Phonics testing. Why not sight words as well?

[proudmama72]

Just that really. There's was extra effort put into phonics data collection. Would it not also to be beneficial to test knowledge of sight words. They seemed to impact my kids reading development.

Phonics is important, but just wondering why all the extra resources and emphasis solely on phonics.

One of the key points about the so called 'HFWs' is that they usually only contain one grapheme which the child doesn't know with its current phonic knowledge when they are introduced at sachool. So the child is probably perfectly capable of 'decoding' the graphemes it knows and only needs to learn the one that it doesn't know. TBH, I think there's too much fuss made about them.

What happens at home is quite different if a beginning reader is attempting to read books which contain a lot of unknown code. There's nothing wrong with that. What you are doing, catkind, seems perfectly sensible to me if he doesn't know any of the code in a word.

As he now knows that 'ear' can = /ur/ can he read 'pearl', 'learn' etc independently?

Sorry, X posted. You've answered my question.

I don't think it matters too much that you're not teaching the correspondences so long as he is learning them at school. You are still maintaining the link between letters and the sounds they spell.

Phonics programmes which teach discrete sounds in isolation intially (should) move on to words as soon as enough correspondences are covered. From then on the use of words should be the norm.

This is for your son catkind www.amazon.co.uk/Oxford-Reading-Tree-Songbirds-Stories/dp/0192793047#reader_0192793047. Sorry, couldn't resist as DD is just working her way through these and the "ear" came up in "Where were you Bert?" A slightly tacky story, had me and DS laughing as DD read it. Especially as she called Bert, "Bertie" to start with...

Of course being able to read words, and being able to conciously decode, use and spell them are different things. Despite reading the above, I doubt my DD has really taken on board the phonic sound, however she does have a fantastic memory and will probably remember earth and pearl and early . DD I think is probably reading as well now, or nearly as well as may children who take the phonics test at the end of Year 1, in YR, however I think she'd probably fail the test if she took it now (have no intention of her taking it now!) as she doesn't explicitly know all/enough phonic sounds. She will by time of test in Y1 as will have had more teaching and practice by then.

freetrait. We do like songbirds. Currently being very tempted by the collection from the Book People for summer holiday reading.

Phonics programmes which teach discrete sounds in isolation intially (should) move on to words as soon as enough correspondences are covered. From then on the use of words should be the norm.

Interesting. So when you're teaching a new sound do they never see it outside a word? Our school seem to start with the sound on its own, then build up. So e.g. DS will come home saying "today we did ", and he'll tell me a few words using it, and maybe a sentence he was asked to write using those words. So the words come immediately with the correspondence, but it is also isolated so they can see the building blocks. The floppy phonics sounds and letters books they send home ask him to practice speed reading digraphs/trigraphs on their own before he reads the words. (Though not that keen on those books generally as they seem to contain a lot of not-yet-decodable stuff.)

Programmes like Letters & Sounds introduce a sound a day and by the end of week one children should be blending and segmenting words containing those sounds new sounds are added to the words as they are taught.

Of course, but if I want ds to learn a new correspondence so he can use it himself proactively I would first present it outside a word then (and in the same sentence probably!) show him some words using it. Was unclear from some recent posts if you guys were also doing that presenting the sound separately step or just showing the sound within words.

So when you're teaching a new sound do they never see it outside a word?

Well, technically, what I think you are talking about here is a letter/sound correspondence (or 'sound spelling' or 'grapheme', depending on the terminology used) rather than a 'sound'.

I think children need to be able to recognise the correspondence both in and out of words so that they can generalise from one word to another.
I am thinking of children (age 11+) I worked with who could reel off a list of familiar words all containing 'ice' (nice, slice, dice, ice, rice) but couldn't read the unfamiliar word 'spice'. I always assumed that it was because they had 'learned' the words they were familiar with but had little idea of decoding and blending unfamiliar words or of using correspondence knowledge. (Incidentally, I always thought that this stumble over 'spice' was an indication that 'onset and rime' doesn't work as well as its advocates believe )

When people talk about 'teaching sounds in isolation' I think more of something like 'Toe by Toe' which does teach graphemes and word 'parts' in solation without the learning being immediately transferred to use in decoding words & text. I have done it myself with a 'precision teaching' technique but only in very extreme cases when all other attempts by the pupil to remember the correspondences have failed. But, generally I'd say that it's not 'in isolation' if the learning is being put to immediate use in reading words, sentences etc. And for spelling.

Oh good, that is what I thought after all.

Yes, meant correspondence, sorry. This language doesn't come naturally yet, I think DS is more fluent in the terminology than I am! Perhaps I'll get the hang of it by the time DC2 starts school .

I'll try to get it right this time:

What about the unusual GPCs that arise in HFWs, are those also taught separately (for want of a better term) or only seen in words?

Unusual, or yet to be taught, correspondences are taught in the context of the HFW. No point otherwise!

But there are very few HFWs where the unusual correspondence is absolutely unique to that word. Inconveniently, of course, they happen to be one, two, eye, the, & of, which children are going to encounter early on, and frequently. But most of the others are used in more than one word, so can be grouped e.g. he, me, she, we, be; mother, brother, other etc.

As you know maizieD we always start from the word and do not teach any new sounds/spellings in isolation.

Hi,
Sorry to but in, but wondered if I could ask if someone could advise on my thread asking about High Frequency Word Scores, in primary education?
bit cheeky to ask, but you all obviously know about this stuff so be grateful if you can?