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?

No, you're interested in "teaching her to read" - you view this as something which is yours to do, and not something which you are going to allow the school to do without your involvement in every detail, up to and including implying they are doing it badly.

What everyone is saying is that, given that your child is already clearly not struggling with reading, and given that she has a caring and involved parent, she will indeed reach "being able to read" without any difficulty without you needing to be passive aggressive in your dealings with the school.

A question you may already have answered, OP, but how are her reading skills other than decoding? Can she e.g.

Read with voices for different characters?
Infer a character's feelings?
Use punctuation to guide expression?
Use features of non-fiction texts e.g. subtitles?
Answer questions about what she has read a) that require literal repetition of part of the book or b) that require a degree of interpretation?
Suggest an alternative end to the story?
Tell the story from another point of view?
Choose another book on the basis of its similarity to one that she has already enjoyed?

I only ask because - after a lengthy parents' evening - it has become apparent to me how much parents believe 'reading' to be simply 'decoding', and expect children to move 'up book bands' as soon as their chaild can decode the words in the current one.... even if they are reading in a flat monotone and cannot explain what is going on.....

My "Best reader" this year isn't on the highest book band ... there are other children who are higher bands than him at the moment silly as it sounds.

I can understand where the OP is coming from. My ds has just started reception and is extremely able in maths, and fairly able in reading (top of red/bottom of yellow band - he's not 5 until may). It has actually been easy for us to sit back and trust the school as they are certainly differentiating for him, so while that would be my natural advice, I can see that from the Op's position it is difficult. I would be slightly concerned if, or example, ds was telling me they had 'learned all about the number 6' as he did in his first week- he is now coming home with activity sheets that are clearly stretching him. So I would personally suggest giving it a bit longer but if it doesn't improve have a word with the teacher, not confrontational just to discuss her aims with the easy books.

Well, she hasn't had that many books with lengthy and varied dialogue in, but her big bad wolf voice isn't the same as her little pig. Punctuation, she knows what a shouty mark is, a question mark and a dot where no more letters are coming. But she hasn't had a chance or a reason to use any of them yet. (She can identify them.) Telling the story from alternative POVs isn't something I've considered. I don't do this, so I'm not sure why I'd ask her to. We constantly discuss capital letters and where they should be used, but unfortunately the world uses them in different ways in titles, captions, running titles and so on, and when I attempt to pin their use down for her she merrily points out some other variation. So that's a work in progress at the moment.

All I'm trying to point out, L&S, is that reading is NOT the same as decoding - and that if you constantly try to evaluate what she is learning about reading by the 'decoding difficulty' of her books, you are in for a long hard few years with school as any school worth its salt will be looking at ALL aspects of reading.

She will surely have encountered full stops, exclamation marks and questions in the books she is reading at home or at school, btw, so I'm a bit surprised that she has 'not had a reason to use them yet', as she would surely be using them to guide pauses in her reading at least, if not intonation at the end of questions and the whole style of a sentence with an exclamation mark in, if she is reading at the level that you say she is??

Well, since pretty much all of her reading so far has been taught to her by me, I don't evaluate any of it from school property, (why would I?) I don't think this school property is helpful. She needs to learn to handle split digraphs next because not being able to do that is causing her to get stuck in lots of real books. My guess is that it'll take her two or three days to get the hang of them. I'll know when she's got the hang of it because she won't get stuck on pole and hole any more.

At home we read real books, so it's not that hard to see what she needs to learn.

HE is beginning to sound good, if only for the sanity of your DD's teacher.....

On a more positive note, ah, so she can't yet decode all of the 'basic' phonic sounds? Then she really is a long way back from where I had been imagining her, apologies. The school will very quickly catch up with her, then, as I know that at the school I teach in, the phonics teaching is pretty much up to where your daughter is.

(The reading book thing is a distraction - we don't send home books until the basic phonic sounds have bee taught, as the Reception teacher is very keen to embed the habit of all children being read to, and so far she has been sending home specific exercises to focus on the new phonics from each couple of days. We don't have 30 copies of all the books for the initial phonic sounds and she is determined that nobody should be sent home with a book that they cannot decode by themselves, to eliminate the habit of 'guessing from the pictures')

OP I'm confused - you say you don't evaluate her reading from the school property but then what are you putting on her reading diary. Given there is only a week / two weeks until half term when her reading is assessed mayb you relax until then. It may be as we'll to make sure she enjoys the stories not just can master digraphs (whatever the hell they are)

Reading diary: write - "Read all of book" and sign it....

I suppose that's the difference between real books and phonics readers. In real books she often gets words that I'd not have imagined like 'decided', 'frightened', and so on and so on. But she sometimes gets stuck on what an adult might call a relatively simple word, (usually a split dig') But of course she can use context to work out what some complex words say. Maybe you're in danger of falling into the trap you were warning me about about using decoding to evaluate reading. The truth is it's important but it's far from everything.

I think we've solved the diary problem thanks to titchy. Tonight my daughter wrote the comment and it'll continue like that.

I was warning about the other way round - assuming that a child could read because they could decode, as that is a much more common opinion from parents.

To say that a child can read when they CAN'T decode some of the main phonic sounds is just building up problems for the future.

For children who are lucky enough not to have any particular problems with reading, they acquire the skill much like they learn to walk. All it needs from the parent is a lovely shared enjoyment of books. I'm dumbfounded by just how far some parents will go to suck the joy out of a wonderful process by stuffing it with irrelevant anxieties.

yes oaty!! And actually the book bands are irritating in themselves in that respect, though I can obviously see the value of staged reading schemes. My DD has 'doctor duck' home right now (see my pink/red confusion above), and though it's too complicated by half for her, she loves the story, she wants to read it over and over, and though she can't decode half the words she is incredibly enthused by the process. Makes my heart sing, and I hope that what seems like the very mechanistic way phonics is drilled into kids these days (epitomised by the bloody phonics test) doesn't suck the joy out of it.

that wasn't a dig at teachers incidentally - DD's teacher is so wonderful I want to take her home with us every evening :) - just at the system as it stands

Libelulle,

I agree. I think our Reception teacher gets it right - by building the foundations of children being read TO every night (or individually at school, as we have a number of illiteracte parents) alongside tailored phonics activities in the first half term, then introducing the whole 'books bands' thing, she keeps the love of books (and sharing books) alive.

libellue why is teaching phonics seen as drilling and expecting children to memorise long lists of words regarded as reading?

Who is talking about memorising long lists? I learnt to read by reading and being read to - lots. I'm lucky in that I found the process easy, and I suspect my DD will be the same. I appreciate the reasoning behind phonics and kids who were left behind by other systems. But when you get to the stage where (as DD's teacher told us herself) excellent readers are failing the phonics test in year one, it seems fair to ask - cf the wonderful Mr Rosen - whether the process has become a little too mechanistic and insufficiently focused on reading as a joyful process involving reading exciting books rather than hours spent practising decoding nonsense words for a government test...

OK memorising entire books

Well, my DD loves both, so in truth I'm not THAT fussed either way :) But it's hardly drilling if a child memorises a book through reading it over and over again because the story is so funny and clever that it makes them laugh out loud every time. Julia Donaldson does that!

Well, I guess that depends on what your view of reading is. If you take a simple chapter book and read it then you can clearly read (to some extent.) The extent to which you can read can be argued about if people wish, but you read. If you can read nice, mice but not rice and twice you clearly can read some split digraphs but not others. That probably means that you don't understand the method for recognising and identifying them and the ones that you can read you are using some other method for. It's by no means certain that failure to decode assures problems if you have sufficient other strategies. (Some people don't have phonics skills and still read.) But my point is that my daughter would be able to read all split di's if I taught her how to read them all, not just the ones that she can read at the moment. It simply isn't true to say that you will surely have problems if you don't use phonics skills, (you may and you may not.) But they are useful.