Should spellings be at a level to support reading in year 1.

[atiredmum]

Hi all,

DC is in year 1 and I'm a little concerned. He's reading ORT books most of the time. He's got up to orange level but these are not songbirds so although he can decode some unfamiliar words a lot is now through repetition. He isn't encoding as well as I'd expect considering he is in the top group (I wonder if he's actually struggling and we need to slow it down for him). He's struggled with split digraphs in his writing/spellings but can normally work them out and point them out in his reading. I also find that he is not encoding with the correct sounds and it's as though he can not hear the sounds i.e anvencher for adventure (i'd have taken advencher). He was given a book today to practise a sound and the 3 different variations but to be honest I would have expected him to be able to spell words with that first grapheme for that sound but he's not even that far along. When they give him the spellings they are flitting around with all the different variations. It feels a bit hard for him to grasp so many different alternatives in his spellings and he doesn't get given many of the high frequency words. I'm waffling and not explaining this but phonics seems to be getting way more complex than perhaps it needs to be. Would he not be able to recall more easily the sound and the correct grapheme if he had say 6 or 7 with the same spelling and a couple of tricky words with the alternative another week?

Thanks for any thoughts.

I think anvencher is a jolly good attempt when you think about how most children (and some adults) say it. ORT books do not help the children with their spelling and in fact are likely to confuse the children and break down any links that they have made between reading and spelling during their phonics learning. The evidence used for the Rose Report showed that boys are disproportionately disadvantaged by mixed methods of teaching (which is what DS's school is doing). There is a page somewhere in the DfE about good phonics teaching that says schools teaching phonics well (one item in a big list) have decodable books in the reading schemes. Oh dear, that was a bit of a rant.

It does sound as if he's being overloaded and the last thing you want to do at this early stage is put him off reading and writing. Go for a chat with the teacher and see what she suggests and if she sees this in class too. I don't think going back to basics would do him any harm at this early stage.

Firstly, Riversidemum is quite right! 'Anvencher' is a very good attempt to spell 'adventure' at this (Y1) stage.
Now, should spelling parallel reading? The answer is no! Reading is easier than spelling because when you're reading you have the visual cue in front of you. When you're spelling, you have no visual cue in front of you and you have hear the sounds in the word (segmenting skill) and then represent them in the form of spellings. Productive language (speaking and spelling) is always going to lag behind receptive (hearing and reading) language.
What makes spelling harder than reading?
As soon as words become more difficult structurally and move on from CVC ('mat') to CVCC ('help') to CCVC ('crab') to CCVCC ('twist'), they start to become more difficult to spell because some children have trouble with adjacent consonants. As soon as children move on to more ways of spelling sounds (, , , , etc), then spelling gets very much harder, which is why no-one is a perfect speller in English. How would you know how to spell a word if you'd never seen it before and it contained less frequent spellings of sounds?
I think that spelling gives a very much more accurate picture of how literate a child is because, with very few exceptions, if you can spell a word, you can read it.

Thanks for the responses. Having spoken to the teacher she offered to talk me through phonics after school one day. Very sweet but I do understand it, I'm a little unsure if DS is getting it or actually getting more confused. I actually think his spellings are confusing him sometimes. He gets words like denied tried and has never really done things like pie, tie so I don't think he sees it as building. Last week was soup, group, should, could, shoulder. A couple of mums today did say there kids weren't sounding there spellings out but just writing them so perhaps I am reading into it all too much as well. Will keep an eye on it. He always writes a bit each weekend and I try and use this time to let him have a go and I help him sound things out. Hopefully it will click.. thanks all

My heart sinks when you say that the spellings for last week were 'soup, group, should, could, shoulder', atiredmum.
It is clear from the list that the teacher(s) doesn't understand the code properly. You might possibly group together the words 'soup', 'group', 'you', and so on because the spelling represents the sound /oo/. The idea you'd be teaching here is that one sound (/oo/) can be spelt using different spellings.
You might also group together 'soup', 'group' and 'shoulder' (/sh/ /oe/ /l/ /d/ /er/ - five sounds) together because the common spelling represents different sounds (/oo/ in the first two, and /oe/ in the case of 'shoulder') - that is if the concept or idea that you are teaching is that a spelling can represent different sounds.
However, putting together 'could', three sounds /k/ /oul/ (the same sound as in 'book' or 'put', as spoken in the south of England) /d/ with the other words is bonkers and confusing.
I'm not blaming the teacher, by the way. The people I blame are the training institutions for not teaching the teacher how the sound system of the language works in relation to the writing system.

Thanks for the responses. It is helpful just to see what others think about it. Another week of spelling and I just don't think they match his level. Having spoken to other mums, they have had similar when their children were in year 1. I will continue to make sure he knows his basics. soundswrite, like you I don't think it is the teachers fault I think it's the system. I can see now he'll get it and we will just get through it. Just one night working at sounds and spellings made more sense to him.