School sending reading books with words that DS can't decode yet - is this OK?

[choceyes]

DS is in Reception year. He keeps getting books that have words that are too hard for him to decode, using decoding methods (which even I don't know much about) that he hasn't learnt yet.
For example last weeks book had the words "headache", "guitar" among a couple of others I can't remember. He could decode the simple CVC words.
Is this totally normal?
I have other reading books from different phonis systems that are at a very basic level and they only have words that can be decoded at that level, like the Songbirds books.

It is a bit confusing as to whether he's expect to decode these words or not. I guess I will have to ask the teacher, but I thought I'd get some advice on here first. I wrote in the reading book comments section today that there were lots of words he couldn't decode as he hasn't learnt how to put he did read the simple words.

Thanks

For the random book test I'll take anything from the 12th cent on.

Papermover, your last post has made me very, very sad. I just cannot believe that there are teachers around who still think that a child learns to read by guessing words from pictures. Even worse, to appear to view phonics as not being connected with reading.

Where is that brick wall. I need to do some more headbanging...

You are allowed to tell her they are talking bollocks if you like, Paper. I have told my daughter the same, in more child-friendly language, several times over the last few years. It isn't necessarily a bad thing that they learn that adults can be fallible.

Sorry last message should say get on, not get one!

I can't resist stating the bleeding obvious once again:
very, very few children would have decoding difficulties after being taught phonics for a couple of months, i.e. by this time of the school year, if it wasn't for the irregularities of English spelling and the roughly 2000 relatively common words like headache and guitar that have tricky bits in them that are not decodable in a straightforward way, like 'kept, keep, sleep' are.

If English spelling was tidied up a bit, if a few hundred of the words that keep causing the biggest reading difficulties, because they are spelt stupidly, had their spellings corrected, so that fewer words posed decoding difficulties,
children would not keep getting frustrated about their inability to decode,
no parents would be expected to help them learn to read,
any children's book would be suitable for teaching reading just as well as any other,
all disagreements about how best to teach reading would stop
and children would learn to read largely by themselves, without fuss or bother and without help from anyone.

I will keep campaigning for it, although i realise that it won't happen in a hurry. Stopping children being sent down mines and up chimneys took a while. So did abolishing the cane. It's sad that so many adults regard being cruel to children as acceptable.

The inconsistencies of English spelling are a form of child abuse which should be stopped. There is no need whatsoever to give children such a hard time at the very start of their school careers.
Masha Bell

The inconsistencies of English spelling are a form of child abuse

Clearly, your understanding of child abuse is as poor as your understanding of language.

I am talking about spelling, not language.

Needlessly irregular spellings are a form of child abuse. There, is for example, no need whatsoever, to decorate the letter e in words with a short /e/ sound with confusing, surplus letters:
Bread/bred, breadth, breast, breath, dead, deaf, dealt, death, dread, dreamt, head, health, lead(x2), leant, leapt, meant, read(x2), ream, spread, sweat, thread, threat, wealth. Breakfast, cleanliness, cleanse, endeavour, feather, heather, heaven, heavy, instead, leather, measure, stealthy, treacherous, treadmill, treasure, weather. Friend, every, Wednesday. Jeopardy, leopard. Jealous, meadow, peasant, pheasant, pleasant, ready, (already), steady, weapon, zealous.
Heifer. Leisure.
Or to spell them with clearly wrong letters:
Berry/bury. Any, many. said, says.

What u probably don't know is that they were deliberately made more difficult by court scribes around 1430, when they were obliged to switch from French to English. Chaucer had spelt them with just e.

They got rid of Chaucer's consistent use of e-e for long /e/ too (speke, seke, beleve) and replaced it with the irregular spellings which survive to this day. The fact that they used ea for some words with the long /e/ sound as well as short (treat, threat) has made matters far worse than they need or should be.