Peter and Jane - best way of using it

[EmGee]

Book 1a seems to have gone down well with DD1 (4.2) Have gone through the first half of the book and she likes the pictures and repeating the words.

My question is - just keep going through it and focusing on repeating the words until she can sight read them? Then on to the next book?

We live in France so she won't learn to read in French until she is in CP (aged 6) and I have heard that it can be easier for kids who have already learnt to read in their mother tongue.

I also got a Ruth Miskin set of books on The Book People but after a quick look, I feel a bit confused about phonics. Peter and Jane seemed much simpler to me!

"teaching a mixture of different reading strategies = mixed methods"

remember that?

"whole word = MM" X
"whole language = MM" X

That's a quotation taken from you! You wrote it, not me!

who mentioned words ?

try context columngollum ...

This is still not clear to me.
I understand the need for phonics. I get that it allows you to make the connections to be able to read unfamiliar words. But why is is problematic, if done AT HOME, alongside other methods such as Peter and Jane. In our example, my child read Peter and Jane first, then we added phonics, then school did phonics as well as Biff and Chip(non phonics) and we did Apples and Pears at home. Full marks at end of Year 1 phonics test. Happy confident reader years later. If my child had not been getting on with Peter and Jane, I would have known, I have no doubt about it....and I would have moved to a different approach.....being at home gave me flexibility. What is the problem is having other methods too, if phonics is also covered. I am not really interested in all those children who remained illiterate in schools...because I am doing something individually with just my child AT HOME.
If someone can address this I'd really appreciate it, rather than from a school wide perspective. Thanks.

Teaching a mixture of methods has been shown to dilute the effectiveness ChocolateWombat.

ColumnGollum

The problem is methods like whole word /look & say and whole language aren't sufficient on their own to enable a child to read (they have no strategy to tackle unfamiliar words (words not in their sight vocabulary) so they need to resort to other methods in addition which is why teachers introduce picture clues, initial letters, what might fit in that sentence? = MM

mrz, is that a school based study? I am interested about 121 at home.
Thanks

No Chocolate Wombat it applies to children who have never set foot in a school.

ChocolateWombat - thank you for your posts! They reflect my thoughts exactly.

What is MM?

Mixed methods, I think - using synthetic phonics alongside something else, rather than exclusively.

Mixed Methods doesn't have to include synthetic phonics Chocolate Wombat.

It simply means that the teacher (be that at home or in school) teaches the child to use multiple strategies for reading - it could be sight words, picture clues, alphabetic knowledge, context or it could be analytic phonics and sight words or synthetic phonics and picture clues or any other combination of strategies.

Chocolate Wombat

At least you mixed a solid dollop of phonics in with your Peter & Jane.

But the point I was making was that look & say is slower and less efficient than phonics.

From the Stuart & Masterton study.

We tried to teach the children 16 new words, which were printed in red to make them identifiable as the words to be learned.
There was one of the red words on each page. After the children had seen and read each red word 36 times, no child was able to read all 16 of them, and the average number of words read correctly was five." We were quite shocked by this, because we had made a database of all the words from all the books the children were reading in school, and so we knew how many different words each child had been exposed to in their first term reading at school. This ranged from 39 to 277 different words, with a mean of 126.
Hardly any of these words occurred frequently in any individual child’s pool of vocabulary: on average fewer than four words occurred more than 20 times – yet 36 repetitions had not been enough to guarantee that children would remember a word.
When we tested children’s ability to read words they’d experienced more than 20 times in their school reading, on average they could read only one word correctly.

So, 36 reptitions not sufficient to learn only 16 words. Children in 1st term exposed to a max of 277 words.

Hold on to these figures and consider, in their first term at school learning phonics children will (or should) learn, at at the very least, one way of representing each of the 40+ sounds of which English words are composed. This means that every single word which contains only the graphemes they have learned will be instantly available to them when they decode and blend them (no individual 'word learning' required). They have only had to learn 40ish items (compare with potential 277 words to be 'learned' in the study). They will have had hundreds of repetitions of responding to the letters with the sounds they spell, so they will be well embedded in memory (100s of repetitions because every time they read a word containing that grapheme they repeat it), and, just try counting the number of words which a child could read once they know just those 40+ graphemes. I doubt if you can, but it will certainly run into hundreds more than the max 277 quoted in the study.

I tried counting once, even the first 8 or so correspondences yielded well over 100 words. (Lost the will to live after that, though...)

Which looks the better prospect?

Why choose the hard way to do at home?

"Why choose the hard way to do at home?"

My thoughts exactly - why do people argue so vehemently for a method that doesn't work tjhat well?

Obviously, if you taught your child to read many years ago, when SP wasn't really around so much and the materials weren't so available, that's not an issue - equally I don't hold it against my mother or grandmnother that they used the discipline methods in vogue at the time. i just don't understand why anyone would look at the current 'landscape' of learning to read, and then say 'you know what, I can absolutely see that synthetic phionics is hugely successful and reduces the failure rate when learning to read to almost zero, but hey, I did P&J so I'm going to do look and say with my children too'.

I can see that P&J is more 'instantly accessible' - you just pick up a book and 'do it', but my phonics journey started with a single copy of 'Jolly phonics teachers' guide' [I wasn't a teacher then], which is printed in VERY big print and is very quick to read - an investment of an afternoon to get a reasonably sound basis in the SP method of learning to read.

[I know that JP isn't 'the best SP', i'm just saying that as a primer for those wishing to 'do learning to read' with a child, it is instantly accessible, adequately comprehensive and very quick to read.]

JP was also my introduction to phonics teaching and I think JP works very well for initial teaching but sort of peters out once the initial sounds are taught and there's no real structure for teaching the alternatives and it's certainly accessible.

I think that PandJ being instantly accessible, is one of the key reasons it has endured, teacher.
You have to remember that most parents are not teachers. You guys know loads and loads about this stuff, but most parents don't. They just want to help their children.
In reality, I suspect that children whose parents do a lot of reading work with them at home, are rarely the ones who have massive struggles. I am not saying never, before anyone jumps on me. Whatever parents at home do, is in addition to what happens at school. Two approaches could be a bit confusing, but not for long. By parents working with their kids at home, children are getting more 121 input, from an interested adult. No child never experiences phonics now, so you could see whatever parents use as a valuable extra. It is not instead of phonics at school, but an additional input. No one is suggesting PandJ goes back into schools.
Realise that as a teacher it is harder to look at the micro rather than macro. On a smaller scAle at home, different thi gs are possible.

You seem to be forgetting that we are also parents Chocolate Wombat.

My interest in phonics arose from the micro - my own son

You guys know loads and loads about this stuff,

So it's OK to ignore what knowledge we are trying to pass on?

I'm afraid with my teacher's head on Chocolate Wombat wouldn't see it as a valueable extra far from it.

Well, you see, some of my children are well beyond all this now. If I told you I have an older son at Oxford, studying English Lit, and that he read Peter and Jane, before the synthetic phonics stuff really took off, and that with him, I only did Peter and Jane, you might see why I hold my views.

I understand what the research has shown. I understand children in schools need to do synthetic phonics. My children though, have learned well with Peter and Jane. And it has been them, that I have been interested in. Thanks everyone. Goodnight.

My thoughts exactly - why do people argue so vehemently for a method that doesn't work tjhat well?

You mean phonics, which only works for half the English language? Why indeed?

Interesting thread. I bought some Peter and Jane books (as I learnt to read with them) and ended up reading them TO my kids as they liked them when they were 2 or 3. But I never used them to teach them to read.

I can't see any harm in using them if you want to though. Any practice at reading will help reading. Children use whatever tools you give them. And yes, many of us learnt to read using the look and say method and it was very effective. The fact it is hopeless for 20% and very hard for perhaps a further percentage is by the by if you have a child that it is effective for.

My kids have both used their memories to help them read. You can't stop them! They have both also flourished with phonics and this is how they have learnt to read principally. I have enjoyed not having to get them to learn "sight" words as I am a lazy parent and this would have been tedious. Both have enjoyed listening to stories from a young age, so by the time they have started reading (both at about 4.5/near to 5) they have had very good for their age inference skills. I don't know for sure, but probably a year or two higher than is expected for this age. I am sure this has helped them read too, as they are using their understanding of the story and prediction to help them decode the words. Of course this is NOT ALLOWED in the pure phonics camp. But you can't tell children's brains this. They use whatever they can and that is how they learn.

"You mean phonics, which only works for half the English language?"

yes almost 3% are unpredictable - leaving *97% of our language perfectly phonetic

Hmmm, and which ones are the words that we use most frequently, I wonder...