Another Oxford Reading Tree whinge

[LurcioLovesFrankie]

I was already a bit worried about this, as so far DS (5 weeks into reception) seems to have got it into his head that what's required is memorising the books by rote, and really doesn't seem to get the idea of words sounded out connecting with words on page - not surprising since they have words like "frightened" and "their" which require quite advanced decoding skills (I have been trying to use even these crap books to build on what his very good pre-school did in the way of introductory phonics by getting him to recognise individual letters). But this morning, we had a (for me) heart-breaking moment, when DS said very sadly "I'm no good at reading". School have managed to get him into this state in 5 weeks! I am so cross.

My immediate response was "reading is difficult, I found it difficult, but you will get there, just as I did, with work, don't worry, all your classmates will find it difficult too, you're not bad at it, everyone has to work, you'll be really good with practice". And I've just ordered a Jolly Phonics home kit from Amazon. Also planning to raise the issue at parents' evening next week (I've also mentioned in his homebook that he seems to just be learning by rote rather than reading). Any other suggestions?

Apologies, won't be back to the thread till this evening (posting in my lunch hour).

Just for interest I once started making a list of the words which a child could read after learning the first 12 correspondences in Jolly Phonics (which would take 2 -4 weeks, depending on the pace at which they were taught). I made it somewhere in the region of 100 (excluding plurals). There were probably more but I got a bit bored...

Contrast this with this description of a study which involved children learning words 'by sight' (as 'old' ORT is designed for teaching).

"We carried out a training experiment (Stuart,Masterson & Dixon, 2000) to see how easy it was for five-year-old beginning readers to store new words in sight vocabulary from repeated shared reading of the same texts. It turned out to be much harder than we expected! We tried to teach the children 16 new words, which were printed in red to make them identifiable as the words to be learned.
There was one of the red words on each page. After the children had seen and read each red word 36 times, no child was able to read all 16 of them, and the average number of words read correctly was five. We were quite shocked by this, because we had made a database of all the words from all the books the children were reading in school, and so we knew how many different words each child had been exposed to in their first term reading at school. This ranged from 39 to 277 different words, with a mean of 126.
Hardly any of these words occurred frequently in any individual child?s pool of vocabulary: on average fewer than four words occurred more than 20 times ? yet 36 repetitions had not been enough to guarantee that children would remember a word.
When we tested children?s ability to read words they?d experienced more than 20 times in their school reading, on average they could read only one word correctly."

(I'm afraid I can't cite the source of this as it was given to me as an excerpt from an unnamed book, but anyone can look up the study cited)

Note that after a term of learning all the 'simple' letter/sound correspondences (about 42 -44) the number of words a child could potentially read, unaided, will be far in excess of the 277 max. quoted in the extract.

zebebee: I think it might be true to say that all books are decodable, once you know the code

Do try ordering songbird books from the library, also some are available as free e books from the ort website. At our library we can order quite a few at a time, and especially with the short ones you will probably only want him to read them once or twice as otherwise he will just memorise them.

If you like the ORT characters, you could try Floppy's phonics - decodable words.
Schools do seem to differ on this, from building up skills through phonics to learning hf words by heart, to a mixture. I was in a school where the youngest children were able to memorise books by heart but had no clue about blending or segmenting. I think it's important to get sound discrimiation spot on, and it sounds as if his preschool was working on this. Keep this going at home and try and keep reading enjoyable by sharing school books as you see fit. There is no point pushing him to read words like Frightened when he won't have fiinished Phase 2! you could read them to him and comment on sounds if he seems interested.
Is his teacher approachable? S/he may be at the mercy of school economics/policies/departmental decisions? At the beginning of term I was sending books home that made no sense at all because it had always happened, we had so few, the previous teacher had set up the scheme and written to parents about it. I'd have a chat at parents' .

I meant decodable words per age and stage iwysim!

OP, if you can afford to throw money at it we thought these Dandelion books were fab decodable early readers. DD worked through these in reception last year and was rather disappointed when she ran out of the ones the school had.

Mrz - tbh they must have done as she seems to be able to spell most of them although some of them are phonetic ie woz etc...

I did some reading with the yr1s today in my kids school and read with the ones who struggle (so basically cannot really read at all) and it did surprise me some of the books they had tbh ie biff/kipper etc with words in that are hard to read ie the word pancake when the child cannot read the word cat iyswim....

My DD read "Run rat run" from the library and "Get up Tim!"

They are reading corner phonics level 1 as her first ever books. She loved them.

You should be able to order them in your local library, would also second ( and third) the songbirds set....

I would expect them to be taught that the letter in was is another way to write the "o" sound and that is a way to write "z" and to always reinforce the correct spelling (while still saying well done to a plausible attempt).