Forced baby behaviour?

[learnandsay]

Are simplistic phonics books good, bad or neutral? If a Reception child can already read Ladybird stories such as Three Little Pigs, Where the Wild Things Are, Dr Seuss, etc, etc, etc but they're bringing home apparently the whole ORT 1+ range comprising of nothing but CVC words which present no challenge and no learning opportunity either, is reading them:

(1) a waste of time, reading time is precious, doesn't it make more sense to spend it on reading words which present a learning opportunity?

(2) potentially leading towards reading becoming uninteresting

(3) promoting ignorance - if the child can read the names of countries already the child could be reading sentences like: The Nile is the longest river in the world, instead of sentences like Dot got a pot and Bot got Dot's pot. Pat pat pat, tap tap tap.

In summary, would the time be better spent reading something useful?

Thanks, Lonecat. The first link didn't work, the one pointing to worse educational achievement. Please can you type the URL in the message rather than link it?

Is it something that I need a subscription in order to read?

very interesting lonecat - I have often wondered why so many parents focus so much on reading and writing (and to a lesser maths) at 4 and 5? It might be the right approach for some children who are ready at that age to start on academic stuff at that point. DS had other needs at that stage which I felt it better to spend my energy on and that the rest would follow naturally. It seems to have worked out OK for him (though to be fair any approach may have ended up the same!) as he started reception below national average in just about everything and ended year 1 above the national and local average. More importantly, his significant separation anxiety has died away and his behaviour when stressed has improved massively. There is a good friend of DS's who was truly precocious in her reading in reception, it tailed off massively in year 1 as she was frustrated by being technically capable of reading individual words but not able to cope with the books that she was bringing home and as a result got very demotivated and didn't want to read at all. My philosophy is to leave the mechanics of reading to the school - its my job to enthuse DS about the joy of reading.

As an aside I wish teachers guided free readers more in choosing books - its a big issue with early free readers I have had to send DS back to change books about 3 times since the beginning of term as he chose books that were just too difficult and demotivating for him.

Do any of the teachers on here help guide early free readers rather than let them have free rein? Or is it the parents job to assess the book and get it changed if its not appropriate?

Lonecat, I read the last two of the Telegraph articles. Whilst the third is made up of many generalisations the second concentrates more on specifics like teaching your toddler Mandarin Chinese or a musical instrument. It probably makes sense to teach your child Mandarin in you are Chinese and live in Britain. One of my friends is and does. Another of my friends is English and pays for her four yo to learn. I'm not sure how that's going to turn out. I'm not sending mine. If my child showed an interest in playing an instrument, sure I'd buy her lessons. But she doesn't, so I won't. As far as reading is concerned, my aim is to have my daughter reading ladybird books and Dr Seuss, not War & Peace and Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I'm guessing if I gave her those things to read things really would go down hill fast. But we're aiming for Goldilocks.

But the issue is not that your aim is Goldilocks (though nothing wrong with war and peace as an aim either) but whether your time frame is realistic and whether your methods will help her continue her reading past Goldilocks and onto War and Peace at some point.

My own entirely non scientifically validated view is that children end up reading at a level which corresponds to their ability whenever and however they learn unless teaching is either absent or truly dreadful. Maths is IME a bigger issue - too many children decide they are "not good at maths" and give up on it. Even aduolts say it - rarely hear an adult without some kind of reading difficulty say "Oh I'm hopeless at reading, me"

(PS am Welsh so genetically programed to understand sheep and mining)

Hi, Kew,

I think what Lonecat was referring to here www.telegraph.co.uk/education/3355933/Slow-parenting-part-three-let-babies-learn-to-think-for-themselves.html is over ambitious parenting. It may be counter productive.

Will my teaching of my daughter to read make her want to read War & Peace later on? I guess in that respect I'll be in the same boat as every other parent. My guess is that it'll depend on her friends, her school, her parents to some extent, her temperament, whether she likes being surrounded by books and many other external factors. I don't suppose it'll be any one thing. But one thing I'm sure of is that if she decides to pick W&P up, when she's a lot older, at least she'll be able to read it, whether or not she'll want to I don't know.

a small detour (apologies learnndsay)

As SENCO I was discussion pupils with colleagues after school, in particular I was asking about the progress of a little boy with a statement. His teacher said "he can quote any book word for word but can't actually read anything ... he's just memorising the text

Learning the text makes some children happy. My daughter first learned Where the Wild Things Are ,(there are so few words in it.) And she could predict what would appear on the next page. But then we stopped reading it for a year. Now she can't remember it any more and has to read it. Dr Seuss books are too long to remember by heart. They're fairly repetitive or close to it so you can sort of predict what the text should say. But since he constantly switches the sentence structures round you still have to pay attention to what it does say, not what you think it says. So even a person with a good memory probably still has to pay attention. Because my child has so many new school books to read we don't revisit her favourites nearly as often as we once did. Now when we do revisit them she's finding it harder and harder to recite them and she's having to read much of them instead. Tonight she volunteered to read three simple library books, simple but still "real books" with proper sentences in. I think it was a tactic to put off going to bed. But it's the first time she's read me three books in one go. She's getting used to reading library books and newly purchased books which she's never seen before. I'm introducing them slowly though. I don't want her to feel compelled to "read all this stuff." So we'll read an unfamiliar chapter book every once in a while.

Saw her teacher tonight at a school event. She told us that at the end of Reception she would be sending the children home with lists of HF words to learn and spell. Both she and I predicted that my daughter can probably read them already.

When I was 18 months old, my mum bought me One Fish Two Fish. After a day or two and many many readings, I had memorised the whole thing and a visitor was astonished to see me reciting the correct words for each page and thought I could read. I couldn't read it, obviously, and possibly didn't even understand all of it, I just liked the sounds. I could read it at three and a bit, though, and at five I was reading Prince Caspian to myself and amusing my parents by reading the Times out loud (with very little comprehension, no doubt). My brother couldn't read fluently until he was eight. Now that we are both in our forties, I don't think you could tell the difference between our reading abilities, and mainly he reads far more worthy and high-brow things than I do. He likes to read a textbook on Cryptography for light relief whereas I like a good thriller or Jodi Picoult or similar. We are both intelligent and we are both 'good readers' in that we read fast and fluently and often, for fun.

My DD had hundreds of books off by heart before she was three or so. At five I felt she could read. Now that she's six and can really read, in that she can make a genuinely good and phonically plausible attempt at any long or complex word she encounters I realise that last year she could nearly read but not quite. Today she read 'stalactite' and 'stalagmite' and 'underground' and 'nightmare', having never seen them before. I particularly enjoyed 'glossAHry' for glossary.

I suppose it depends on the length of the books, but I'd guess that to remember hundreds of books is a bit of a feat. (I have trouble with remembering shopping lists.) And I'd guess it also matters how long the memory has to last for. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with remembering text but I'm guessing that unless you've got an extraordinary memory there's no point in trying to rely on it. My daughter's memory appears to be much like mine. It can't hold that much and it doesn't last that long. I've read that some infant autodidacts memorised text and then correlated words and memories to form written stories. I'd imagine that (whatever one's chosen method is), repetition of it does help.

My heart really goes out to all those parents who post messages about their struggling children. But I find it so odd that I get so many rude (and some bitter) comments about my wanting to help my daughter to learn. I don't want her to struggle so I'm helping her to learn. This website is a bit funny in that respect.

Learn, the only question I would have is whether - in the long term - you are helping her to learn.

There are various ingredients that are helpful for learning to read:

• A passionate curiousity.
• A love of books and reading and stories.
• A sound basis in some formal system of decoding words - synthetic phonics would be my 'weapon of choice' in this reagrd.
• Suitable, varied reading matter.
• A strong, trusting and respectful relationship between teacher and parent, where the child is in school.
• Someone qualified to gain an accurate, fact based assessment of where strengths and weaknesses in reading may lie and to address them.

Which of those are you modelling, nurturing and providing? Number 4 is the only 1 I can give an unequivocal 'yes' to. School is giving number 3, and probably 6, if you would allow them to.

Only my opinion, but please let your DD go through the structure of phonics books, even if you choose additional free readers for her too.

A boy in my Year 10 class made a brilliant, insightful comment about Of Mice and Men today which demonstrated inference and understanding of character. But this was after I had read a chapter aloud to him, he can't read on his own, barely a few words. He is likely to fail GCSES because he can't read the questions. He remembers everything I read to him, but he can't read, and he's 15.

But you see, lots of people don't think that you are helping her learn. Some of us feel you're making it into something it isn't. A race, a thing with an outside (lolly) reward, a thing that isn't done just for the fact that it's fun but as a hurdle to be overcome. That's what it sounds like to me. I'm sure your daughter will learn to read well whatever you do as you are obviously intelligent and I'm sure she is too. But perhaps she might learn to read more joyfully without quite so much direction from you. You seem to be micromanaging it more than is really necessary for an intelligent child who likes books and has no obvious learning issues.

I don't think hundreds of books was a feat, particularly. DD was read to often and I enjoyed doing it and she enjoyed learning the words (without any apparent effort). I never tried to make her learn them. She just did, because she had a little empty receptive head and was busy filling it up with things she liked. Later, now, when she can really read and write, it's all coming out in the form of stories and word patterns. But it wasn't reading. It was just a thing, a stage that children pass through on the way to real reading. The stages are important, I think. Don't short-circuit them by pushing her on to something else before she's ready.

Haberdashery, I would entirely agree with you about the hudreds of books thing. It is definitely a stage that some (not all) children go through, and many of them (as long as it is recognised as not-reading, rather than falsely celebrated as being able to read) go on to become good readers.

Atr one point, DS could recite every one of his favourite bedtime books - fairly meaty picture books, most of them, the type with one or two paragraphs of text plus a picture on each page. DD never did it. Both are able readers now. It's a party trick, a fun stage that you can both enjoy.

OK, Habard, but lots of people don't know me and my daughter. They only know my internet posts. And they might not know that the most pleasurable times that I have with my daughter are when I'm teaching her to read. Unfortunately the lollies are bought by the other half and they'd be in the house whether reading was going on or not. I'm against lollies and hide them. (It doesn't always work.) So when a lolly dispute arises I say, OK, do xy and z and then you can have one. (Maybe tidy your bedroom.) And hey presto, tidy! It would never have happened otherwise. In order to make a real judgement you need to know the people concerned, otherwise you're only judging their messages which is not at all the same thing.

teacher, I don't know the line between reciting and reading, but it's likely to be different with different children. Some (maybe only a few,) and perhaps those whose parents/mothers trace each word with a finger while reading, manage to correlate the word that they can recite with its written form. (I'm not saying that my daughter is one of them.) But it's wrong to dismiss recital as a non-reading strategy, because for some children (maybe only a few) it seems to work as a proto-reading tool.

The lollies are in the house, but you don't have to use them as bribes! Bribes for reading suggest that it's a chore, on the same level as tidying your room. It's clear that she does find enjoyment out of reading. But if you ever bribe her into doing it when she doesn't feel like it, slowly but surely you are killing the idea that reading is a pleasure. There are various studies that show that people paid to do a task spend less time and effort on it than those given an identical task but told they were doing it just for the hell of it.

A more palatable alternative might be doing what my parents used to do, and use reading as the treat! I got 2 bedtime stories as of right, whether or not I'd been a little shit during the day. Then 2 more if I'd been good .

A child who is wholly reciting is not reading - if you cover up the text, they can still recite, so they are obtaining nothing at all from the written words on the page.

Some children - my DS was one - independently link the words thay have heard before and are reciting in a 1 to 1 way with the words on the page, and can apply those 'sound / letter' correspondances, initially perhaps to the same words in other contexts, and then [and this is the one I missed, but the reception teacher picked up - I would have said that he used whole-word recognition to read initially, but on entry to Reception he had an exceptional self-taught knowledge of phonics] to use a derived self-taught set of phoneme / grapheme correspondances to read all other words.

So in his case, it was a stepping stone to reading. Not reading, not 'proto reading', whatever that might be, but a stepping stone.

However he could not 'really read' until he could pick up a wholly unknown book and independently read it out - where he was obtaining all the meaning from the words written on the page.

I get what you are saying learnandsay to a point....

DD is all consumed with reading (she read 4 books this eve) and luckily she is now starting to read to herself, to her teddies, to the cats even so does not need my imput all the time. She refuses point blank to read books that she "knows" so I have to keep a stream of new books coming by going to the library, Oxford owl, reading chest and going to 2nd hand shops/charity shops.

But I do love reading with her and showing her the sounds that 2 different letters can make when they are put together ( although I don't do this anymore as I feel I have shown her all I know - which is not loads but more than the average parent iyswim)

However she does not need bribing to read and on the odd day when I am tired or have volunteered in my DC school (I read with KS1 kids) and the last thing I feel like doing is reading with her, it is just easier to do it as the temper tantrum that follows is just not worth it!!!

I think the lollies have become a bit of a diversion.

I don't really want to shift the blame for introducing lollies, but they're a bit of an issue at the moment. I can't get rid of them right now but I can limit them. (It switches to other types of sweets when I do.) I'd rather have no sweets at all if possible, but it's not possible. So the path of least resistance is to say, OK, you can have this sweet under xy and z conditions, or a big hissy fit and a bad night for the whole family is going to follow.

Dr Seuss is well within the 'memorising' range of a very young child, btw - having sat through 'Thidwick the big-hearted moose' more times than I care to remember, I know it to my pain!

Why do you have sweets in the house, if they are a problem? You are the adult, just don't buy them. Sweets do arrive in our house every now and again, courtesy of parties and whatever, but we very rarely actually buy any - Christmas and Easter aside.-

I would bin the lollies. I don't think they're a good idea. If you want to look up some of my other posts today, you will see a tale of woe which has ended in my daughter having dental surgery at the age of six. And it's not just because they are bad for her teeth that they're a bad idea. As others have said, it's important with something as vital as reading and learning that it is a reward in itself. I give my DD a pound for tidying her bedroom each week. After a few weeks she can buy a magazine (which she can read) or a tiny toy and after a couple more weeks of saving she can get an actual book.

With my DD, I use reading as a bribe. So if she wants to read in bed, she can stay up ten or fifteen minutes longer. This is worth far more to her than a lolly and she happily lies in bed and reads to herself and I sit near her and if she gets to an interesting bit she tells me about it. I really think this is far more sensible than sugar as a bribe. Just tell your other half to stop buying lollies. If they are not there, she can't have them.

How are your DD's teeth, btw?