my child reads and write at top level, but her Phonics group is not!!!

[B4r4joon]

My daughter is a very bright child at Y1...she is reading and writing very well...however when it came to grouping them, she is not been located in the top group in Phonics, although she reads the same level and writes the same as those children on the top group. This is very confusing for her amd me, as I dont understand on what basis this happened. She can be at times shy and she observes her peers very well and learn from them as she is bi-lingual. In the gropu she is in now, the difference between the level she reads and the level of some other children is huge...perhaps 7 colour reading band!!!

This has affecte dmy childs confidence as she thinks she hasnt been good enough, or why she is reading the same book as her reading partner, and he/she is in another group. ALl confusing for me, I am gonna talk to the teacher tomorrow, and I dont know how to say it. i dont want to convey that I dont trust their judgment, but this is gonna hold my child back and crashes her confidence, as the groups are gonna stay the same until the end of teh year! Can I ask the teacher to move my child to the other group? Is Phonics the knowledge that they learn to apply to their writing and reading, so how can she read and write higher than her phonics knowledge? She is already reading sounds that she has not been officially taught, by working it out on herself....

I don't think a forum is really the place for these sorts of issues because a glib answer to the 80/20 divide is: the 80% were taught well with phonics before they reached Y7 and the 20% were not.

But that's just lip moving. It doesn't actually address any of the issues in the 20%'s lives. And they can't be addressed in a forum like this, (I don't think.)

My stepson 14 year 10 his readings poor.

he reads in similar way to my 6year old

guessing words
sounding them out
really slow.

he hates reading

spellings hes forever asking us how to spell simple words that if sounded out phonetically should be fairly simple.im not sure if hes just lazy or really bad.

I have known his since he was 5

on weekends we had him we tried all sorts even offered to pay for tutor.

he was very naughty boy in primary
he got into good secondry but blew that ended up in social exclusion unit for a year where from sound of it dident do much academic.

when he was year 6 did reading test online he was at same stage as 6year old. he can read just very weak i cant even imagine he could read a harry potter book. he loves computer games, going out with mates hes just not bothered.

his mum keep saying hes dyslexic but this not been formally recognised.

the factors here he lives on rough predominantly white estate with his mum and step dad who dont care much for school work.

his mum always blamed the school but since spoke to someone else who child went there and said it was good school.

Hes never wanted to he shuts off from very early age any academic word tried games, work booklets the lot I couldent motivate him and part time any progress we made he never kept it up.

Having worked in quite a few white deprived areas can immigrants themselves not the issues many of the the families take education very seriously.

I do think theres issues over resources if school has high esl as lots polish here needing tas but im asumming schools get extra funding to cope with that.

Bingo, mam29, that's what I've been saying all along! Communities (or at least a family/mum with low educational expectations.)

I don't know how many boys who get excluded, trash school property and have spells in and out of pupil referral units and can't read do later learn to read using either phonics (or any other method(s).

I don't agree that the issues here can't be addressed, Lands. I think they can. What is more difficult (of course) is how to go about solving the problem. And, by the way, I never said that it was as simple as an 80/20 divide. It's much more complicated than that. Although many children do learn to read to a level that will get them through school, they still aren't necessarily able to read anything, much less spell successfully.
Mam's description of her stepson is typical of many children, an example immediately recognisable to teachers like Maizie who try to rescue them from their illiteracy (and worse!). And, of course pupils like this affect a posture of preferring to go out with their mates/play computer games/etc. because reading is something that they feel they always fail at and why on earth would anyone want to subject themselves to that humiliation.
And, Cecily, maladaptive strategies doesn't just affect the 20%. It affects a lot more than that. What are maladaptive strategies? In the main, guessing. Why? Because teachers tell children to guess when they get stuck on a word. They do this mainly because their training hasn't taught them how to approach errors properly so they tell children to look at the first sound and guess. But, guessing isn't reading!
I would expect any properly trained teacher to be able to intervene successfully every time a child makes an error in their reading and in a way that is positive, by which I mean that the child is also given a chance to learn something for the error. Teachers need to be taught what to do when a child makes a phonic error, leaves out a sound when they're reading a word, reads a /d/ for a /b/ and vice versa, etc, etc.
Obviously, there's much more to teaching reading and spelling than that and it helps if it's done properly in the first place. However, many people on these forums do ask specific questions about the difficulties their children have and, apart from one person I can think of, there are quite a few people who are able to offer advice that works .

Well, quite, soundswrite. I didn't mean the issues can't be addressed in life. What I thought, (until mam29 proved otherwise,) was that we weren't going to get a profile of a 20% child or the 20% children here in the internet forum.

What we had done was just trade generalisations for generalisation and no questions were getting answered. We weren't finding out what it was about the lives of these children that meant that they couldn't read. I wasn't taught to read using phonics. But I'm pretty sure if some of these boys had been learning via Look & Say with me, and they had been reading their Janet & John books and reading the rhymes on the wall with the class, and they had been making the words on the floor with wooden letters, then they would have learned to read just as we did. But instead they're climbing on tables, bunking off school, fighting, biting each other in the corridor. Well, of course they're not learning to read! But that's got bugger all to do with phonics!

Of course we feel bad that hes so behind but we cant seem to influence or change his course. His mums always blaming others never taking responsability and lets him do what he wants.

during primary he was in anger managment.very disruptive in class, attacked a teacher, got suspended for 2weeks.

He was assessed for adhd/dyslexia to which hes not got both.
He has no obvious disabilbiloities or anything that would prevent him from doing better. He does what he wants and is bit out control.

I cant blame his primary teachers for struggling with him.

when he got accepted to good 1/3secondries in his town ex gramer most academic they started catch up lessons for him we thourght maybe the other kids good behaviour and work ethic rub off on him.

but he dident he went through extreme naughty behaviour like he wanted to be expelled year 7 and and 8, when we asked his mum she kept saying hes fine.

The pru centre he went to sounded awful. mostly boys, couple of kids from care system, his behaviour got worse when quizzed what work he did we were not really sure.

hes now in comp no 2 with learning support unit but the intake is much mixed deprived than old one so his mates that go there are ones on estate where he lives they all want to do same pointless things. hes very immature for his age and easily led.

He can read just not flunetly so would say hes probably good few years behind his age. hes picked soft options at gcses.

pe
btec hospitality
hes in lower sets for scinece.maths english .
art
cant remember is 4th option.

havent seem much eveidence of him trying harder due to his bad beahviour not seen him in few months,

Im kind of hoping hes one of few and not many as uk be sad place if so many kids failed but many comps here dont even get 50%a-c pass rate so do wonder whats happening with 50%. my local cmp has 43%pass rate secondries cant perform miracles can they if tehy come from primary so far behind. in states they hold them back a year maybe thats a good thing.

our upbringing, where e live and our childs upbringing/schools very different so hoping outcome be better for mine.

I think that if these kids had been learning Look and Say with you or with anyone (I don't want to personalise this), there would exactly the same thing we are seeing today because most of the casualties turning up in secondary schools have been taught Look and Say.
The research on the disastrous results produced by whole word approaches is as robust as the theory of natural selection. And, I'll let you into a little secret: when I trained as a teacher, I was encouraged to use Look and Say. I did and every year there were children who hadn't learned to read. Only then, they part of what was though acceptable. It was the kids' fault. Or so everyone maintained.
What opened my eyes was teaching English as a foreign language and having to learn how the sounds of English related to the writing system.
The problem is that there are also phonics programmes around that are very poor and don't do much better than Look and Say, so people get confused.

I don't want to personalise it either (per se.) I'm just using myself as an example because my Look & Say experience was very positive. And while blaming the child might be an easy get out of jail free card, so too is blaming the teacher or blaming the method that she uses. In fact slinging blame around in all directions is precisely the reason why I said that we're never going to get to the bottom of the 80/20 in an internet forum because it's far far too easy to say:

The reason for the 80/20 is (put your favourite pet hate here). And then press send.

I'm not at all surprised if your learning experience with Look and Say was positive, Lands. It is for some people and those people go on to read and spell very well indeed, though, as I'm sure you'll agree, it's almost impossible to say whether other extraneous influences are important or even crucial. Actually, sometimes, when I look at the claims made for some phonics approaches, the same can also be said.
I am also careful not to go around 'blaming' teachers either. I think that teachers are such busy people that they don't have time to look at evidence in a detailed way. I've always said that it's a question of training. And training isn't done in the five minutes that many heads seem to think it takes to achieve good results.

Many years ago (in the 70s) my father got a job as a teacher for what they called the ROSLA children. (Ones who would have left at 15, if they hadn't raised the leaving age to 16.) He was supposed to teach a range of useful subject like gardening, basic maths etc.

In the first lesson he said, "anyone who can't read come and have a chat with me after" One girl did, and he showed her how to read by sounding out the headlines in the local paper. Her exact words were "Bloody hell sir, so that's how you do it" Somehow she had got to 16 without realising how the letters (Which she knew, especially in capitals) made the words.
Presumably, she had learnt the letters in infants, and then missed the day when they showed them how to blend, or not got the hang of the "look and say" method they were using then.

I had no idea if the pupils had ESL or not. Maizie did already say they did not have SEN.

Our school is 99.9% white British. We have currently about 5 ESL pupils (the most we have ever had in the 13 years I have worked there).

"mrz, that description of Look & Say isn't one that I recognise." with respect learnandsay how many primary classrooms have you been in during the past decade? The method I'm describing was labelled "Searchlight" and was the method advocated by the National Literacy strategy

My understanding was that Searchlights was a mixed methods approach. But I wasn't talking about Search lights I was talking about

"the child just stares at a new word until an adult gets angry and tells them what it is."

That's not a reading methodology. It's not a teaching methodology. I don't recognise it any more than I recognise the description of angry adults crossing offices to correct their colleagues' spelling. If adults are getting angry and telling the children what the words are then they're doing it wrongly regardless of what teaching method they're using.

The problem with the 20% of children who are being failed is there is no way to identify which child is going to struggle and which child isn't until it happens. They come from all communities, all social and economic backgrounds and they are being failed!

That's part of the reason why I'm so pleased with mam29's post, because generalisations don't get this conversation anywhere. It just goes round and round in circles.

In the case of mam29's example we can see why the child can't read and it has nothing to do with phonics.

My best friend is a single parent and is constantly busy (doing errands for people,she is too nice to say no!!) and she works part time. She also has serious health problems ATM.

She has 3 kids (one who is grown up, a teenager and a 7 yr old).

She never listens to her youngest read and she always has a million other things to do (she feels bad about it) and so her daughter is ok (ish) at reading but behind where she should be. Whether this is linked to not getting support,I don't know...

Another mum I know from my DC school believes that it is the schools job to teach her DD(7) and not hers so does not support at home either (her DD is in the bottom phonics group in yr2 and scored 7/40 in her phonics test in yr1). Again, whether this is linked,I don't know....

As far as I'm concerned any primary parent who believes that it's the school's job to teach and does the minimum as a result gets what they deserve. And if their children turn out drug dealers on convicts as a result then they've only got themselves to blame.

We're always being told we have to trust the teachers, they're experts etc. it's no wonder people leave it to the school when it's all talked about in such jargon.

What jargon IWipeArses? sounds? spellings?

The problem with the 20% of children who are being failed is there is no way to identify which child is going to struggle and which child isn't until it happens

Actually Dr Levinson did a trial where he measured the eye tracking ability of 3 year olds, and succesfully predicted, with 95% accuracy, which of them had dyslexia.

He screened 1,500 kids in New York and found that 20% of the had the eye tracking problems that would later cause them to have dyslexia.

Eye tracking problems weren't the cause of their dyslexia - eye tracking problems were a symptom of an inner ear problem - which do cause dyslexia.

Of course eye tracking problems certainly made learning to read harder....

"the child just stares at a new word until an adult gets angry and tells them what it is."

That is not what mrz said, lands. If you don't interpret other people's communications properly how can we have a conversation?

Mrz said: but they won't have been taught what to do if they meet a new word beyond stare at it until an adult gets fed up and tells you.

There's a world of difference between 'fed up' and 'angry'

'Telling' a child a word is one of the key techniques of look & say/mixed methods. It is completely contrary to what we know of how we learn things.

But not all the children who fail to read have a physical reason Indigo ..they just haven't been taught.

mrz - it's impossible to tell how many kids who struggle to learn to read have a physical reason.

Because nobody ever checks them for physical problems.

They can be both badly taught and have eye tracking problems.

Just because with good teaching they learn to read, doesn't mean they don't have dyslexia.

It just means it will be a few more years (if ever) before their parents realise there's a reason why their child isn't doing well at school and mucks about in class.....

It is totally possible the difference between the 80% who learn easily and the 18% who only learn with excellent teaching is always underlying physical problems.

Jargon such as 'split digraphs' from a thread the other day for a start.

Foundation Stage
Phonics
Phase 1-6 Letters and Sounds
book bands, ort, tricky words over which not everybody agrees apparently etc.

It's specialist knowledge that I had not heard of before I had children. It's a jargon minefield, like any specialism is. It disempowers parents who aren't confident enough to read into it because their own schooling failed them.

And I've read so many threads over the last 5 years where people ask how to teach their pre-schooler, or help their older child to read and are told to leave it to the experts when the child gets to school.
This thread is an example of that.