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?!

Hmmm, I was choosing to ignore all that had gone on in between…poor OP having to put up with a bun fight when she has asked a fairly simple question.

Did I miss the buns?

I do think lots of people have addressed the OP's query, though. Which is why I haven't said much - although, OP, if you are still here, have you looked at the Reading Chest website? You can borrow levelled readers from them, much the same as LoveFilm or whatever it is called...

thanks for your advice mrz DS's teacher told me yesterday that they have just started phase 5 of phonics too (just with the top set I think) so they don't just stop at phase 4 like I thought they did, so pretty soon DS will be able to decode these words. And actually the books that he was getting from school are all decodable, it's just the yellow band books that I got from the library that seem to have these harder words...but his reading is improving very rapidly and last night he was reading words like "made", "like" without any problems!

Pleased it's working out for you

as a little aside Songbirds are on offer from the book people for £17 for all 36 books

For those who are interested in learning about the alphabetic code - synthetic/linguistic phonics there's a wonderfully comprehensive description on the Sound Reading System website:

www.soundreadingsystem.co.uk

btw as a reading tutor I never had any problem with the few words that are commonly thought of as difficult. When a child's teaching follows a logical structure this is not a problem .?