Reception Sight Words - advice from teachers please

[FlirtyThirty]

My son is in his 3rd week of Reception. He loves it! He's pretty bright and is enjoying the first steps in learning to read.

He started school knowing his alphabet - sounding them out in phonetic style - but not able to read ( bar the odd word; cat, his name, Dad)

His school use Jolly Phonics and histeacher has commented in diary that he knows his letters well and is 'ready for blending'. He received a set of sbout 15 red words and learnt them fast. He was tested, got them right and now has the second orange words.

The new words include:
He
She
We
My
Look
And
Is
In

Anyway...my question is:

• what is the best way did me to teach 'he' , 'she', 'we'? He has learnt (originally from

me) that the letter 'e' has the sound /e/ as in egg. So should I now be saying, sometimes this letter makes the sound /e/ as in bee? Or should he just be learning it as a Sight Word? Recommendation from the more informed?!

• also, in similar vein, what's the advice for 'my'?

Thanks so much for any advice!

I would join you Feenie but I have a headache without the head banging WHY! WHY! WHY! do some teachers think that tricky is a synonym for sight ?

I realised the mistake in my wording...apologies and am now banging my head. 'Some phonic schemes require children to learn words by sight.' I didn't mean PHONIC SCHEMES. What I should have said is 'some approaches to READING requires children to learn words by sight.' I stand by my other comments and those about letters and sounds.

No pollypocket I wouldn't be surprised how many schools are still teaching this way despite all the evidence that it is failing thousands of children.

"In 2000, researchers Masterson, Dixon and Stuart, carried out an experiment to see how easy it was for five-year-old beginning readers to store new, whole words in memory from repeated shared reading of the same look-say texts. It turned out to be much harder than they expected: ''We tried to teach the children 16 new words, which were printed in red to make them identifiable as the words to be learned. There was one of the red words on each page. After the children had seen and read each red word 36 times, no child was able to read all 16 of them, and the average number of words read correctly was five."

perhaps they need a rethink

and L&S says to identify the tricky part and blend through the word when introducing tricky words ... the aim of phonics is for a child to reach "automaticity" the point where they don't consciously need to sound out the word but brain research shows that even expert readers decode words - without knowing and in milliseconds. unfortunately some people seem to think this is learning words by sight!

However, I'd also like to point out that in the 'letters and sounds' scheme, it advises teachers to refer to words such as 'the' as tricky words with sounds in them that we don't know yet and tells teachers to practise them until children can say them by sight, without attempting to sound them out.

That means learning them to automaticity - recognition on sight, not teaching them as sight words (wholes). This is where teachers got confused in 2005 and ever since - the Letters and Sounds training must have been very poor.

Maybe I have interpreted L&S wrongly and now wish I hadn't brought it up as our school doesn't use it. If I am wrong I stand corrected, it's just a few years ago during my NQT year I watched many L&S phonics sessions in outstanding schools where they explained it like I did to the children. So they must have been unintentially DESTROYING the future reading capabilities of these children.....not!
We are slowly diverging from original post.....shall we just all agree that the lady needs to talk to her teacher??

Lots of schools are teaching phonics badly and unfortunately we don't know how many children have been damaged by it!

Ok....so...again...what do you suggest the lady who posted should do???

I'd go with SoundsWrite's suggestion of speaking to the key stage coordinator.

Or the Literacy coordinator, find out what's going on and what their rationale is.

I agree ...

Longer term, he - and you - would probably find this book very useful. At under £7 from Amazon, it would probably last him throughout his primary years. You can see several sample pages HERE:

Goodness! A debate. Absolutely fascinating and passionate!! Thank you for taking the time to write such detailed comments. I'm genuinely so interested.

I don't have much time right now to study all your comments, but I will!! I would just like to say: I will support my child and his teacher. I have huge respect for early years teachers...and I know enough to know there are goud and bad. I don't think my son has a bad teacher but i do want to understanx better their approach.

I will ask next week at parents' evening.

I suspect they will say that they are giving the sight words in advance of the phonic decoding skills, in order that the children can access more reading books. I guess that's the only goud argument...? (Open to correction!)

Just one last thing...could some of you experienced teachers recommend where I could read some good-quality research on phonic reading...or the use of sight words for that matter. Thanks again!

Pollypocket31
soundswrite I am very offended by your comments about teacher incompetence. Are you a teacher? If not, I suggest you check what you're talking about before writing such offensive nonsense about teacher training.
Yes, PP, I am a teacher and a teacher trainer and I see plenty of examples of teacher incompetence. Of course, I also see plenty of examples of very good teaching. In fact, just last Thursday I saw some magnificent work going on at St George's CEPS in Wandsworth, where over 50% of their children are on free school meals. Oh, yes, and 100% of their Y1 children passed the phonics screening check.
But, you shouldn't be so defensive about teacher training - a hell of a lot of it is conducted by people teaching methods that went out with the ark.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15475441.2013.812017#.UmPVSBCaeSo