I was wondering ...

[mrz]

How many of your children's schools send home words to learn by sight?
reading posts from parents and teachers on MN I just wondered how common this practice still is ...

[mrz]

Interesting

[ipadquietly]

I'll go with a 'real' example this time, rather than 'brought', which I have to admit I plucked from the sky!
'Paint' is in the red word list before the children access the ai spelling. (They are taught 'ay' in RWI)

I'm painting quite a bad picture of RWI here, I feel. You have to take into account that most children will progress by one or two groups over a half term/term, so there is rapid progression through to alternative spellings.

[mrz]

I clearly don't understand RWI ... sorry for being dense

[CharlotteBronteSaurus]

yes, dd1's school did this in reception IIRC correctly

they send home a bunch of words suggesting the DC learnt them as they would appear very frequently in texts.
oddly, i think lots were words like "in" and "and" which are totally decodeable

[ClayDavis]

I don't think you are necessarily painting a bad picture of it. What is interesting is that it may be the only phonics program that uses a sight vocabulary. The programs I'm aware of (Jolly Phonics, Phonics International, Phonics Bug, Letters and sounds) all teach 'tricky words' differently.

So, if you were teaching 'no' you would teach that 'o' was code for /oa/ and then get children to blend through the word /n/ /oa/.

I can't speak for Sound reading system but learning sight words has never been part of my nieces HW so I suspect they don't.

[ipadquietly]

No, you'd teach it by repetition/writing on white boards in your daily lessons and you would get the children to talk about what was different about it.

In RWI, children learn 'ow' as the 'oa' sound, and only learn alternative spelling o-e and oa in fairly high groups (prob around the middle of Y1 for an average learner).

One of the funny things about the Y1 phonics test last year was that u-e and oi were used in 4 of the words, and these are taught in the later stages of RWI!

[Pozzled]

mrz, my daughter's school still send home word lists, as do other local schools. I think it's still a pretty common practice. It's very bizarre, a lot of the words sent are full decodeable, and someof the easiest to decode are on the later word sheets. My DD has been given sheet 7, which includes 'on' and 'as'; while 'my' 'with' and 'he' were on sheet 3.

The school apparently follow something called ERR- do you know it at all?

[mrz]

We would simply points to the spelling not yet covered and tells the child the sound it represents. The child says the sounds in the word and then reads the word. So in the HFW go the teacher would point to the letter and tell the child it is a spelling for the sound /oa/ and the child would say /g/ /oa/ go.
in paint the teacher would point to the say this is a spelling for the sound /ay/ and the child would read /p//ay//n//t/ paint

[ClayDavis]

Sorry I wasn't very clear there. I edited the post slightly before I posted it. When I said 'you' I meant if you were teaching the other programs. Not you specifically teaching RWI.

I think u_e and oi are taught earlier in other schemes. Would be interesting to look at the results of Y1 check in schools using different schemes.

[mrz]

Early Reading Research Jonathan Solity identified a 100 words which he claimed are all that we need as adults to read most books

[ipadquietly]

Same thing really, mrz. We'd expect the children to notice the difference in 'paint', and then spell it on our fingers p/ai/n/t. We wouldn't learn the sound pattern at that time though.

I think it would be really interesting to compare the outcome of the phonic screening with different phonics schemes. My analysis certainly showed that children missed the oi and u-e words!

I'm really interested to see what happens this year, as RWI has cranked up a gear and more children are on higher levels.

mrz That's interesting. Presumably that would be words with the 44 sounds plus a few oddities, then!

[mrz]

We wouldn't teach "paint" by "sight" but if a child needed to read it in a text or wanted to write it we would explain the spelling so the child could decode /spell the word ...we wouldn't repeat repeat repeat. They would be formally taught the spelling later.

Our Y1 children also made errors with the spelling

This is our first year using Sounds-Write so it will be interesting to compare with last years class but next year will give a better picture as they will be the first group to have been taught from reception.

[simpson]

I don't have a clue in which order DD is being shown the phonics sounds in class (they use JP) I know she covered o/e, I/e, a/e, u/e etc the other week and are now doing alternative sounds OW as in snow/grow/know etc....

[ipadquietly]

Each RWI book has a few 'red words' that they repeat during the week.
At the end of the day, we're doing much the same thing!

Do you start phonics in nursery?

[ClayDavis]

That would be about right, simpson. JP taught as set out in the handbook introduces one way of writing each of the 44+ sounds during the 1st 12 week of reception and then covers some of the more common spelling alternatives during the rest of the year.

[mrz]

No we focus on language skills

[ipadquietly]

Have you used talkboost?

[mrz]

No we don't use Talk Boost but we do use other resources from I Can

[beanandspud]

DS (reception) had flashcards of HF words right from the beginning of reception. They have helped his reading, in conjunction with learning phonics, and certainly seem to have given him confidence in reading (he's gone from being a non-reader in September up to now reading level 5 books. They also have a weekly spelling test of these words .

After reading far too many threads on here I was very sceptical as I don't think the school uses a particular scheme but it appears to be working - or maybe we are just lucky?

[simpson]

My DC school start JP in nursery singing "A a a ants on the arm" etc etc but I go into another local school as a volunteer (they use RWI) and don't do any phonics in nursery.

[learnandsay]

100 words are here news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4514106.stm#lists


So if the book says

Stephanie needs fresh butter

we can't read it. hmm, OK. Send Jonathan my regards. Oh, no, don't. He won't be able to read them.

[mrz]

To be fair to Jonathan Solity he also says children should be taught phonics albeit a small selection of the ways sounds can be written in English [buhmm]

[Pozzled]

Interesting. No wonder I don't feel DD1 is making enough progress at school, if that's the scheme they're using.

[mrz]

www.spelfabet.com.au/2013/03/diy-disorders/

[teacherwith2kids]

DS (at a school we will call 'School A') did not. Good quality JP phonics teaching.

DD (at 'School B') did. Good quality JP phonics teaching, so we never touched the 'high frequency words' box she used to bring home.

Schools I have taught in do not send HFW home.