Flipping heck. DD book this week is....

[Shattereddreams]

y1
Scheme is ORT once a week, the old ones which I thought at 20 years plus was bad enough.....

Today she bought home on the non scheme book day.....

Mr Brown's goat. It was written in 1972. The infamous Roger red hat and Billy blue hat.

It's utter tripe. Repetitive tripe.

Is anyone else subjected to these? Weren't they banned?????

I found that one really creepy too!! Reminded me of a horror film.

The really, really old books might look a bit strange, and fall to pieces sometimes, but they're useful if the decodable books at the same level are too easy. If schools were forced to get rid of them then, unless they defaulted to putting children up levels when the current decoding becomes too easy, (rather than waiting for comprehension) then there will be periods when the system necessitates that children are kept on books that are too easy for them.

There are plenty of books available learnandsay without falling back to books that are long past their best.

My dd had to read Roger Red Hat, Jennifer Yellow Hat and Billy Blue Hat in 1978 when she was in Reception. At home she had just started an E Nesbit book called The Magic Castle.

My YR child came home with a book about...Chairs.

Scintillating.

The best one my dd had was one that was all about sea life. It was great and very interesting til you got to the last page and discovered that whilst writing about blue whales they had printed a pic of beluga whales

It's not always just a case of whether or not the books exist. It's also a case of whether they're available to the children. A student teacher can always go down into the cellar to pull out a book from 1970 which is brown and sticky. The other thing is that if the books coming home are really wrong the teachers can let children read books from home. Some teachers seem to be OK with this and others don't.

I don't think any teacher would have a problem with children reading what they like at home ...they may not want them all written down in a home school reading diary however.
Personally I would never consider sending home sticky brown books from the cellar [yuk]

I meant read books from home instead of school books if the school doesn't seem to own any which are right for the child.

So did I.

Personally I don't care what a child reads at home as long as they read.

I would join the PTA, and fundraise to help them buy new reading schemes?

If it is a PTA they aren't "allowed" to buy books but if it is a Friends of the School type ...

The PTA campaign tirelessly against a stuck in the mud head.

I have decided to read neither book over half term. I shall pop in and explain myself in person.

We have queens knickers to enjoy! And a trip to see it performed in London to boot.
Mrz - any chance you have a list of real books on gold level and above to link? At least I know then I am supplementing properly at home. I used the Essex library often referenced on here but that gets a bit fuzzy around gold level. TIA.

Finally had enough & wrote a note offering to fund raise for new phonics books after yet another book held together by a thread with the same 4 words on 11 of the 12 pages.

The reply was "we aim to equip children to be able to read a wide range of texts not just phonics ones. We know some schools do things differently. We have recently purchased some phonics books for a few children who are struggling"

This from a school who teaches Read Write Ink? Let me just squeeze past the 40 iPads and at least as many laptops (oh and the barely used after the 1st term since purchase Kindle's) to collect my 5 year old from their "outstanding" village primary academy!

hmmm, maybe not put very diplomatically, but I can see what they mean. If a child can read really well she doesn't need phonics primers. She can just read real books.

But they can't "read really well".

My child can't read the words in these books as they haven't covered most of the sounds needed to sound them out. The only way we an do those books is if I tell them the words and they repeat the sentence on each page because they soon realise the same thing is on each page. If I show them the words in another context they have no idea what they are.

They are getting really good at sounding out words that they know the sounds for. Books like RWI for their level and Songbirds are fine and help build on the sounds they have learned and are learning. I know once they have covered all of the sounds and the different "spellings" that they will be able to read any text but not 4-5 months after learning their first sound!

My eldest started school in 2000, and Roger Red hat, or '1,2,3 and away' as it was rightly called, was the main reading scheme then.
It was so old fashioned that a bus was called a 'bus lol. Those who think ORT is boring should have their DCs put on 1,2,3 and away for a while!! When Billy blue Hat falls in the river, you'll be ready to jump in after him!!

I vaguely remember some real shockers my DD had in KS1. One was about a creature (horse or donkey?) that got drunk on fermented apples. DD was ignorant at that point of the concept of being intoxicated. Another one was about some children who played out on a dump. The dump got replaced by a proper playground but it was too boring for the children who missed playing on the dangerous junk. I think some junk was restored to the site in the end. DD was totally bemused why anyone would be bored by a playground. She had been to the tip but children aren't allowed to leave the car and she knew it definitely isn't a place to play. It might have made more sense to someone a bit older than 5 I suppose but very dated for any modern child.

It did irritate me that the school had spent injections of funding on all sorts of things whilst she was there (I got matched funding of £500 from my employer every year for instance) and had never prioritised the reading books which to me should have been critical and central.

socharlottet
123and away was around when I was in primary and I started in 1967. When my ds started school in 2000, his school also had what looked like original copies. My DS hated them and used to hide them, I think the ta had chosen his book. Spoke to his teacher who was happy for him not to read them. They had a big selection of all sorts of books and didnt stick to a specific reading scheme to bring home. They also had a few of the dragon pirate books which looked pretty ancient.

Oops wrong thread

We have Roger Red Hat and I must say DS1 and I really like it. We also have a bit of Ginn and some ORT and the books in the book bag get changed 4 times a week so you get through them pretty quickly.

As a not particularly high achieving reader he likes the repetition in the Village with Three Corners. And the hat are fabulous, of course.

Perhaps he isn't a particularly high achieving readers because he is being taught in the 1960s

"Mr Thing left Mrs Thing to live with his secretary, but we won't be discussing him here."