Parents of children who have had their phonics screening

[bronze]

Have you all heard how they did?

I haven't and I'm worried as I'm pretty sure dd is going to fail. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to know by now or not or if I'll be told at all

Niceweather

Have you considered whether your DS1 might have dyspraxia? What you have said about him sounds like that is a possibility. While the two conditions can overlap, it might be worth reading up on dyspraxia.

Indigo
I don't know if my dd has failed but suspect she will have. I don't blame
the teaching though. In a lot of other areas my dd is behind. She was born prematurely and though she has supposedly caught up she has always been a bit behind. She gets there in the end, it's not that she's unable to, it's just that she does it two years after everyone else. The problem she has is that her peers are constantly on the next thing and that is very hard for the teacher.

Niceweather lots of our SEN children passed (including those with a family history of dyslexia )

If your child has failed, you can well and truly blame bad teaching in almost all cases.

But some children just learn a little slower to learn. Give them a bit longer and they will get there. We have a child, for example, who has had daily phonics every day for a year and a half, plus an additional phonics/reading/writing session daily on a 1:1 basis - but he only started to blend sounds in the last month despite fairly intense intervention. He has however known most of his phase 3 sounds for the past 2-3 months, but didn't know all phase 2 at Christmas. he was never going to pass this time round - no where near. We were pleased he managed 2 or 3, a month ago it would have been 0. But all indications, including those from external agencies are that he will get there eventually but it will just take far longer for him to do so.

It is not unusual for 5 and 6 years to just not be quite ready but to suddenly make huge jumps when it starts to click. It isn't always down to poor teaching - sometimes a child's maturity and readiness for learning comes into it, esp where SEN and EAL come into the mix too.

A very quick analysis in our school - bearing in mind that the same 3 classes have the same 6 phonics teachers - shows that the class with the eldest children in got 80%, the class with the summer born children (who also started school a term later than the older ones) got 60%. All our able readers passed. Those who did not were able to read the words within the phase they are secure at and attempt those in the phases above. If a child was in one of our phase 3 or 4 they were less likely to pass the test - this very much linked up with the actual words in the test - you needed to be able to blend and decode at least the phase 5 sounds to pass the test.

For us it showed absolutely no surprises.

Indigobell - also we have children with exceptional SEN in our mainstream school, there is no special unit attached. We have a child with severe autism who is non verbal, with have children with selective mutism, we had a girl with profound learning difficulties due to down's syndrome...and we have children with EAL who only ever speak any English within the school hours and never at home or in holidays. These children are going to struggle to pass this test at this stage of their education regardless of the school phonics teaching they get - they'd have t be doing it all day every day and probably wouldn't be ready just yet - but most, if not all, will get there.

My DD scored 22.

She is a little slower than her peers but her NC level in her report this year (can't remember the number/letter) said she was working at the level expected for her age for reading. Not below.

Hulababy - yes, kids with severe learning difficulties won't be able to pass the test.

My point is that the vast majority of the 30% of children on the SEN register don't have severe learning difficulties, they have minor learning or behaviour or emotional difficulties.

In the vast majority of cases being on the SEN register isn't an excuse to be failed - but in a few cases there are children who can't be expected to learn in Y1.

If your child has those learning difficulties then you know that and you won't be blaming school.

But if you don't know why your child failed - then odds are it's bad teaching.

I know nothing about EAL. But if a child has been at your school for 2 years I would have thought they'd be able to pass the test regardless of what language they speak at home. Ofsted 'how the best schools do it' certainly included schools with high EAL.

i am sorry what is it DD

and when they have phonic screening

Same, Popcornia DD does the same thing. Starts off with the first letter of a word and just tries to guess. But then she's never really got into sounding out to start with.
I'm trying to more look at her end of year report for guidance to her abilities. Has your son received his report yet?

We just had a letter saying DS had passed. No score. Not bothered really.

All those stating SATS levels for DC in year 1-really, when they haven't done them yet! And won't for a year? That's a guesstimate by teacher only surely?

wheremymilk - the levels are not 'Sats' levels, they are National Curriculum levels, and are used from YR1 on, for assessing all children, however schools are only required to report them in yr2 and yr6 (I think). They are arrived at using teacher assessment, rather than a test.

Our school does not report them formally in Yr1, however the teacher has always told me what level each of my DCs were working at during the course of Parents' Evening.

*"The child that is reading "Storm" for "Strom" may well be the child that gets into difficulties later on. As a reading volunteer, I come across Y6 children who are "good" readers, reading long novels for pleasure, but make annoying mistakes when reading aloud .

For example:
"concerned" for "condescending",
"influence" for "inflorescence"
"interesting" for "intersecting" "*

I totally agree with this. These types of errors then affect other subjects, for example when they read "diagram" for "diagonal" they don't know what to do in a maths question.

A little confused now.... my little girl got a 1A (on the cusp of a 2C said her teacher) in her report for the end of year 1 - but failed the phonics test?

Don't be confused!

The phonics test only measures ability to decode phonics. The overall reading score (in your case 1c) covers reading comprehension and other reading skills such as predicting what will happen next.

It sounds as if your dd may be learning to read some words by sight rather than decoding them phonically. This is OK ( IMO) but some concentrated work on phonics would be really helpful for her as research shows that a strong foundation in phonics helps with more advanced reading and spelling skills later. The school should be putting some phonics work in place for next term.

If you want to do some fun activities over the summer to strengthen her phonic skills, I have put together a leaflet of fun phonic activities that I will happily email you if you pm me your email. Did the teacher indicate which phonics she knew and which she finds tricky? You could do with knowing the tricky ones if you want to support her with some practice over the summer. Other than that, just keep reading and enjoying books together!!

DS2 got 39/40, don't know what NC level he is, but he is a free reader, has been for a while, he went through all the colour bands up to lime, but don't know how they correspond to NC levels.

I disagree that a child reading Strom as Storm is likely to have difficulties later - they're 5 and 6, and they might just have rushed! I sometimes mis-read words, through haste, the context would flag it up, and I would correct it, as do most literate adults. In a maths test it is a different scenario, as you are taught to check, check and check again!!!

(I accept that SOME children who make that mistake may have the difficulties you describe, but for many it is just a case of rushing, and these are VERY little children we are talking about - they haven't had lots of practice in taking your time in a test!).

I disagree that a child reading Strom as Storm is likely to have difficulties later - they're 5 and 6, and they might just have rushed!

True, and they might not have rushed. Their teacher should be able to sort out the rushers from the not so secure decoders. If that was the only word which gave a child a problem it's hardly something to worry about as they will have reached the standard easily.

But trying to turn an unknown word into a 'known' word, or reading so quickly that they fail to notice the detail within the word could lead to problems later. It's no good being in denial about it...

I'm wondering how many adults frequently mis-read words because of the way we were taught as children? Somewhere else I just mis-read premium as perineum. This may betray my obsession with birth right now (37+ weeks), or maybe, just maybe it's to do with the fact that I leanred to read by look and say. I very frequently make mistakes mis-reading one word for another, and realise when the context makes me go back and take another look. My reading age at school was years ahead of my actual age, and I have always been successful academically, so it would be hard to argue I've been held back. But, I bet I'm reading primarily by whole word recognition, which would fit with my infant school teaching. Thankfully I have a large vocabulary and good comprehension of most stuff I read, so this does not inhibit me. I also find it hard to spot letter transposition typos .

Just because I can read effectively enough, doesn't mean that if I had been taught a different way and had a thorough grounding in phonics at the start I wouldn't be even more effective. Maybe I cope well because I was (and am) an able reader and 'good' academically, so have strategies to manage, whereas if I struggled more in other areas, these reading weaknesses would be more of an issue?

Either way, I see no harm in teaching primarily by phonics in the early years and KS1 and the looking at other strategies afterwards for children who have been well grounded in phonics but still struggle. I think to teach multiple straegies from the off is much more likely to cause problems for more children.

maizie, it's not a question of being in denial, I know full well that if ds2 got that one wrong, it would be through rushing, and rushing alone. I tried him on some sample words, he got the odd one wrong, I said 'oh, is that really the answer?', he said 'oh, yes, sorry, it's STROM' (or whatever it was).

In the context of a sentence, he'd have twigged from the context that he'd slipped up on that one, or in the case of a word he didn't know would have asked.

Declutterbug, I think we do misread words if we're focused on something else, and similarly, write wrong words if we're thinking about something else - try writing and having a conversation with someone at the same time, you end up writing the odd word that you're saying!

Isn't that the whole essence of Freudian slips? Saying something that is in your brain, but you didn't mean to say out loud!!!

maizie, it's not a question of being in denial, I know full well that if ds2 got that one wrong, it would be through rushing, and rushing alone. I tried him on some sample words, he got the odd one wrong, I said 'oh, is that really the answer?', he said 'oh, yes, sorry, it's STROM' (or whatever it was).

Rushing words is a Bad Habit. Not to be mistaken for fluency, which is the product of rapid, automatic, accurate decoding. I hope that his teachers, at least, will do their best to discourage it.

He is only just turned 6. When he is reading a book he gets no words wrong. When presented with a list of made up words, one of which strongly resembles a real word, he slips on 1, though carelessness. Doesn't mean there is a problem that needs addressing!!!

I do wonder about all this identifying of so called problems kids have that always comes up on these threads; he is an excellent, careful, expressive reader, and I don't think it's appropriate to worry about mistaking strom for storm, in a list of random and context-less words.

For some reason the teachers on these threads never accept the possibility of a child just slipping up on an odd word, it's always indicative of some greater issue!!