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?

Is it the same demographic as Kobi? They have an extremely high proportion of EAL children. I don't know what it is like now, but when Ruth Miskin was Head Teacher a great many of the EAL children started speaking no English at all.

What you should be able to expect is that your child is taught to read properly.

Schools are, I believe, supposed to say on their website how they teach reading.

They are legally obliged to say on their websites what reading scheme(s) they use. Try looking under Literacy policies, Papermover.

Ok so as a teacher then can I ask a genuine question? If you are a child taught to read using only phonics with no other strategies, what happens when you meet a word in the text that for whatever reason you are unable to decode? You surely cannot progress past that word? But if you had a back up strategy of reading on and then maybe using the picture to help you might spot the mistake in your blending and work out the word. We are none of us perfect and on meeting an unfamiliar word might be temporarily stumped surely the additional strategies give us the independence to problem solve? How can this be 'damaging'?

A child taught to read with phonics and no other strategies would be able to read any word they encountered once they had completed the full programme

If we happen to have a book that has slipped in a sound or grapheme the child hasn't done, I'll tell them the sound that the grapheme represents. They can then blend the word.

Would echo Maizie and Panzee.

What I definitely wouldn't do is teach them how to guess - we now know that weaker readers rely on picture/context cue guessing.

Ok, so are you saying you would actively prevent a child from attempting to read a book for pleasure that is not purely for their reading progress because it wouldn't be 100% phonic ally decidable? And also surely no strategy is 100% successful all of the time?

I'm not being deliberately difficult I am just trying to balance how I was originally trained with more recent courses and the things I've read here and elsewhere. Our school has some outdated practices at the moment which as a new teacher I am tackling bit by bit and our reading schemes is one of them and the children I inherited were doing an awful lot of sight reading and guessing at the beginning of the year. This is much improved now but I do use phonics primarily but I encourage strategies as above also.

At a recent phonics course I attended the trainer was horrified that the nc was exclusively focused on phonics as a strategy and convinced me this was the wrong approach. Now I'm just confused! Mind you she did make a couple of errors re info and definitions so perhaps that should have set alarm bells ringing...I don't know!

Eurgh sorry for spelling! Also you wouldn't use the phonics based ort books at all then because the character names are not decodable to chn just starting out? I hate them for that reason but my 4 yr old reads them and copes fine with those words because she recognises them in the same way she does her own name - she can't decode that either!

Biff, Chip and Kipper are entirely decodable and Debbie Hepplewhite's Floppy's Phonics are fantastic.

I wouldn't actively prevent a child from reading anything. But I wouldn't expect them to be able to read anything which contains correspondences which they had not yet been taught.

If I'm teaching them the mechanics and skills for reading, the book absolutely has to be at the appropriate level, made up of the sounds the child has covered.

If we are encouraging a love of literature, I will read to them, maybe a well loved book or poem with lots of repetition and wonderful artwork so they can join in and respond. And then put it in the book corner so they can have a go themselves.

They don't have to have learned to read before you let them near the good stuff. And the pictures are not there just to help a child work out an unfamiliar word.

None of those names contain GPCs which are not taught in the first term of Reception.

The full programme, hmm, that's a bit circular, isn't it?

There are some place names Happisburgh being a good example, where people have been reading for well over sixty years and still have to be taught how to pronounce the word.

I presume your phonics course doesn't last that long.

No sorry I'm not sure I'm putting across what I mean clearly. I know biff chip and kipper are decodable but ch and re are phase 3 phonemes so giving 'big bad bug' to a phase 2 child as it would be intended would surely be an issue with the scheme.

Yes I realise pictures are not purely for helping to read the words and obviously as reading scheme books and guided reading books I would use ones that are decodable to the chn but for example my chn also take a library book which is intended to encourage parents to read to their child too. Some of them try to read the library books too (not that I have encouraged or discouraged this). They are reading those books, or trying to for pleasure, not to learn the code. They are listening to parents and using other cues and strategies to read.

Not at all.

Seriously.

A phonics taught child would automatically try to sound out and blend an unfamiliar word. If it contained and unfamiliar grapheme (and they would be very unlucky to encounter a word with more than one unfamiliar grapheme in it) they would be told it, or ask (what panzee said)

They wouldn't be likely to be reading something well beyond their capabilities because it would be a struggle not a pleasure, and children don't like struggling; it puts them off reading.

Context is highly unreliable. If you were reading, say, a technical research paper would you try to work out what unfamiliar words 'say' from context? Try reading Isobel Beck's 'Bringing Words to Life' and see what she has to say abut 'context. You have to understand that Look & Say reading scheme books were deliberately written to facilitate guessing words from context (and pictures). It's not at all the same in 'real' books.

Phonics taught children also read words accurately (you can't read them any other way if you sound them out and blend them) AND understand that books are full of unfamiliar words, so they don't try to force an 'unknown' word into being a word that they already 'know' (so changing the meaning of what they are reading.

Children are free to attempt to read whatever they like whenever they like; there's no dastardly 'witholding books from children'; it's just that the books they are given to practise with should be consolidating what they have already been taught, not scaring them with completely unknown graphemes.

It is recognised that children who understand the 'logic' of the alphabetic code are able to self teach as well.

Of course, 'making meaning' is an essential part of reading but it is foolish to rush children into the comprehension aspect when they are practising phonic skills. Most early readers are hardly complex literature; children don't really have much difficulty in understanding them.

Your phonics trainer sounds like a total arse disaster!

Feenie Biff, Chip & Kipper decodable?

The ORT 'early readers' I bought cheap from The Book People to put in my Chamber of Horrors aren't decodable at all! Supposedly 'just started reading' books had about 43 graphemes in them!

Oh, Go Away, cg.

I think Feenie meant the actual names!

Apologies, Feenie.

Missed a message and lost the thread of the conversation

Seeing as it's you, Maizie.....

Seriously, Debbie's Floppy's phonics are superb. And when I have needed to ask her about something regarding her scheme, she's emailed me back within 2 hours. Her training was also fantastic.

As soon as someone gives me a meaningful explanation of the theory that some teachers have an infallible system of reading all English words then I'll be satisfied.

Arguments such as oh, go away don't cut it.

They're not explanations. I want a faultless explanation of a system which purports to teach the reading of every English word.

I'll settle for an acceptance that no system can hope to teach the reading every English word but one can simply hope to teach elementary and intermediate English reading.

That's perfectly reasonable.

'I don't believe in a well-founded system of reading because some obscure English place names just don't cut it - therefore the entire system which helps 96% of children is a SHAM.'