to build up a vocabulary so that the child can read Peter & Jane books then the answer is an even louder NO.

Children need to see adults enjoying reading, they need to see it as enjoyable and useful and they need to experience the joy you can feel from sharing a good book. If they don't get it in the home then they need to get that experience in school. Some will naturally pick up whole words from sharing books and that's fine but very different from a systematic attempt to teach reading by whole word learning because that isn't reading.

I don't know anyone, child or adult, who learned every single word by 'sight reading'.

I do...only a few including my son

mrz

Really? How many has he memorised (roughly, of course). Someone up thread said it's only possible to memorise 2,000 out of 30,000.

My son is hyperlexic and has never encountered a word he is unable to read (without being previously taught the word) so I can't put a figure on how many. He was reading the Financial Times in nursery and his favourite bedtime book which he read to me or his father was the NATO deployment of troupes in Europe... He didn't know and doesn't know any phonics (he might manage )

^Some will naturally pick up whole words from sharing books and that's fine but very different from a systematic attempt to teach reading by whole word learning because that isn't reading.^

Except it was, for me - I think that's one of the reasons I'm getting so stuck on this, because it seems to be denying that the experience I had could or should have taken place. But there I was, an early whole-word reader with excellent comprehension and voracious appetite for books. Are you really saying taht if one of my kids showed the same tendencies I should hold them back from it? Of course if it didn't seem to suit them I'd try a different tactic - but I can't see how my own experience could either have been harmful or something that stopped me from acquiring phonic rules in due course.

So you were taught to read isolated words out of context?

a all were come house
to we go will old
said can little into too
in are as back by
he up no from day
I had mum children made
of my one him time
it her them Mr I?m
was what do get if
you there me just help
they out down now Mrs
on this dad came called
she have big oh here
is went when about off
for be it?s got asked
at like see their saw
his some looked people make
but so very your an

like masha's lists ?

Flashcards?

Nope, emotionally resonant words that I chose myself, thus providing a context. On flash cards to start with yes, but to be honest I don't think that lasted very long - my mum wrote my first books out of my own and key vocab, and I was reading proper books very early. I'm sure there was lots of sounds and letters included along the way, but the initial engagement was with words as wholes.

Surely, that's the beauty of the Ladybird scheme. The first book only has 12 different words. The second book has the same words in a different order. You know that, and I know that, but for the child there is the accomplishment of having read a whole book.

I doubt if books 1A to 4B have many more than about 80 words in total (and many of these will be the same as the tricky words taught in most phonic schemes). And if OP has book 4C; this one starts on phonics.

And flashcards - I have vague memories of finding these exciting in infant school - I'm not entirely sure why.

Very different to teaching Peter & Jane IMHO
I would probably get a child to help me work out how to write the words to make the book using their key vocabulary missing out the flashcards stage.

CecilyP you could be describing any reading scheme ... Ginn only has one word in the whole of the first book then adds another in book 2 ... deadly!

Do you know, I wrote a message asking for clarification of what I was 'excluding'. I must have forgotten to press 'post' before I went off to do something else

Thank you msz for interpreting so well what I was trying to say. Your description of how you teach phonics & reading, and that of teacherwith2kids exemplifies just how I would expect phonics teaching to be integrated with all the other aspects of reading. I'm afraid that it seems so obvious to me that I forget that people can be brainwashed into thinking differently.

I should have made it more clear that in all this discussion I have just been talking about how children should learn word identification (and spelling) skills.

Once again, msz's son defies all logic Do you have any idea at all how he works out what unfamiliar words 'say', msz? If you gave him a word like 'sesquipedalian' (assuming he hadn't seen it before) would he just read it straight off?

Surely, that's the beauty of the Ladybird scheme. The first book only has 12 different words.

A child could independently (i.e without having to be 'told' what they 'say') read more words than that just using s,a,t,p,i,n ... Does no-one think that that could be very exciting and empowering for a child?

I haven't got a clue maizie but he is the same with numbers completing complicated calculations in his head - he claims he just sees it but can't explain what that means ... Yes if I gave him 'sesquipedalian' he would say it immediately without hesitation ... while I'm trying to work out if he's right
The other 2 or 3 children I've encountered who seem to demonstrate the same "skill" are also ASD so perhaps there is a link.

^Your description of how you teach phonics & reading, and that of teacherwith2kids exemplifies just how I would expect phonics teaching to be integrated with all the other aspects of reading. I'm afraid that it seems so obvious to me that I forget that people can be brainwashed into thinking differently.^

Well, if that's the case then our positions aren't so different - except that I still don't think the argument's been made successfully that including whole word techniques among 'all the other aspects of reading' is problematic.

And I don't think it's that people get brainwashed - I think people are very aware of the ways in which policy, particularly soundbitey policy like 'synthetic phonics is THE answer to literacy', can be implemented badly and then used as an excuse for not being able to do other activities.

Teacherwith2kids spread of classroom activities related to literacy sounds great - but it's not universal. What is increasingly common is teachers saying that they don't have time to read books with their classes because they have to concentrate on the phonics programme. And see also my example of a fluently reading five year old I know not being allowed to, at school.