Good reader (y1) not so good at phonics

[Cat98]

I'm a bit baffled by this and just wondering if I need to be concerned.
Ds is 5 and in year 1. He's an able reader (currently bringing home white band books from school). Teachers hae never mentioned any concerns. However when he had an assessment (informal - a friend did it for us as he is particularly able in numeracy and we wondered how able. She also checked his reading) we were told that he reads well but as he has an excellent (possibly photographic)memory he remembers how the words look rather than sounding out.

I have tried to get him to sound out more at home but he gets very frustrated. After reading on here how important phonics is, I tried him with the phonics screening test from last year. (No flaming please he was perfectly happy to do it!) and he would clearly have failed. He was fine on all the real words (slightly suspect with 'portrait') but struggled sounding out a lot of the pseudo words. He would have had about 25.

Now I know he's a bit young to be taking it as its usually end of yr 1. But because he's on 'white' and school say he's a great reader, no problems, I'm wondering how he can't do phonics as well? Would you be concerned at the disparity? I find out this week too that he's been selected with one other child to be a reading helper at school, too.

Thank you for any opinions!

Unless you learn the code, such as 'kn' is another way of writing /n/, etc, or that 'gh' is a way of writing /f/ and would never occur at the beginning of a word as in the ghoti example and you would never find 'ti' as /sh/ at the end.

And once again, Masha - how many?

What, Feenie, said about the 'silent' letters. I can't think of any words in the English language that have no sound relationship to the way they are spelled. I doubt there's more than a handful that contain a sound/symbol correspondence that only ever occurs in that word. English place names excepted.

Thanks for the replies, interesting views as always. I saw ds's teacher last night and she wasnt at all concerned. I will continue doing the sounds with him at home now to try and consolidate them though.
Can't remember who asked but he's fine with 'igh'. 'A/e' on the other hand - hit and miss. He's fine with most words like this in books because he knows them, but for example in the phonics check I have him there was the word 'yune' and he didnt get it, he said 'yun-ee' until I reminded him what happens most of the time when we have an 'e' on the end. It's things like that that I thought the teacher may not pick up because the majority of split digraphs (is that what they're called?) he just knows so would read then fine.

Learning to read is a process and takes time. Your example 'yune' is such an unlikely example of an English word, that I am not surprised that it was a problem (most English words starting with that sound would start with the letter 'u') The only word in my dictionary that has the same pattern is 'yule', so no doubt once he has done Christmas as a new reader, 'yune' shouldn't pose any futher problems.

"For spelling English, phonics is of extremely limited use, because 4,000+ common English words contain one or more letters which are not predictable and have to be learned word by word,
e.g wobble, wAs, wHAt ...wipe, wHile, wHY, hIGH, flY, pIE, bYE, bUY..."

presumably he would have been taught that the letter is often the spelling for the sound /o/ following a /w/ sound and that is a common way to spell the sound /w/ and and are all ways to spell the sound /ie/ which combined with his prolific reading would have helped him to recognise which alternative to use ...

I'm surprised you don't know that being a good reader doesn't guarantee that you will be a good speller masha as it would be something you could throw into your spelling reform cause.

Learning phonics as an adult certainly improved my spelling ability

Cat98 I would say he hasn't been taught split vowel spellings yet ... in the first year of the screening those were the words that gave our pupils the most problems (real words just as much as nonsense words) simply because their teacher hadn't taught it.

I hesitated about responding to this because it is slightly OT but I think it is misleading and doesn't reflect good synthetic or linguistic phonics teaching.

Your example 'yune' is such an unlikely example of an English word, that I am not surprised that it was a problem (most English words starting with that sound would start with the letter 'u') The only word in my dictionary that has the same pattern is 'yule',

Children should be taught that a word is read by decoding L to R all through the word, not by analogy to another word (though some children may do this independently it's not a necessary strategy). The fact that only one other word in English begins with 'yu' is irrelevant and should make no difference to the decoding of 'yune'. It's perfectly straightforward - 'y' spells the /y/ sound (as in 'yes'), then there's the split digraph 'u-e' spelling the /oo/ sound (as in 'rude') and the 'n' spelling /n/. Children who read 'by sight' without understanding the phonic structure of a word very frequently fail to recognise the split digraph; I've had KS3 children do it!

I would be concerned that the school has failed to pick up on his gaps in phonic skills; as mrz has pointed out, there is a limit to memory for whole words and if a child doesn't have firmly established phonic skills by the time that limit is reached then they will start to struggle - this is the famous '3rd grade dip' (in the US they teach even less phonics than we do). Skilled adult readers have a reading vocabulary of up to 60,000 words; the Sun newspaper had 9,000 discrete words when counted by David Crystal. 1,700 - 2,000 'known' words isn't going to get anyone very far.

It's worth chatting to the school about their phonics teaching and if/when they cover all the sounds- particularly those split diagraphs and all the alternative combinations. I think good phonics teaching is priceless for both reading but also spelling. DS like yours has a fantastic memory and I think learnt to read a lot by remembering, but then had this backed up with really good phonics teaching which means his spelling is very good and he is quite the phonics expert, knowing all the alternative combinations.

Our school really worked on their phonics teaching and have raised their results of the phonics check from something like 50-60% passing to more like 90% which I think is where it should be if phonics has been taught well. You could find out the stats for your school, will give you an idea! The RWI flashcards set 2 are good for the split sounds.