Trying to see the positives in Biff Chip etal

[Ohgoonthenpouranother]

My DD school is teaching jolly phonics. She knows all her sounds now.
The school also uses these ORT books. They are ink stamped with the school logo which also has the date on and they are clearly over 20 years old. They do not use any other scheme.
We have now had all the purple books (there's a list on the back) and seem to be doing a second round. Yawn.
Also they are doing a word book of 45 high frequency words. They have not started with easy words, 'this' & 'away' being within first group learnt. I have found this list via mumsnet and I am bewildered to say the least. DD does not seem to be 'getting it' what ever it is! She is a bright girl, but I see no progression and this second round of kipper has finished her off!

Is it a good reading scheme? Should I trust school or do something myself to encourage her.

Ninah - he really is. Before he started school I really struggled knowing what to do with him because at nursery - where they didn't do any letters or numbers (Scotland) - he formed the opinion that "I'm not clever at reading/writing" and from then on point blank refused to try. That nearly broke my heart, hearing something so negative about himself from the mouth of a four year old. :(

Ha, good luck with that though i do recall they get slightly more interesting - tonight we also had the oh floppy, no floppy, oh floppy, floppy floppy - dh then read it to me porn style for laughs. I cant wait till they start going to the seaside on trips with the children with equally ridiculous names.

well gaelic I don't know as much as mrz, and maybe never will, I am still in training, but from what I have seen I'd say enthusiasm in learning is everything. You are right to want to keep your ds motivated. Read to him, talk to him, listen to him and at his own pace explore sounds and letters (why do they say letters and sounds? sounds come first) if he can retain that enthusiasm and not pick up too much anxiety he will be fine. Confidence and enthusiasm are crucial in learning imo, and reading schemes come second.

porn style floppy? that must have been even more disappointing

it was/ is. It should be biff, chip and stiffy and no mention of a kipper.

As others have said some of the later magic key ones are ok. The first ones are meh.
Our school has some non Biff and Chip ORT, believe me wading through those with dyslexic DD1 was grim. Weird names, lots of scene setting and some dreadfully crass attempts at being PC.
Fortunately DD2 found reading as easy as falling off a log (and she's good at that, fortunately she didn't break her arm learning to read).
I don't think I could have stood another 6 years of Biff and Chip at DD1 speed.
It was not helped by having a very load flat mate called Biff (short for Elizabeth, which I didn't get) foisted on me at collage.

Mrz- If you've ever looked at the Read Write Inc programme, it is all random sounds. Children are assessed on their ability to recognise short, long or 'bouncy' phonemes, then they read 'ditties' which are full of nonsense crap which uses the phonetic sounds. Incidentally, RWI is created by the wife of the most recent head of HMI...

Read the Rose review- it talks exclusively about synthetic phonics. The primary strategy, however, had the spotlights concept, which involved four reading strategies- including phonics.

Where did I get that from? 4 years of teacher training and a heavy duty dissertation, not to mention a good few years of practical teaching under my belt.

Mrz- If you've ever looked at the Read Write Inc programme, it is all random sounds. Children are assessed on their ability to recognise short, long or 'bouncy' phonemes, then they read 'ditties' which are full of nonsense crap which uses the phonetic sounds. Incidentally, RWI is created by the wife of the most recent head of HMI...

Whereever did you get all this utter nonsense from?

Where did I get that from? 4 years of teacher training and a heavy duty dissertation, not to mention a good few years of practical teaching under my belt.

It's a pity they didn't teach you how to think logically, how to teach reading and to refrain from passing on ill informed gossip.

Mrz- If you've ever looked at the Read Write Inc programme

I imagine mrz may have glanced at it once or twice.

juniper904 Fri 18-Nov-11 20:23:13

Most schools teach synthetic phonics, as government suggestion. This means sounds that are not linked to real words, but use the same phonemes like blim and cran.

What a load of blimcram!

Phonics has always been a style of reading, but before the Labour initiative, it was one of four strategies: phonics, sight words, picture clues and context.

Perhaps politics isn't a strength either ... check who introduced what ... The NLS (searchlight strategy) was introduced by Nu Labour 1998

ORT old series use all four strategies

Only if you teach children by the searchlight model ... it is a whole word programme pre-dating NLS by a few decades.... , whereas the newest ones do seem to be synthetic phonic friendly. Phonics for reading is not a new idea, and so the old schemes are just as valid except children just starting the reading process have to guess many of the words in the early books because they haven't learnt how to decode them yet ... either by using phonics (or even by memorising whole words) so they use the pictures and get the confused message that good reader read words and pictures

What a load of blimcram!

I have worried about what student teachers are being taught by some universities it seems my concerns are justified

and yes you are right Feenie I have had occasion to browse RWI and other schemes from time to time

Why would the children have to guess, mrz? Wouldn't they be reading to an adult who knows what all the words say, even if the children don't?

use the same phonemes like blim and cran.

Sorry I can't get over the utter nonsense of this statement ... it clearly demonstrates the poster doesn't even understand what a phoneme is [shakes head in despair]

Well if the idea of a reading scheme was for an adult who can read to read it to the child wouldn't it be a bit pointless we could just read some classic children's literature CecilyP.
What message does it give if an adult has to read half of the words for you? ... reading is really difficult

I was thinking in terms of simple beginner books like ORT which is, after all, the subject of this thread, and assuming that the child could read some, but not all, of the words at the particular level they were on.

The message it would give is that they cannot as yet read all the words in the book. Which they probably know anyway. If you are given only the 2 alternatives, are you saying it is better for children to guess (even it they are wrong) than the adult supply the unfamiliar word?

Most schools teach synthetic phonics, as government suggestion. This means sounds that are not linked to real words

And this bit!

Yes I was thinking in terms of early ORT too ... but if I'm going to be reading the words the child can't we may as well pick something a bit more engaging/fun.
No I'm saying that it's better to guess I'm saying it's better to use books that the child can read without either guessing or needing to be told half the words. Then the message is I'm a reader I can do this!

I was thinking in terms of simple beginner books like ORT which is, after all, the subject of this thread, and assuming that the child could read some, but not all, of the words at the particular level they were on.

But decodable readers not only enable a chilf to consolidate their letter/sound correspondence knowledge, but also have words which are all readable by the child.

I really cannot stress too much the message which people like mrz, feenie and I (and others) are trying to get over. The early stages of ORT are completely incompatible with the systematic introduction and practice of letter/sound correspondences which your children should be getting. The reading scheme should complement the instruction (this point seems to have been forgotten by many teachers), not introduce correspondences which children haven't yet learned and fail to contribute anything towards consolidating what they have already been taught.

Why don't I preview.... I always see the typo just as my message is disappearing

'child'

I appreciate your and mrz's and your point of view, maizieD and agree that in an ideal world, children would get reading books which would complement and consolidate what they were learning in class. However, I was querying mrz's assumption that if these books were not available, children would 'have to guess many of the words'.

It is just that when DS used to get reading books home in the days before there was so much emphasis on phonics, it would never have occurred to me to tell him to just guess the words he didn't know.

but that is exactly what juniper904 was promoting in her/his post CecilyP
OK the jargon is to look at the picture /initial letter and predict what the word might be using the clues.

Those of us who have had experience of all the failed children - the children confused by blimcram - by teachers with no professional knowledge of how to teach the alphabetic code - simply see the devastation caused to those failing 20%. How dumbed down do we have to get and how much blimcram needs to be fed to children to enable even more of them to fail?

My point was that we did teach Read Write Inc, which is synthetic phonics. We taught sounds. With 'blim' and 'cram', these words follow the normal phoneme rules of i being as in pick and a being as in apple. So with blending of bl and cr then children learn these synethetic words, even if there is no use for them in the real world. Mrz, you may be a Senco, but how much experience do you actually have of teaching Read Write Inc? Have you had to do spelling tests with nonsense words?

I think a good grasp of phonics is great, but in RWI, they have two huge posters as part of that pack of 'red words'. Words that actually do not fit in with spelling patterns because that is the nature of the English language. So we are telling children "this is the only method you need to make you a proficient reader.... except for this whole stack of words which you just have to know!"... know as it sight read.

If schools take on RWI completely, it dominates all literacy lessons as well as the reading strategy, and the whole thing is not designed to be context based.

Personally, I really do not like this. I think it's important to recognise that "every child matters", and they do not all learn in the same way. Phonetic awareness might benefit some, but sometimes sight reading words is important.

And Mrz, I find your tone quite abrupt and unpleasant. Maybe it's not the way you learnt things, nor how you see the world, but education is fluid and research is constant. As someone who has done a lot of research/ essays using current research, my viewpoint is equally valid. I have the theoretical experience of current methods as well as practical experience of having taught, and despised, RWI. I think you need to take a step backwards and think about how you speak to people.