Letters and Sounds. Pros and Cons?

[SavoirFaire]

This is the phonics programme used by the school we will probably put as 1) on out school list in Jan. What do I need to know about the pros and cons of this? Thanks.

From the schools point of view the big advantage is that it is free

From the parent's point of view this will probably mean that staff have had minimal training to teach it

It has those stupid unnatural phases that some schools /teachers get so hung up on which result in some children never getting the chance to learn the 44 sounds in English

It has no resources so teachers have to find their own from various sources that have sprung up - some of doubtful quality and some schools continue to use Look & Say texts with Letters & Sounds and therefore fall back on teaching sight words.

Or completely misinterpret 'tricky' words as having to be taught by sight, despite the advice in the document saying otherwise. It's amazing how many teachers believe that.

Taught properly it is effective; it's based on sound phonic principles. But, as mrz and Feenie point out, it's easy to teach badly.

Dfes website Phase 5 (pdf)
....some words have unusual or untaught GPCs (tricky words) and these have to be learned...(see elsewhere for explanation)

and in the explanation it says

point to the words to be learned....

Unfortunately the guidelines are ambiguous. I hardly think that teachers can be blamed for doing what the guidelines tell them to do. But if they wanted to they could reinterpret the guidelines and not take them literally.

www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/Letters%20and%20Sounds-5.pdf

The instructions for teaching tricky words in Letters & Sounds is pretty clear and not at all ambiguous

Procedure

Explain that there are some words that have one, or sometimes two, tricky
letters.
Read the caption, pointing to each word, then point to the word to be learned
and read it again.

Write the word on the whiteboard.

Sound-talk the word and repeat putting sound lines and buttons under each phoneme and blending them to read the word.

Discuss the tricky bit of the word where the letters do not correspond to the
sounds the children know (e.g. in go, the last letter does not represent the same sound as the children know in dog).

you are not teaching it as a sight word you are teaching it as a word with a "tricky* (not yet known) spelling ...

If your child hasn't been taught digraphs the teachers is working on phase 2 or early phase 3.

The guideline doesn't say "you are not teaching it as a sight word."

The guideline just says what it says. The guideline should be re-written. And until the guideline is re-written teachers shouldn't be blamed for taking it literally even if doing that isn't in the spirit of phonics. They're been shoddily advised.

Thanks. This is interesting (and a bit worrying). The school DS will in all likelihood be going to next September uses L&S. Their SATs results are good in terms of progress, value add etc and I have no other reasons to doubt the school. But should I bothered with the fact they use this scheme?

Does anyone know how much it costs a school to buy a new reading scheme set and train the teachers to use it effectively?

The procedure says teach the tricky spelling learnandsay and to sound talk blending through the word ... that isn't teaching by sight it's teaching decoding sound by sound.

As maizieD said it really depends how well they use it.

Costs vary greatly depending what the school needs ... a full reading scheme is expensive (but the government is currently offering up to £3K in matched funding for training and resources)

I know what it says. I've read it. But it also says

these have to be learned
and
point to the word to be learned

It should not say either of those two things. What the word these refers to is left unspecified. And the word is not to be learned so the guideline should not say that it is. That is wrong and some teachers are doing exactly that.

And it's difficult to teach a word like "they" because the spelling of the "ay" sound spelled "ey" is not that common in words young children will come across.

Everything has to be learnt learnandsay, the point is how it is learnt ...which is not by sight

It's actually very easy to teach a word like "they" as two sounds "th" and "ey" ... and most young children will know grey, prey, obey, hey, whey,

hey is slang. Prey I'm not so sure about. They may well have come across the word but it's hardly one used in most children's books. It may be in dinosaur books for boys. Whey is an unusual word in lots of ways. Little Miss Muffet is their most likely source of this word. But they're likely to be singing the rhyme and not reading it. (Grey, I don't know. I can't think when my daughter has come across the word. I'll ask her about it.)

Just because a spelling is used it doesn't mean children will be familiar with it.

learnandsay I sympathise with you as you come from same background as me, ie taught via look and say methods, so the phonics approach does not come as naturally as it will to our children. I am still amazed by DS's approach to spelling etc that comes via the phonics learning. His brain works this way as he has been taught (re the th and ey etc etc). I don't think like this but he does. I wouldn't get in the way of your DD learning this way even if it doesn't come to you naturally.

Tgger, I'm OK generally with it. My daughter has been taught to read by me, so she's not waiting for more sounds. But I do ask her what they're learning in general. And she has always been forthcoming with new sounds. But for quite a while these have dried up. She has never talked about digraphs and keeps telling me that they've finished learning their sounds, which is almost impossible, if she means by that the ones that she's told me about. All in all it's none of my business really. But I just think if the school shifted a little bit it could have taught many more sounds and maybe the children could all read

Ice creams half price

by now.

Hey isn't slang it's an exclamation (origins 12C middle English).
I recommend The Owl who was afraid of the dark it's a commonly used books in infant/reception classes and the owl mummy goes off to hunt for prey ..
Little Grey Rabbit ...Mimi Grey is a well known children's author or Beatrix Potter "a little fat comfortable grey squirrel" living in a nest ..."
however they are all words in most children's vocabulary and as such they can read and spell them easily.

learnandsay you come across on here very antagonistic towards it in your posts re "They, grey, hey" etc.

Sorry, Tgger, what is "it" in your post that I'm antagonistic towards?

I refer to your "Tgger, I'm OK generally with it". Maybe I presumed wrong, but I thought this referred to the phonics approach.

Beatrix Potter's vocabulary is sophisticated. Learners can't be expected to read it. Beatrix Potter books are to be read to small children. Just because the word grey is used it doesn't mean that the children are reading it themselves.

But they can once they understand how to decode it.......? Not quite sure why you object to children being able to read "grey"? .

Tgger, I'm quite precise. I'm greatly in favour of children sounding words out. I'm not so in favour of people being told how to sound words out. And I don't really like phonics theory at all. So I'd say that there are different parts of the "it" that I feel different about. But I don't accept any part of it on faith. For me every part of it needs to explain itself.