Advice from phonics experts please

[phonicsgovernor]

I am a school governor with a (second) child in reception. Over the past couple of weeks we have had ORT books home that were not fully decodable. They are still in the single letter sound stages of teaching phonics but the books included the words bike, look and dinosaur.

Now, my child is fine - I can access other materials for him. But the school serves quite a deprived area, with higher levels of FSM, SEN, EAL and MENA children. And I'm wondering if there will be children who are not fine.

I spoke to the head of KS1, who is excellent and lovely, and she couldn't see the problem with the odd word not being decodable. So - is it a problem, and if it is, how should I tackle it?

and my local school manage 100% without RR teachers

Yes RWI is a phonics scheme

I realise you can't exactly go in and fire the RR teacher. It is difficult. It was more of a hypothetical what else could that buy.

I think it would certainly cover Toe by Toe or Bear Necessities for those children. Good quality phonics training for all KS1 teachers, new reading scheme, new classroom resources to support the teaching of reading. The funding's probably ring fenced so you can't use it for those things but it's a lot of money to spend on something that doesn't have evidence of long term gain.

I would hazard a guess that the money is from pupil premium funding

Or Phonics International, which can also be used as an intervention.

So could be spent to purchase books to benefit more than 8 pupils if the school chose to do so

We use Sounds-Write both as a main scheme and as an effective intervention

We use Debbie's Sounds and Letters, so Phonics International fits in really well to back this up as am intervention.

Phonics isn't the only reading strategy that children should be taught to use. They should use graphic knowledge e.g. What does the word look like? Can it be broken into smaller words that you know e.g bigger, looked etc 'read around the word' e.g. Can you have a good guess? The dog ... the cat. Must be chased, could be ate
There are more but I can't remember. Just ensure your child doesn't always rely on phonics. English is too awkward a language for that

"Can you have a good guess?"

English is complex but perfectly decodable and we are teaching reading not guessing!

Can you have a good guess?

God almighty. That has absolutely nothing to do with reading whatsoever.

Unbelieveable that anyone thinks guessing is an effective strategy for anything!

There's always one isn't there

Phonics International is a seemingly endless resource. I bought it when it first came out after reading lots of Debbie's posts on TES. There's more stuff there than I will ever use, but whatever you do actually need is there. I've used it to plug some of the gaps my niece had and I've never had to create something to deal with an issue. Whatever I've needed I've just had to look it up and it's there.

We had 3hrs a week over 10-12 weeks on reading. Mostly on multi-cuing strategies/searchlights. There was one week on phonics which consisted of the tutor throwing open a debate on the point of teaching phonics in English. Heavily guiding us towards the idea that there was no point teaching phonics as English was not phonetic and when you sound out cuh-a-tuh you don't get the word 'cat'.

I was a lone voice in the idea that this and the searchlights strategies we'd been taught in the previous weeks were complete bollocks. I lost badly.

That's right Papermover

Yes. I probably should have used her full name. Have you had a look at the PI site? Lots of the unit 1 resources are free to download so you can have a look at them.

Someone needs to deliver an intervention - do they not get paid?

I am familiar with Sounds-Write as an intervention, but my belief is that each of the children, had they had Reading Recovery would have progressed much much further in their reading over the same amount of time. They don't tend to need more 'phonics' and 'decodable' books, they need more experience in reading.

Papermover - you can't rely on phonics i.e. decoding alone e.g. going could be read as goyng, love as loave etc etc

Even 'decodable' schemes have 'sight' (beyond phonic knowledge...) words e.g. Dandelion readers pretty early on uses says, which I don't think (without going to check) is in Letters and Sound's list of High Frequency words - which in a way doesn't much matter.