Reading in Reception

[Plonker]

If your child brought home books that she was struggling to read, would you ask for simpler books, or would you just get on with it?

Dd is struggling a little with the new books set on a new level. She could read the last level well, with a little guidance in places, but appears to be finding the new level rather difficult.

My instinct is to ask the teacher if she feels the level is appropriate, but then I think she wouldn't have given her the books if she didn't think she was ready for them, right?

Dd isn't particularly stressed by it, btw, however I'm finding that I'm reading quite a lot of it to her, rather than her reading it to me.

Any advice?

3duracellbunnies, your little girl predicting ('guessing') what might come next is an important part of the 'message-getting, problem-solving' process of reading. What then needs to happen is for her to check the storyline, picture, sentence structure and letter detail to confirm her attempts.

Or she could just read her attempts. Because that would be actually reading, not guessing from the picture, etc.

LaBelleDame, my Y1 ds was thoroughly demoralised by his failure to read using the school whole word books. The school couldn't understand why his comprehension skills were so far ahead of his decoding. I subscribed to Reading Chest, ticked all the phonic schemes and he has moved 5 book bands at school in 5 months. His reading has rocketed, and lately so has his reading esteem - that took a lot longer to pick up off the floor. School are so encouraged by the progress he has made (or worried about what I pointed out to them about the whole year group's progress ) that they have started sending home Read Write Inc in the last 4 weeks, so he continues to whizz along. So go for it!

refusetoworry would that be the Reading Recovery that is a big fat fail in New Zealand, where Marie Clay began it?

LaBelleDameSansPatience I have to say that is what some of our staff with young children have done and they report positive results.

www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/reading-recovery-is-failing/story-e6frg6nf-1111113770263
THE most common remedial reading program used in Australian schools is failing the students who most need help and some studies suggest the gains produced are lost in the following two years or so.

This one?

Hi Plonker:

I have become a very cynical old thing - and have been given much cause by our school - so do read the following with a health warning:

I found this kind of thing was used at our school as a means of reducing the number of pupils in a particular group. Because schools tend to buy in books in sets of 6 it becomes problematic if there are 7+ students in a particular group. So one way of readjusting numbers is to provide slightly too hard books which results in a few parents writing honestly in teh reading diary something like 'DC was struggling with this' and low and behold a few weeks later those children are dropped from that group. Parents are usually told it's to help with their 'confidence' or something equally vague.

My cynicism comes from the fact that there are always 5 groups of 6 - I did have the cheek to ask why couldn't they have 6 groups with perhaps some with less than 6 pupils and got a withering look. It turns out that previously the groups were set by ability on entry to year - so say in Y1 the best reader was a 2a - then next four groups would then be 1a, 1b, 1c and then EYFS/ Reception level. Rather lazily the school would aim for the group at 1b to move up 3 sub-levels a year in KS1- so the 1b pupil would work to a 1a by Christmas, 2c by Easter and 2b by end of Year. Although they have moved children down (and seem to regularly) they rarely move anyone up. Parents usually are never informed their child has moved down - they just suddenly see a huge drop in the level of reading book. So much for individual reading plans.

On a more positive note:

I think your solution of taking turns to read pages is a great one - and our DDs have found that 'takes the pressure off' as it were.

The other thing I did with both girls was to let them go ahead and read a passage (without interrupting) and then go back to the 'big' or 'tricky' words and work on pronounciation of a few (not all - that's too demoralising). I worked on both pronunciation & on meaning (because often there's the double problem of not knowing what the word actually means).

We found 3 problems at the switch from picture type books to 'proper' books:

1. Less illustrations and only words seem daunting (the children were losing that crutch of working out the story from visual clues as well).

1. Longer texts are too daunting to read in one night - so we broke them down keeping reading school books to ~15 minutes a night. We found it was really important to work out how many nights we had the book (say 3 nights) and that it was 30 pages - so we aimed for 10 pages a day of practice reading.

1. Both DDs got completely freaked out by moving up to chapter books. In both cases the TA was the same and she seemed to make a really big deal about how they were moving up to 'big kid' books and that this would all be much harder and they couldn't fudge that they knew how to read anymore. End result for my two, at least, was that they were convinced they wouldn't be able to do it.

Finally, my advice is (as many on MN have previously advised me) - don't take the guided reading too seriously from school. Do it if you and your DC enjoy it - but if your DC is happier reading other types of stories - as long as you're reading together and your DD is progressing with her reading and getting lots of opportunity at practice it really doesn't matter that much what is being read. Just write in the reading diary that DC didn't care for this weeks book so we read x instead. It shows you're respecting the schools desire for reading at home.

HTH

Hi Plonker/ refusetoworry/ mrz:

To quote mrz's link: Professor Wheldall yesterday said the argument over Reading Recovery was not whether it was effective but whether it was effective enough.

He said the program should target the lowest 20 per cent of readers overall, not the lowest 20 per cent in every class, which meant that some students in higher-achieving schools received help while those in lower-achieving schools who might be poorer readers missed out.

So in fact the problem seems to be that this was universally applied across every school regardless of the actual reading level of the children. The bottom 20% of each class got this reading. In some cases this was applied to children who were performing as expected or indeed better than expected at that point - in other cases because it was a straight 20%, some schools left out pupils who were performing below expected level.

That being the case I think it is difficult to accurately conclude that the one on one reading recovery programme was a failure. Indeed what it seems to have shown statistically is that one on one reading time is of benefit to everyone, but shows the best improvements for the most able readers in the scheme. (in that the results showed that children with very little reading problems had the best long-term gain - the inverse correlation referred to above).

This is rather wonky statistics in that you're comparing those children with better skills (possibly more home support) vs. those children with the least skills (and possibly much less home support) as if everything is equal.

So what we do know is that one on one reading time seems to be a help - and I don't think anyone is disputing it. The question is whether more time/ better teaching or instruction or some other method is required for those very low achievers who may or may not have help at home and who may or may not have other issues (such as learning disabilities). I'm sure we all (parents and teachers) understand that this question brings in issues of funding, structural organisation, external monitoring of performance, etc... - all of which also aren't particularly straightforward).

To through a cat among the pigeons, both my dc brought or are bringing home ORT books (ds is in reception and dd in year 2), and managed to read them without much difficulty. Most of the words are decodeable, and the ones that aren't they seem to pick up without much trouble. They seem to enjoy them.

Depends which ORT books - the old core books are a whole word scheme and chuck in words like 'naughty' and 'furniture' at very early stages. Floppy Phonics and Songbirds are both ORT but are phonic strands.

PastSellByDate - Reading Recovery has been universally panned pretty much everywhere to date.

Hi there. It is the old core books, but they can work out the words using their phonics. Maybe i have just been lucky.

PastSellbyDate,

Another odd thing about RR is that, if you look at their data (which I had to for a couple of years) you will see that they consistently 'refer on' some 23% of children. In other words, the RR didn't work for them and they are referred on for further intervention.

"Why not?" one must ask oneself; they sell themselves as being able to teach the 'hardest to teach' children. So they can't teach the hardest to teach

So you haven't come across the very early ORT book

Floppy went in the cement

Or an example of an early reader

The children were noisy.
The children were silly.
The children were messy.
The children were untidy.
Oh Dear said Mrs May.
It's the weather.
The children were cross.
The children were grumpy.
The children were unhappy.
Oh Dear! said Mrs May.
It's the weather.
The sun was shining.
The children were good.
What a day! said Mrs May.

not many of those words are decodable for a child just starting out ...

www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/44/44we32.htm

education.qld.gov.au/literacy/docs/reading-recovery20.pdf

Kevin Wheldall, director of Macquarie University's Special Education Centre

If initial reading instruction based on synthetic phonics were to be implemented seriously, then the need for Reading Recovery - or indeed any other early literacy intervention programme - would be hugely reduced. There would be far, far fewer struggling readers after the first year of schooling. Those struggling readers remaining, however, would be far more likely to be struggling as a result of more severe phonological processing problems - children we might call "dyslexic".

It makes no sense to offer less effective instruction, such as Reading Recovery, to the remaining low-progress readers, even if delivered one-to- one.

So what would I suggest as the alternative? Those struggling after one year of initial whole-class instruction should receive more intensive instruction, based on the same principles but in a small-group format. Those still struggling after this should receive even more intensive one- to-one individual instruction - again based on the same instructional model.

Thanks for the advice everyone.

Mrz yes, I suspect that you're right and that it's the type of book. They are the older ORT ones.

She can decode words excellently and has a very sound grasp of phonics. For example she had no problem reading 'coach' on a sign, she said "c-oa[says oh]-ch". I said very good and she said "well cohwak wouldn't make much sense"

She doesn't, however, commit 'tricky' words to memory very easily, and this is where she's having a little difficulty.

I think I'll stick to the idea of reading a page each in her school reading books, with a couple of extra trips to the library.

I can't join in the debate regarding reading recovery, as I have absolutely no idea what you're all talking about

It is estimated that RR costs £3000 a year per child just think what schools could do with that kind of funding

So, at the risk of sounding completely ignorant, why do schools pay that sort of money on something that doesn't work?

Labour invested £144 million on the scheme (so no real cost to schools) and the current government scrapped it.

and it does work (for some children ... sort of) because they are getting daily 1-1 support for 30 mins. The problems arise once the 1-1 support stops

Ah okay. So in a nutshell, more effective phonics teaching would solve most of the problems without the need for the recovery scheme anyway?

Going back to the point you raised about the older ORT books not being very decodable, why do they still use these in schools if they're known to cause problems (or probably more accurately prove less than helpful??)? Is it purely monetory, or can most children manage them effectively?

Also, is there any other way of helping a child to learn the more trickier words, or is it a case of keep going over them in hopes that they'll eventually 'stick'?

Plonker, the amount of money is falling everywhere and reading schemes cost a fortune. I am not blaming my child's small school, just trying to help her.

LaBelle, I'm not blaming my child's school either. I'm just trying to understand it all better.

Well, they shouldn't use the old ORT books in Reception. Our school uses them in Year 1 or once phonics is better established. Personally I would burn them all before Stage 5 and then I would only keep them then as DS really enjoyed/enjoys the Magic Key stories .

Re your other question, a lot of the trickier words are decodable once you know the phonics for them, just they often appear in these early stage books way before kids have covered these phonics, which is barmy.

Yes, that does seem rather barmy.

Thanks all.

Yeah, Little Miss Guessalot read 18 pages yesterday, one guess (coconut - which was right as she saw the picture of Biff with said coconut), suddenly has stopped sounding out and has started to read 'properly'. Only downside is ds (2.5) demanded requested same book for bedtime story, seems we have a magic key addict.