Phonics and fleucney and speed (waves at MRZ)

[CassandraApprentice]

I'm hoping for some advice from experienced phonics teachers rather than a debate on merits of phonics.

Does speed or fluency in reading just come with practise?

The Dc school pays lip service to phonics I've one in Yr1 and one Yr3 and there have been some negative comments from both teachers about their reading.

YR1 who only 'got' blending due to us stepping in with sound foundation books in reception - he still sounding out small words he should 'know'.

Yr3 - reading too slow and last year 2b levels don't reflect her abilities - despite her having to work hard at school and home for those levels.

I'm getting back into regular practise with sound foundation books for both of them - is this enough to help improved their issues?

Am I o.k. to still discourage guessing in any form - yr1 teacher is a look at pictures fan again and Yr3 teacher is teaching relying on sentence and paragraph context to guesses unknown words?

I?m being told no dyslexic issues despite me and many of my family being dx ? as they are not swapping letters ? actually the still occasionally do in both reading and writing but we?ve worked hard to help them not do this ? plus its not something I personally do despite dx.

I?m less interested in labels than helping them but at minute their issues are being referred to as needing ?more effort? on their part ? particularly unfair on my eldest -rather an underlying problems. Should I be concerned?

sorry about title - fluency.

I need to go and install a browser with spell checker again.

For some children "fluency" (automaticity) comes after reading a word once or twice for others they need to decode it 10 times. or 50 times a hundred times and for some many more times. It wouldn't matter if they were presented with whole words to learn by sight or shape as they would have the same problem with recalling what it is. With phonics at least they have the skills to tackle it if they can't remember, with whole word they have nothing to fall back on.
So I'm afraid it does boil down to doing it as many times as it takes ...

Failure to swap letters doesn't rule out dyslexia just as swapping letters doesn't indicate dyslexia ... the school is ill informed.

School talking alarmingly ill-informed crap about dyslexia, I agree.

Struggling to develop automaticity is often associated with dyslexia however - although what is 'dyslexia'??? As a label it isn't brilliantly helpful anyway, as dyslexic individuals vary enormously.

Agreed that the school does sound very ill-informed about dyslexia. Dyslexia is a general term that covers a range of different difficulties; one of which would be reading words you have encountered many times before, as if you were reading them for the first time. School sounds particularly harsh if they are telling DD to make more effort; it is certainly not effort that enables the fortunate ones to read a word once and know it next time.

Thank you so much for the replies.

The implication that phonics was making automation harder really got to me especially as we put so much effort into ensuring they learnt phonics. A few comments that could have come directly from my childhood schooling didn?t help.

I don't think DD been told directly to put more effort in - we've been told she need to make more which I'm not sure is possible - I think they are careful what they say to her as she is noticeably highly strung personality. Tonight, having the speed issue in back of my head, I'm wondering if it less automation and more lack of stamina for her.

If it just more practises needed- then that is fine we'll plug away till it comes for both of them .