Sounding out, whole word and phonics question

[Shattereddreams]

My dd is doing well with her reading. Y1.
At home we read more extensively than school books so I am aware there is an element of pushing her above her school ability so to speak. But her school books are not particularly challenging ORT Level 7.

When she approaches a long unknown word, she basically panics. Small words if unknown don't cause problems, just long ones.

If phonetic, I ask her to sound out. But she can't. I think she reads in a whole word way, and she tries to make a word that she does know without really looking at the word.
Eg
Tethered she wanted to read as teacher.

She has a lazy supply teacher this year so hasn't made much progress in school, plenty at home though.

Is this fear normal progression?

I wondered about the phonics test because if she can't sound out unknown words then this could be a problem.

We don't know why they can't read very well. Whole word methods work for some people.

Why do you assume we dont why they cant read very well. There has been enough research in reading to work out why most people cant read well, hence going back to phonics.
Whole words may work for a minority, but either because they would learn using any method like my dd, or they just have a good memory.

Whole word methods dont give children the skills to read. Children like my dd will work the rules out for themselves
So they clearly do work with some children.
For the majority, starting with phonics is much better, for roughly the first year of learning to read and write.
But however they are taught, the final aim of all instruction is to be able to recognise all common words instantly, without decoing, as we all can now.

For learning to spell English, phonics is of very limited use (e.g. blue, shoe, flew, through, to, you, two, too).

learnandsay Tue 22-Jan-13 07:42:38

But mixed methods may not be to blame. Perhaps the children just aren't very good at reading.

and suddenly become good readers once they have been taught effective strategies to tackle new words ...

Mashabell Tue 22-Jan-13 10:11:46

Whole word methods dont give children the skills to read. Children like my dd will work the rules out for themselves
So they clearly do work with some children.
Sorry masha how do you get from working out phonics for themselves to whole word methods work!

Many children are able to work out that the "s" in ceiling is spelt with a and the "j"s in ginger are spelt with the letter and apply this knowledge when they encounter other words. That is far from being taught to memorise lists of whole words by sight from flashcards stuck round the house

The suddenly becoming good readers bit doesn't seem to be happening.

but it is learnandsay

Do you know these children?

I know lots of children learnandsay and have taught hundreds to read ...how about you?

I'm talking about these particular children.

and which particular children are we now talking about? The OPs child, the children in Y6 you brought into the discussion, the children maizieD teaches to read ...

That's the point. If you don't even know which children I'm talking about then why are you arguing about them?

There are plenty of children in my DS's class (yr3) who struggled initially with reading and were getting extra help.

These children are now being put into the top table for reading. They were taught using phonics and just needed more time (and practise IMO as they did not get the support at home, but that is a whole different debate )...

No learnandsay the point is you introduced the thread on TES primary and made lots of silly remarks. The teacher on the thread said her lower ability children are working at level 3/4 which is actually the expected level for children in Y6 not as you seem to imagine the level of struggling readers. These children would be able to read most tabloid newspapers for example.
But please don't let knowledge get in the way of your assumptions.

There are teachers on the threads you contributed to with a great deal of experience of teaching children to read ...hundreds of children over many years but you believe you know best ...

There are teachers on the threads you contributed to with a great deal of experience of teaching children to read ...hundreds of children over many years but you believe you know best

And there are teachers on this thread who have taught hundreds if not thousands of pupils over years- possibly before some posters were even born- whose experience and knowledge is being dismissed outright. :)

She said they've still learning to decode. If you believe decoding is necessary for reading then that means they're still learning to read.

No she didn't ...what she said was "she wondered if they were getting the basic decoding skills they need" that doesn't mean they can't read

I agree entirely. I don't think you need decoding skills to read.

If you can't decode you can't read ... but level 3/4 child can decode

and they can read

This is worth reading. I am not the author but I think anyone who is interested in reading - and there are plenty on this thread- should read it.

When I started teaching at Woods Loke Primary School, Suffolk, UK in the late 1970s, the method of teaching reading was ?Look and Say?, where children were expected to look at whole words and memorise each one. In order to try and reduce the number of underachievers, our school introduced synthetic phonics. Immediately we noticed a huge improvement in all the children.

The next breakthrough came from a research project. The children were taught to hear and identify the sounds in words at the same time as they were being taught the letter sounds. By the end of the year, all the teachers involved felt that these children were a year ahead of where they would have been if we had not changed our method of teaching. On standardised reading tests our children were a year ahead, and best of all, there were very few underachievers.

In the 1980s, most schools in the UK followed the ?Real Book? approach, where children use readers from the start and are expected to work out themselves how the letters make up words. At our school we did not go down this route. We spent our time developing and improving the phonic method of teaching that had brought us such good results. Results in other schools started dropping but our results stayed high.