Phonics versus Biff, Chip and Kipper

[Lukethe3]

I find it slightly irritating that at DS school he is taught phonics but then sent home to read the old ORT stuff which has tricky words at even the easiest level. Is this purely because the school has no money to buy new books or is there actually an advantage to be taught like this?
I have bought some Songbirds books for DS and these seem to make far more sense to me as they include the sounds that DS is learning.

I would be very surprised if the teacher hasn't assessed all the class simpson. Assessment in reception is continual.

Well then I don't understand the books she has been put on. If there are gaps in her phonic knowledge then surely phonic books would help, rather than non decodable ones

I think learnandsay has said she prefers the non decodable books...

But a words a word?? A non decodable book wouldn't be good for a child learning phonics but a sight reader could read any book surely?

A sight reader is just someone who has worked out basic phonics for themself.

So no such thing as a non decodable book then? :) I dont remember stage three being anything more than a max of two lines on a page. The variety came from about stage four onwards. Wondering what on earth these books could be.

If they are ORT they will probably throw in words that the average child won't be able to decode yet ...things like concrete in the very earliest books remember they were written for multi cueing methods ...look at the picture and "infer" ...look at the initial letter and see if that helps ...miss out the word and keep reading ...

All books are decodable once a readers has the knowledge and skills needed ...we are back to the learning to drive or music analogies.

See my dd just used the pictures to wind me up :o she looked at the word then used the picture to make sure she described everything it could be rather than say the one word that it was. Eg dad looked through the yellow "big round thing you walk through that's yellow" funnily enough when I covered pictures she had no choice but to read the actual
Words. Needless to say tunnel was the word and with no picture to describe every possible alternative she got it straight away.

Yep, DD had the book with "concrete" in it and "pancake" (at pink level)....

The Snowman was another book I remember, it had words like "blue" "nose" "gloves" etc in it which are all perfectly decodable but I wouldn't expect a child at red level to necessarily be able to read them (without cheating and using the pictures).

unfortunately Wheresmycaffeinedrip some children don't have any alternative strategies to read words. They too can talk for ever about the illustrations but unlike your child can't read the words.

I gave her a test with a second hand More Robins ORT stage 7 tonight.

There are about 30 wpp. This is the first time I've never said anything to her while reading. I just let her get on with it. She needed three goes at cardboard. She got card straight away but had to think about the word to make it. Everything else she got right first time. On the other page that she read she got nothing wrong reading "driving", "narrow", "country," "lanes", "raining", "traffic", and "remember." The other words were all easier. It's the first time I've just let her read a more difficult book without any help at all in order to see whether or not she could read it. I won't be doing it much more. My aim isn't to make the child read Dickens unaided at five. It's just to be able to read.

A further problem involves the accuracy of contextual guesses. In a study by Gough, Alford and Holley-Wilcox (1981), well educated, skilled readers, when given adequate time, could guess correctly only one word in four through contextual cues. Gough (1993) pointed out that even this low figure was reached only when the prose was loaded with fairly predictable words. Interestingly, although good readers are more sensitive to context cues to elicit the meaning of unfamiliar words, they do not need to use context to decode unknown words (Tunmer & Hoover, 1993)".

sorry wrong place!

But most people's aim is not to make their child read Dickens at whatever age (I would hope!!) but to see what they can cope with (when learning to read) and to encourage a love of reading.

So now you know she can cope with stage 7 would you not want the school to provide harder books?

BTW I do get what you are saying. If my DD had to go through all the stages one after the other then I would rather her read non decodable yellow books too (than decodable ones at yellow level).

I'm not sure what the school is doing, to be honest. I'm fairly sure that it isn't extending or perfecting her reading ability. I think it's just treading water with her. It's the same thing that I hear people say about their children who can multiply two digit numbers in Reception. Sometimes they've forgotten how to do it by the time they leave.

The teacher says she going to move her up twice and I believe her. She also told us there would be no reading assessment until after Christmas. So it's possible a few children are reading the "wrong" books.

Do I want her to give my daughter the "right" books? No, not really. It's far easier for me to source the correct books for my daughter and for me to advance her reading at home than it is for me to change the teacher's behaviour. She's obviously got some kind of a plan. I'm inclined to let her get on with it. On the whole I see the school's involvement in teaching my daughter to read as a bystanding one. And as the teacher herself said "she basically gets reading" I don't see much proactive help coming anyway.

I'm inclined to let sleeping dogs lie.

It's the same thing that I hear people say about their children who can multiply two digit numbers in Reception. Sometimes they've forgotten how to do it by the time they leave.

Erm, this is nuts. If they actually understand how that multiplication works, it would be impossible to forget it. If they don't understand it, they were just performing a kind of parlour trick.

You know some strange people.

People forget techniques all the time. It's known colloquially as "getting rusty".

Getting rusty isn't the same as forgetting.

Too true. But I don't think we send our children to school to get rusty. I think we send them to learn.

People do forget techniques. But they don't tend to forget concepts.

You said "forget" earlier learnandsay which is it?
If a child understands multiplication when they begin school they will still know multiplication at the end of reception ...teachers don't remove knowledge from children's brains.

Being able to perform a series of actions which result in multiplication isn't the same as understanding what those actions do. Much like being able to recognise some words isn't the same as being able to read.

The term "getting rusty" isn't precisely the same as forget because if you forget you have no memory at all, whereas if you get rusty you have a partial memory. So getting rusty is one element of the set of methods of forgetting.

If you understand the concept of multiplication it is simply not possible to forget it, barring dementia or similar which I imagine is a rare problem in Reception class children.