Bit worried ds reading.

[Moonfacesmother]

Ds is in reception, he was reading dandelion readers and was on unit 17 which is apparently yellow band equivalent. He was doing well and has a lot of high frequency words and could sound out the unfamiliar words as the dandelion readers are entirely phonetic.

However apparently his school only have them to to unit 17 and now he's finished all the ones they have they have given him a red band reader and he can't read it! He can read the high frequency words but when he comes to words he can't sound out he's lost and he's getting frustrated because he could sound out the words in the other books. The book we have had this week has words like "tastes" "whoosh" "house" "dance"
I know you can in theory sound these out but ds doesn't seem to have covered split vowel digraphs at all so he struggles whenever he comes to one.

Any advice or is it basically like starting again?!

And which ones don't "conform' ?

Quick question as DS is at a similar stage to the OP and I don't know how things progress from here.

Bough is pronounced b-ough as in bow

Presumably the kids are expected to run through the possible sounds and pick out which one makes a word they know?
So what is stopping them pronouncing cough as cow? Are they expected to just realise from the context? Or learn it separately?

What about bow as in take a bow and bow as in bow tie? How would you teach them to figure out which sound was appropriate?

And if it is purely by context, then how does this fit with the phonics check where they are given a list of words and no context? Do they only list words with unambiguous sounds?

No OohInterestingI asked you which words you believe don't conform.

noblegiraffe when they first start learning the alternatives they may read cough as cow but the job of the teacher is to teach them how our complex code works. So the teacher would say well done for remembering that is a spelling for /ou/ but in this word there are 3 sounds (split it into the sounds with lines ir phoneme spots or whatever system you use) and get the child to decode it again. Basically it's taught by exposure

OohInteresting you might like to take your own advice and read what Debbie says about teaching "tricky words"

www.phonicsinternational.com/Audit_Debbie%20Hepplewhite.pdf

Avoid:
Do not teach an ‘initial sight vocabulary’ or ‘tricky words’ where learners are expected to memorise the whole words by their global shapes.

What is with the Primary forum atm? So many aggressive - - now banned - posts and posters indulging in extremely unpleasant personal attacks.

No, Bauhausfan, mrz didn't msg me - but it does give an insight into your thinking. We don't allow personal attacks on MN - it relies on reporting of posts such as yours, and doesn't need 'henchmen'.

Oohinteresting, how disgusting that you used this as an opportunity to dive in with what is clearly a personal problem for you with another poster and use a point you have misunderstood to do the same.

Really hoping MN choose to delete this thread.

Irregular words are words like: one, once, yacht, eye, sword, damn, salmon, wednesday and february.

oh, and supercalifra...

Oohinteresting - nowhere on that link does Debbie say that some words are irregular and must be learned as wholes.

You have seriously misunderstood - and then used your own misunderstanding to make a series of unpleasant and deeply personal attacks about a poster's professional standing, AND had the gall to tell her it is embarrassing!

Your behaviour on this thread is astonishing.

I get the impression that Oohinteresting has had training from Debbie H, and basically likes phonics, but has come away with a few misunderstandings.

I have known Debbie for a number of years and know with absolute certainty that she would never reccomend teaching any words at all as 'wholes' (i.e without decoding and blending). I think that the fact that there is some word specific learning involved in phonics instruction (more for spelling than for reading) leads people who are familiar with 'Look & Say' to interpret this as meaning that some words must be learned as 'wholes' (like pictures) without attention to the structure of them. It is hard to turn around your thinking if you're used to this way of teaching and to think constantly in terms of sounding out and blending.

Technically, every single word contains letter/sound correspondences; there are a few very bizarre ones, like the often cited 'one', 'two' and 'yacht', but they are so rare that phonics trained children just don't have a problem with them. The 'irregularities' so often mentioned are more like adult frighteners (think of marsha and her enormous lists, designed to scare) than hurdles for children to jump. Children are great learners; phonics teaches them to be pragmatic about word ID, to be flexible in their approach and to take the oddities in their stride.

If you don't teach

eye, one and two

as wholes, what do you teach them as?

To be fair to normal people there is a bit of crapology which creeps in here because then people start saying daft things like

mr
mrs
and
etc

aren't really words at all.

Oh dear, 'recommend'

Oh dear again.

cg. You teach them as decodable but with a 'tricky' bit. Though I cannot deny that 'eye' is in a class on its own...

Mr & Mrs are not written words, they are abbreviations of written words which, because we known the spoken words which the abbreviations represent, we 'read' as the complete spoken word. You just tell children that when they encounter them.

Nobody has ever said that 'and' isn't a word and as there is nothing at all unusual about it. I can't think why you've included it

That's just pointless semantics. There is no earthly use in being able to read half a word.

I'll have a fight with you. I'll just go and get my s(thingy)ord

I've forgotten how you do the bit in the middle.

mrz - I agree with bauhausfan

Hello

Sorry to see that this has descended into a bit of a bunfight. One of the posters concerned has been previously suspended for this sort of thing so we've suspended her again now and we'll be getting in touch off-board with others.

Phonics/decoding seems to be a blue touchpaper issue on the Primary Ed board so we'd really appreciate it if all posters could bear this in mind and try to address the points at issue without getting into personal attacks on other posters.

Thanks

Can I add to all of this that there is no research evidence that making the teaching of reading highly technical with specialised jargon improves learning outcomes. Educated mothers have been successfully teaching children to read at home for centuries with no technical knowledge at all, and in many other EU countries, the approach to reading at school is also considerably more relaxed than in the UK. Over here a very technical approach to teaching reading has become the norm, hence the intense debates people have about it all, some of which we see played out on MN. This is partly a function of the early age our children start school, and partly a function of the commercial sector's involvement in early childhood education flogging extensively marketed special phonics schemes, training courses and the like. Some of these things have their uses for children experiencing learning disabilities or difficulties, but frankly they are optional extras for most other kids.

Also for anyone who is nervous about their child's reading, by definition MNetters are going to be reasonably if not highly literate themselves, proven by the fact they can read and make posts, so a bit of sharing books and waiting for children to mature will do a lot more good than kicking off about the teaching of individual words or the merits of one approach over another. I promise you, by 7 most normal children from caring middle class homes will have sorted out reading for themselves anyway, regardless of what we all do. That't not to say a bit of support with the bonkers spelling of the English language may not be necessary at some stage, but certainly it's not worth fretting at KS1 level about any of this, or what level children are on, or how their friends are doing, or whether their lives will be doomed if they struggle now and then. In the words of Julian or Norwich, 'All will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well'. Trust me on this.

Dr Boff xx

I meant Julian of Norwich, who happened to be a 14th century mystic and - get this - illiterate, I understand.

Boffinmum, I have a friend and a brother-in-law who followed your advice. They both ended up with desperately unhappy children who couldn't understand why they couldn't read in Year 2 when everyone else could. Fortunately I was able to advise them about phonics and via work with Toe by Toe and phonics tutoring they have been able to remediate the damage.

Your post is a perfect example of the kind of dangerouscomplacency that has led to the large numbers of functionally illiterate children and dyslexics who are much worse at reading than they otherwise might have been, as well as plenty of normal children who can't spell. And just because MOST of the children of highly literate parents can learn to read without phonics doesn't mean that ALL of them will. And plenty of children from less literate families are likely to be much worse off. Do we not care about them?

As for your smear about phonics being motivated by commercil interests, you are clearly not aware that phonics has always been a grass-roots movement by dedicated teachers who were deeply concerned at the number of children who didn't learn to read using whole word and whole language methods. They looked into the research done in psychology departments (largely ignored by departments of education) and discovered that all the evidence pointed toward phonics as being the best method for teaching reading and spelling. There are plenty of misguided people who are opposed to phonics teaching for ideological reasons, who are not above spreading misinformation and smears about it, sadly. Funnily enough, they never mention the research supporting "alternative" methods - because basically there isn't any.

There is a great deal of ev

Oops, ignore last line - in too much of a hurry to preview!

You can't really have a research-based argument in an Internet forum. (That's what universities and think tanks are for.) All that you can do in a forum is say

we've got loads of brilliant research and you haven't, ne-ne-ne-ne-ne.

proudmama72 Wed 02-Apr-14 11:00:33
mrz - I agree with bauhausfan

Really? Which one of her now deleted personal attacks would that be? It's not clear.

That's just pointless semantics. There is no earthly use in being able to read half a word

Nobody's asking them to read half a word. You are just being irritatingly obtuse. (Sorry, Rowan of mumsnet if that's not civilised enough)

column

I never said fonix woz rong, and I never said you shouldn't teach your school-attending children about reading. I said that it wasn't worth getting your knickers in a twist about it all until KS2 unless a) you suffered from literacy problems yourself, b) they had a learning disability, or c) they suffered from a learning difficulty. I also said it was important to share books with them (and by extension show an interest in what they were doing).

But hey, Kesstrel's friend and brother-in-law are probably exceptions that prove the rule.