Is this a poor approach to reading from school and am I making it worse?

[lecce]

Ds is in reception and I am a little concerned about how the school seems to be approaching reading.

Things I am happy with:

• He only knew a few letters by sight when he started and now knows all - upper and lower case.

-He knew all sounds of basic letters before starting but now knows all letter 'names' and sounds.

• He is clearly learning to read - had done nothing in this area before school.

Things that worry me:
-There is only one comment in his reading book from school - written by the TA about 5 weeks ago. How does the teacher know anything about his progress?

-They send home words for him to learn. These are not decodable (at his level) and they are only supposed to be sent a new set when the previous one has been mastered. The first 3 sets ds loved but now we have 7 sets and he just finds them confusing. I have several times commented in his book that he finds them confusing and prefers decoding but the school continue to send more. He has not mastered the last 3 sets yet subsequent ones (and certificates congratulating him on learning words he hasn't learnt )have been sent.

-Books sent home seem to be completely random. I wouldn't have a clue what level he is on and most are not decodable (last one had guinea pig - what a waste of time). This has led to a lot of frustration on his part as he tends to try and use the pictures and I try and stop him and conflict ensues. He only gets one a week and I have commented that he is frustrated because he clearly enjoys the phonics sessions they do in class abd wants to be able to use them, but no one ever responds to my comments and similar books come home the next week.

I now more or less ignore what comes home from school and use other stuff. He abolutlely loves Starfall (though we've nearly exhausted it now) and I've got some Usbourne phonics books which he also likes because they have a bit of a plot. However, neither of these are completely the right level and I have been saying stuff like, "The 'a' and the 'r' make 'ar' in this word," and if I do that he will blend it fine. I have also told him about 'magic' and 'silent' 'Es' and, if I tell him which it is he can decode the word from there. However, I am a little worried that what I am doing is 'wrong' and will be counter-productive for him later. I am also a bit worried about basically ignoring the stuff school send home as I don't want to appear arrogant or unsuportive.

Thanks for reading.

Some kids sound out and don't understand the word they are trying to sound...the pictures help. Not everyone can manage on phonics alone,it depends on their learning style. Children doing Reading Recovery learn a variety of strategies to help them. Are you saying that is wrong?

Reading Recovery has not got a good track record.

Kids tend to make progress while they're on Reading Recovery, and then stall then when the program is finished.

So yes, Reading Recovery appears to have got it wrong.

All independent research has labelled RR a failure for those children who need the most help and a costly failure at that.

www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/reading-recovery-is-failing/story-e6frg6nf-1111113770263
www.nrrf.org/rrp_failure_11-4-04.htm
www.avko.org/Essays/reading_recovery.htm
www.wrightslaw.com/info/read.rr.research.farrall.htm
www.ldanh.org/docs/Reading%20Recovery.pdf

Children make accelerated progress while on Reading Recovery. Good class teaching should ensure that they don't stall when they are not on the programme.

'Good phonics teaching does away with the need to use 'other strategies' when reading. If your posts reflect the way your child is being taught, then they are being taught badly...'

I disagree. Both that good phonics teaching does away with the need to use 'other strategies' - context and sense will help a child read 'shone' as it should be rather than to rhyme with bone, as in 'Dad shone a torch', and that my child is being taught badly.

'Similarly the child would not be expected to read a word with 'le' in it until they had been taught that 'le' represents the /ul/ sound.'

Maybe my children are good readers because I and they don't limit their expectations of what they can do. By using phonics and other strategies they have become good at it. They use these other strategies to reinforce what they have learnt and to move themselves on.

Can I ask how your children would read an unfamiliar word if there were no picture clues zebedee?

Phonic knowledge and previous experiences. So if they were expecting to get meaning from the word, but it was beyond their phonic/previous experience - take the word road for example, they may say ro-ad and tweek to road. Or they may ask what a ro-ad is. Or if they knew the word toad they might just say road, because they are using their knowledge of how words work.

Interesting

Or if they knew the word toad they might just say road, because they are using their knowledge of how words work.

It never worked with the struggling readers I work with at KS3.

I believe that good phonics teaching should be opening children up to reading, not closing them down. If they are given the impression that they can only read what they have been taught to read it will slow progress down to how fast the phonics programme can be taught - but if they are shown how to make connections between what they have read, written, can see about them, encourage them to be enquiring and questioning then they can see how they can use, apply and extend their phonic knowledge and reading ability.

If they are given the impression that they can only read what they have been taught to read it will slow progress down to how fast the phonics programme can be taught

You say that with great confidence. Where is the evidence for this? Do you actually know 'how fast the phonics programme can be taught'?

It is my experience (i.e teaching a fair number of children to read competently at KS3) that good phonics teaching does open children up to reading. It is also the experience of people who teach good phonics in Early Years and KS1.

Well I teach "oa" in the first week of October in reception and cover all 44 sounds by November along with lots of incidental teaching that doesn't include directing children towards the illustrations to work out the words.

Sorry mrz! MaizieD was right. Closer reading is called for for! Lovely stuff this humble pie.

I should have used quotation marks

Oh dear. Everything I have learned and trained for seems to get shot down in flames on here. No idea how we manage to get kids reading, then! .

JamDonut - do you get 100% of your kids reading? In KS1?

Do 100% of children leave your school able to read at level 4 or above, jamdonut?

They didn't at ours when I was fresh out of college and keen to try out my mixed method teaching. Made perfect sense to me at first. And it worked fine for 90 odd %, but I felt terrible for the children we let down in the meantime.

Cross posts, Indigo!

I haven't read the whole of this thread, but picking up on what mrz has said above, I just wanted to comment that in Reception year at the school DD started at (she's at a different school now) they taught one sound a week, and were not due to complete all the sounds until Easter. DD was getting so frustrated with the slow teaching that we sped on ahead at home to stop her getting bored.

We moved schools for Year 1, where she's doing a lot better.

That's not good practice, as you have already identified, DuchessofMalfi - the sounds need to be taught much faster than that.

It sounds fairly typical of how "letters" were taught when I first started teaching ...at one sound a week they could only cover the 26 letters of the alphabet by Easter!! which is why children were taught so many words by sight.
Pace is an important feature of good phonics teaching, as is constant application and reinforcement of previously taught phonemes. Children should be blending sounds for reading and segmenting words for spelling right from the start (after 6 days they can learn sat and at and an and as and sit and pit and pin and pat and ant and pants ... )

Pace is really important, mrz. I agree! I also very much agree that children need to practise reading and writing (spelling) from the start, mainly because when children 'build' a word and they read and then write it, it helps them to learn sound-spelling correspondences more effectively.
I don't want to push Sounds-Write on this forum particularly but we cover all the basic sounds, plus, , , , by Xmas. We introduce them to a small number at a time and we teach children to blend, segment and manipulate sounds in three-sound words until they are brilliant at these skills, can easily connect all the basic sound-spelling correspondences for reading and for writing, and they also understand that these spellings are symbols for sounds.
After Xmas we go on to further improve their skills by introducing adjacent consonants (VCC, CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC in this order) using all the sound-spelling correspondences we introduced in the initial phase. All this, plus , , , and so on are also added. This means that, by Easter, children in YR can blend, segment and swap sounds on words like 'swift', 'shrimps', etc. and they are then ready to take on learning that there is more than one way to spell a sound.

My background is linguistic phonics rather than SP so Sounds-Write is probably closer to the way I work than RWI (but I probably use a hybrid) and introduce ccvc , cvcc and ccvcc before Christmas and start teaching alternative ways of writing phonemes in the summer term although I do lots of incidental teaching as they arise in day to day stories.

mrz, at ds's school he only learned the sounds by the summer of YR, let alone Easter! Now he has had half a term (and a bit) with the teacher who uses mixed cues, he is reading words like 'witch', 'fright' and actually enjoying reading. Your method sounds great (pace, how nice!), but sadly it's not my experience which means we muddle along.

I would expect some children to be able to decode witch and fright easily by Christmas if they were non readers in September.