Is this how children learn to read these days?

[Bananaketchup]

Am genuinely asking. DD is in reception. She started late at the school and has only been in full-time since xmas, so they don't really know her too well. She loves being read to, she can sound out words when she's in the mood, but is also one for the easy life. She reads once a week 1-1 with a TA at school, and brings the book home afterwards until it's swapped a week later. The books are of the 'this is a house, this is a garden' level. In her reading record it will say 'DD read the book and enjoyed it'. But when she reads it at home she rattles off the sentence on each page and has clearly just memorised it, and isn't actually reading. If I mix the page order up, she can't read it. If I hide the picture, she can't read it. She will make wild guesses without even trying to sound out the word e.g. she will guess 'the' for 'house', just pure guesses. This weekend she got in a strop because I wouldn't let her see the picture (as she was just guessing from this and not reading the words at all). She then said 'but Mrs X (The TA she reads with) says look at the picture, then read it'. So my question is (if you've got this far without dying of boredom), is this how children are taught to read - to look at the picture to know what the words say? Because DD isn't paying any attention to the words, just gabbling off what's in the picture, and I can't really see how this is teaching her to read. I am minded to speak to school, but don't want to be 'that' mum if this is genuinely a method children learn to read by, which I'm unaware of. Can anyone advise please?

She can't say gym properly. Adding anything on the end just makes it worse. And she doesn't know what any of it means. I thought about showing her a gymnast but she'd just think it was a man (or a woman.) I've thrown the words away.

I was just about to say why are you even trying to do Flash cards with a 2 year old when there's far more fun be had...

... But you're already there! Well done.

It's what CG does GoodnessIsThatTheTime so her children can read the classics in nursery

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition (or reads the classics in nursery).

Rubbish columngollum!

Just want to say thanks for this thread! I know some of you may be done to death with the discussion(!) but I have just done a unit on synthetic phonics as part of my PGCE and got into some quite heated discussions on exclusive phonics vs mixed methods. Plenty of background and info here that has been invaluable (plus some interesting anecdotal evidence !)

If you are interested anchovies try

beckclasswiki.wikispaces.com/file/view/SpellRead+Lexicon.pdf

www.spelfabet.com.au/2013/05/myths-about-phonics/

www.spelfabet.com.au/2013/01/how-phonics-got-framed/

Anchovies - also have a look at www.dyslexics.org.uk - a goldmine of information.

I'd love to have your estimate of % for the exclusive phonics as opposed to the mixed methods group. Also your lecturer/s pov, if you've time.

Thanks for the links. Have found this all so interesting. Sadly it's me vs the rest of the course (inc the lecturer) wrt exclusive phonics!

There's a lot of focus on the "Synthetic phonics and the teaching of
reading: the debate surrounding England’s ‘Rose Report’" paper and like on here plenty of anedotal evidence.

On a recent teaching practise we talked to some Year 8 boys at a school for complex learning difficulties who had effectively started learning to read again using exclusive phonics and were on phase 3. They said that reading was "making a bit more sense" because they hadn't realised there were rules you could follow. No one seems to have picked up on this because we have a discussion forum where the argument continues. There is a lot of talk about fluency and comprehension.

During our lectures we were told that exclusive phonics isn't ideal because:
a) there are a large number or irregular words in the English language

b) high frequency words (the top 100) are recommended to be learnt to be recognised

c) the evidence is that children from “word rich” environments will do better academically

Anchovies, I'm not an expert (like mrz) but that seems very outdated advice, and in direct contrast to current advice....

Papermover - there's some phonics readers free on the Oxford Owl website. You have to be careful though, the songbirds, rwi and some of the others are phoneticly organised but not some of the older ORT ones!

There is a lot of talk about fluency and comprehension.

The daft thing is that phonics improves both these things! It teaches children rapid and accurate word recognition. They aren't struggling to recognise words, so they can attend better to the meaning of what they are reading.

I taught SP to 'struggling readers' at KS3 for 10 years. Made a big difference to their reading and to their confidence.

During our lectures we were told that exclusive phonics isn't ideal because:
a) there are a large number or irregular words in the English language

English spelling is about 95% regular if you have a good understanding of how the 'alphabetic code' works.
www.rrf.org.uk/messageforum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1976&sid=465dc22919067c2e20aae8b17aba7ce9

b) high frequency words (the top 100) are recommended to be learnt to be recognised

Most of the words on that list are perfectly straightforward to decode. The very odd ones are taught as 'decodeable' with a 'tricky' bit. There's no pressing need to teach them as early as they are taught, it's just that some are useful for writing more 'natural' text.
If they do 'have to be learned' they can do it far better with phonics.

c) the evidence is that children from “word rich” environments will do better academically

II don't see that this has any thing to do with phonics but it's funny how the 'anti-phons' are willing to believe 'evidence' when it suits their purpose but decry it when it doesn't! Really this is just a cop out for when pupils don't learn to read.

Children from non 'word rich' environments need lots of compensation in school; lots of encouragement to read and enjoy reading. No-one ever seems to consider that in the past plenty of children of illiterate parents learned to read perfectly competently. If they hadn't, we'd still have 19th century rates of literacy!

Just something ive always wondered. Given that all us who learnt to read pre-phonetics seemed to have managed fine, how can it be so inconceivable for people to understand that phonetics is not the only way to teach people to read and presumably is not necessarily the best way for each child? Everyone is different and research can't show what suits everyone. Like medicines research - some people don't respond to treatment, some respond better than expected. The phonics obsession really baffles me.

It's only 'obsessive' when you can see something which works for nearly all children eschewed for something which actively messes up and confuses one in five children. It's massively frustrating.

And you only 'managed just fine' because you worked the code out for yourself. Some children can't.

Definitely both.

Oh another online game we've found my daughter liked that is mainly phonics based is reading eggs. You can get a trial for free to see if its your cup of tea or not.

Not at all necessary,but if you were looking for additional games that work on an ipad that one does! They also do some mini-phonics games that are a bit different to the whole package.

Get her to re-read it. Re-reading has an evidence base as a good technique for improving reading.

It'll give her more decoding practice, too

Would she have understood it if you'd read it to her?

Just had a quick look and Reading Eggs may mean contaminating your SP ideals with mixed methods (e.g. onset and rime, not all sounds 'pure sounds', sight words) however it 'is based on the most up-to-date research on how children learn to read' and 'based on solid scientific research' ...

My point too Fuzzle but this seemed to get lost in translation/polemics!