Y1 phonics check

[piellabakewell]

You can see it in action here so you know what we are putting them through!

the little girl who got a x for blow definatly pronounced within her own accent.

do the children need to sound up as in the sound of the letter rather than the name of the letter, my dd in y1 no longer sounds out in sounds if that makes sence when she comes across or spelling words she says the letter names out loud then straight into what the word says rather than sounds like.

I think she would struggle with the concept of the non words are they explicitly told some words are not words as she would spend half her time saying thats not a word etc.

I'm not slagging it off, I'm just saying that people who advocate it should be prepared to admit that it's only one way of doing things and stop saying things like people who can't decode can't read. They can. There are lots of different ways of reading.

They are explicitly told they are alien words, and they have a picture of an alien next to them.

Why does she say the letter names? Why doesn't she just read the word?

I've argued the toss on this one before.

Lockets, my dd would have hated it too, for different reasons - she was always very secure with phonics, and EVEN THOUGH she was told 20 of the words were nonsense words, she would have clammed up and refused to say them. Even though she would be thinking the correct answer. That's just what she's like. At age 8 she is much better, but still occasionally goes into shut down mode, because she is a perfectionist.

Ds1 would have found it tough too, because he didn't click with phonics till later on, Y2 or later, though he was reading very very well - he is very like me, I learnt entirely through Look and Say (which is how it was taught at the time), and that suited my mind. Ds1 is so similar, he finds spatial things tricky, just like I do, but visual things are easy for him if that makes sense, no idea if that impacts on how easy/difficult you find phonics, but certainly he found blending ridiculously difficult, despite being an excellent reader.

Ds2 will find it fine, he is very logical and finds phonics easy.

I know phonics is very much the current thinking, and in many ways I'm really impressed with it, I am still a little dubious that every word can be phonically decoded, because there are still words that need to be 'learned' (eg one and two).

It depends on what you mean by decoding. The look and say method doesn't contain decoding of the type you're talking about and yet people who learn to read using it can still work out meaning. So your decoding isn't necessary. It might be useful but it isn't necessary

Decoding isn't necessary? That's one of the silliest things I've ever heard anyone say on the subjects.

Whole word memorisation and mixed methods fails 20% of children, learnandsay. I am only interested in making sure each and every single child in my school learns how to read, and read well.

if it is a new word or one she is unsure of she says the letter names then the word, if she can read it or knows it she will not do that. but if she is doing her spellings she just seems to automatically say the word then the letters out loud then write the word. she has not been taught this she just seems to have developed it her self. i suppose from when she relied upon sounding out she just seems to have moved on to doing it that way, not sure why.

Depends on what you mean by silly. Logically if you learn to read using a method which doesn't employ decoding, defined by uttering strings of letters whether you understand them or not, Then logically it isn't necessary.

If you find logic silly then so be it.

Logic:

Mixed methods/learn and say methods = 20% children failing to read.

Phonics - 100% children successfully learning to read in around 15 years at my school - except 3 children with statements who went on to special school settings after Y6.

I would say that's pretty logical.

It may be bad teaching not the reading theory which is failing the children.

Same teachers in our school, learnandsay - different method.

And if your child was one of the 20%, as my ds was, would you care - or would you use what worked?

All the recent research points towards successful phonics teaching - and none to whole word. Still don't let the facts get in the way of your argument .

I think the main problem with teaching reading is doing it as a class (though obviously this is a necessity, 1:1 would be lovely, but totally impractical), because you inevitably get some kids who are bored, some who would do better with a different method (ds1 DEFINITELY would have struggled if he had had to do purely phonics, but I do accept the wisdom that mixing methods doesn't work for a lot of children), others will struggle and fall below the radar.

I was definitely a bored child at school - we did look and say, along with Janet and John reading scheme (yawn), I could read absolutely fluently before starting school because my mum's professor in the uni where she was a tutor taught me to read. She claims I had read Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland before starting reception (the proper versions). I don't remember if this is true or not, I do remember being UTTERLY bored at 'fishing for words' and then seeing if we could read 'the' or 'and' or 'this'. And if we asked for harder books we weren't allowed them. Which seems futile.

From very bitter personal exerience I would say you are wrong learnandsay.

Watching my dc learn by phonics has been a revelation to me in working out how to pronounce new words (which are all too common in my specialism of Biology).

Had I been taught this way, and not relied so heavily on context, I might not have spent years of my education struggling. and then have to spent more years over coming my shaken confidence.

Context is important, but if you want to read out loud then phonics is necessary.

My argument is simply that all of these claims to be "the answer" are wrong. Phonics is only an answer. So efficiency statistics don't affect my argument because my argument isn't about statistics. My argument is that there is more than one way of learning to read.

People who talk about learning to read as if it is always one process are misleading others.

I could also read before I started school - my teachers turned out their cupboards for me and I was allowed to read anything. I was never bored. Depends on the school, I think.

I agree that 1-1 attention helps enormously - I did some consultancy work at a local private school, and they had no clue at all about reading instruction. But they did have lots and lots of adults per child, and of course huge parental interest. So they muddled along anyway . But their 'strategies' wouldn't last 5 seconds in a class of 30. You don't always get what you pay for.....

For some children though, learnandsay, mixed methods actually confuses them. And there is no way of knowing in advance who those children will be. It is another way of learning to read - but for 1 in 5 children it's a damaging one.

Why take that risk?

Feenie, that's so true about not getting what you pay for necessarily!! My primary was lovely in very many ways, but I was a bored child until we got to juniors and I was 'allowed' to read proper books.

All the teaching I do is 1:1, and involves teaching to read music - in lots of ways this is similar to teaching to read text, in that it is a decoding exercise, starting off by knowing that if you see this written, you press that, and ultimately being able to hear and understand it in your head. On a 1:1 basis, it's very obvious that people learn in utterly different ways - some people do it all by recognition, others by context (eg that note is higher than the previous note, it's higher by a hop of 2 notes, so it must be this one, rather than that is a G, this is a G, press this note). Some people learn to read music in a very visual way, others in a more aural way (again, ds1 is very visual, and can sightread very well, dd is much more aural, and knows what it should sound like, ds1 struggled with phonics, but found word recognition very very easy, dd found phonics much easier).

And if you're teaching 1:1 you can explore all these strategies and work out what works for the individual, but in a class of 30 this just can't be possible.

(to add, my primary wasn't an independent one, the first two sentences of my previous post are entirely unrelated!!! I was agreeing that you don't necessarily get what you pay for, and then moving on to talk about my primary! Should learn to use paragraphs!!!).

People who learn by Look and Say are really stuck when they encounter an unfamiliar word because they have no effective way to work out the word. As there are a quarter of a million (plus) words in the Oxford English dictionary that is an awful lot of memory space that the human brain just doesn't have.

Teach phonics by all means, just explain that it's an alternative and not the only way of doing things. So don't say things like people who can't decode also can't read, because that's not true, they can. You can say more people who can decode can read than those who can't decode (if that is actually true.)

There is no alternative to being able to decode, learnandsay - you seem very confused.

I have been defining decoding as plausibly uttering strings of letters regardless of whether or not you know what they mean. What do you mean by it?

It's the most effective way of learning to read and write.
What strategy would you use if you met an unknown word learnandsay?

I'd look it up in a dictionary.

The problem I have with phonics, and the argument about 'if you met an unfamiliar word' is that there are so many options with phonics that even the most proficient phonics user wouldn't guarantee to deduce the right pronunciation, and in the absence of anyone present who did know it, would have to look it up in the dictionary to see it written phonetically. But that's not necessarily an argument for or against teaching phonics at reception level!