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?

Thanks for links mrz & further info.

Interesting that the second link article concludes that at present there is no suitable alternative.

I think there is a concensus (here at least) that good phonics teaching and more if that fails (see mrz's first link above) is likely to be our new best hope.

[just to clarify - not querying the pedagogy here teachers - just the faulty stats leading to faulty conclusions. Not of course that underlying all this research is the structural issue that academics frequently earn their crust of bread from overturning someone else's work. ]

The problem with reading research as I've said before is that it is hugely expensive to undertake and also has the moral issue of do you deliberately give groups of children a worse education simply to prove your theory?

Yeah, Little Miss Guessalot read 18 pages yesterday, one guess (coconut - which was right as she saw the picture of Biff with said coconut),

Would she be able to read 'coconut' again without any picture to help her? If she can that's fine. If she can't. the experience of 'reading' the word from the picture hasn't moved her reading skills forward one little bit.

Sorry to seem negative.

I know what you mean MaisieD, but the fact that she was able so sound out in her head and then say 'frightened' and 'adventure', words which she cannot have guessed from the picture means that I am fairly confident that she would have a bash at coconut!

I hope I'm not too late to clear up a few misunderstandings about Reading Recovery.

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.

Reading Recovery 'refers on' children who have not met the expected level for their year group. At this point a thorough diagnostic and formative assessment of the child's strengths and weaknesses is passed onto the school with clear recommendations for next steps. 'Referring on' a child does not mean they have failed or made little progress. Each child has a maximum of 100 lessons, this is to ensure they do not become dependent on 1:1 support. The feedback given to schools gives clear guidance as to how further support should continue to foster the child's independence.

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

Can you put a price on literacy learning? Where this early intervention programme is delivered as it was designed it eliminates the need for a hundred and one other possible sorts of learning intervention later on in the child's school life.

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

Reading Recovery is still alive and well in the Midlands.

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

If the Reading Recovery teacher's recommendations are clear and thorough and the school adheres to them there should be no problems when the 1-1 support stops. The child and school staff should be so grounded in the methodology that the child continues to make significant progress. A huge strength of the programme is its major aim to get the child to be independent. How many interventions do the opposite and make young learners increasingly dependent on adult support?

OP, my dd did much better with 100% decodable books to start with. We used to get Songbird phonics out of the library to supplement, though they also used those at school too.