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Primary education

Join our Primary Education forum to discuss starting school and helping your child get the most out of it.

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Original poster

Phonics versus Biff, Chip and Kipper

405 replies

Lukethe3 · 31/01/2013 14:09

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.

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Haberdashery · 03/02/2013 22:34

I am sure she is doing just fine, Simpson. Abacuses are lovely for counting. And I also really like Cuisenaire rods for early number work because they make everything so explicit.

Also, I meant to say, counting up from 1 to 29 or whatever isn't useless. Your DD is fixing the meaning of 29 or any other number in her head. She is understanding the concept of 29. Letting her do this for as long as she wants to won't hold her back. Give her twenty or thirty raisins and get her to sort them into equal groups if you want to give her something to think about. Then she can eat some and try the same exercise. If you eat only one at a time, it's really v interesting. You can turn this into odd and even numbers if she seems ready to understand that. You could talk about prime numbers too if that seems appropriate.

I see a lot of posts on here worrying about reading but as a nation I don't think we worry about early maths instruction enough.

learnandsay · 03/02/2013 22:36

I don't know, simpson. I really don't know. Because we have learning as play. If there was a rule that the three rs were the most important things then we'd probably have a different perspective.

The school did make it plain that there would be no reading assessments (of any kind) done before Christmas. So any parents wanting their children to be put on green or lime immediately would have been disappointed.

Is the teacher doing some "weirdo home made" assessment? I don't know, maybe. Has she said she would move my daughter up and lied because she found phonic holes in her knowledge? Maybe, yes. Maybe.

But, do you know what I really think? I think that the school just doesn't think that there is all that much hurry. They get round to things in the time that it takes them to get round to things. And they still get the best results in the area according to the league tables.

simpson · 03/02/2013 22:55

I am not worried about DD numeracy wise (although she does not find it as easy as reading or writing) she will get there (and I will support her if she needs it).

She loves the game "shut the box" which DS plays with her.

Her teacher knows she does not find numeracy as easy as literacy as has given me ideas of things to do with her (if she wants to) but its all pretty low key at this stage.

I would be concerned with a school that does not assess kids till Xmas (and that was a while ago). All kids were assessed in everything on entry to reception (in DD's yr group and that is 90 kids-I would have thought that normal tbh) and DD was assessed again the first week after the Xmas holidays and i am sur she was not the only one. But I guess all you can do is support your child at home and raise any concerns with the teacher as they arise.

simpson · 03/02/2013 22:57

Haberdashery - good idea and she would love to eat them after wards

mrz · 04/02/2013 06:58

Because what it's based on is the concept that if you have been shown something once and have understood it you will always be able to reproduce it. Is that correct?

certainly not! It's based on the concept that you have secure understanding and can apply that understanding whenever it is appropriate.

mrz · 04/02/2013 07:00

I think perhaps you have a different concept of what "continual assessment" means to teachers learnandsay.

yellowsubmarine53 · 04/02/2013 10:02

Yes. I'd say it was somewhere between extremely unlikely to completely impossible that the teacher didn't have any idea of where children were in literacy in a whole term.

She'd had gleaned some of that information in the first morning that she spent with the class.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 10:09

I'm not sure which teacher you're referring to, yellow. But my daughter's first book home had no words at all in it and her second was Sam's Pot. My daughter could already read Dr Seuss books before she arrived in school and I told them that on the "write all about me" sheet that they ask parents and children to fill in. I guess thy use those for loo paper or something.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 10:31

I also wrote all the Dr Seuss books, all the Elsie Marinarik books, Mick Inkpen, Michael Rosen and Beth Parker books that she can read in the table marked books I have read (with an explanation) at the front of the reading diary.

So every time the teachers opened the reading diary they had a list of what her reading ability was like

and they still spend a term sending me home ORT 1+ ORT 2 level books
which I could do nothing with.

yellowsubmarine53 · 04/02/2013 12:07

Any teacher, lands.

Sorry, but I can't quite get my head around that you could 'do nothing' with ORT 2 books but ORT 3 ones make you happy. There's not a huge difference.

It's unlikely that the school use the 'write about me' sheets for loo paper. It's more likely that the teacher noticed very quickly that there was a huge disparity between what you reported that your dd could read and what the teacher worked out that she could do independently, and she didn't want to hurt your feelings.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 12:10

The books we've got now are not ORT that's been my whole point. I can see why you've not understood anything I've said now.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 12:13

And the book with no words in?

yellowsubmarine53 · 04/02/2013 12:25

Sorry, you're now happy with the yellow non-decodable ORT3 equivalent books? Is that right?

How is the books not being ORT been your whole point? ORT aren't 100% decodable, though I thought that you wanted this.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 12:26

They're not ORT equivalent. What made you say that?

simpson · 04/02/2013 12:30

I thought that if a book was "yellow band" then it's stage 3 regardless of Biff et al, jolly phonics, or Ginn 360 (ie non decodable) as that is the point of coloured book bands.

Although I agree some books within this band can seem harder than others (JP IMO).

yellowsubmarine53 · 04/02/2013 12:37

Because you said that your dd's teacher was insistent that books were read in order and level 3 comes after level 2, lands...

Quite, simpson. And it's unlikely that the books are Jolly Phonics as they're very old, battered and stored in a basement according to lands, and JP is a relatively modern scheme.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 12:38

There are other stages within yellow. But that's still talking about ORT.

But these books aren't ORT and don't have stages. Some are more than twenty years old. They're a real hodge podge. Some have more than one colour band on them. But I've already said all this...

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 12:42

Or it could be mistaken labelling which places stage four books in yellow band. (We've had some labelled that way in the past.)

simpson · 04/02/2013 12:56

I know they are not JP ones but I just used them as an example as my DD had them a few months ago and they are much harder than yellow ORT books and within yellow level have 6 levels of difficulty iyswim.

LandS - I get what you are saying in that you would rather your DD have some books with some "bite" to them (for want of a better word) but by now I would have thought the teacher should have your child on the correct level of reading books rather than using old ones. What will happen when she has read them all?

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 13:07

What the teacher wrote was:

"The books need to be read in order. I'll give her a mixture of reading books and then move her up and then I'll move her up again."

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 13:10

If we get decodable ORT blue/green and they're too easy I'll ask for the non decodable blue/green ones. But by that time it'll be getting a bit silly. I'll try and have a word with the teacher and see if we can't think of a better system. I can live with the one we're using at the moment. But it is a bit bonkers.

yellowsubmarine53 · 04/02/2013 14:56

It's because you're making it bonkers, lands.

You say that you trust your dd's teacher and it's a good school. It may all be a bit less bonkers if you just let them get on with it.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 15:38

They're not doing much. As I said, the children who started off unable to read haven't done digraphs yet. At the rate they're going it'll be the end of Y1 before those children are reading half way decent books. By the way, I've just seen another reading list which puts Dr Seuss books at the beginning and puts Lion Witch & Wardrobe at intermediate. On that kind of list there's no place for Sam's Pot and books with no words in them.

learnandsay · 04/02/2013 15:41

Tonight's reading book was published in 1970. When I opened it for a minute I mistook it for one I had in school.

mrz · 04/02/2013 16:47

There are other stages within yellow. But that's still talking about ORT.

Yellow book band is a universal system that applies across different publishers and authors learnandsay so no it isn't about ORT.

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