Reading books and phonics

[slev]

Looking for some help please!

DS has just started bringing books home for reading practice (he's in Kindergarten so only just learning to blend letters). Yesterday's was all consonant-vowel-consonant words, very regular and easy to help him sound them out. But today's has jumped to include words like "sandwiches", "cakes" and "basket" (we're in the south so to me that's phonetically irregular as we'd have a long a!).

So he obviously can't read it on his own, but I have no idea how to help him with our without undoing whatever he may have learnt at school. Will speak to his teacher on Tuesday, but any tips on the meantime? Do I get him to guess the words based on recognising the first letter and the pictures? Or do I just teach him the word and ignore the phonics but accept he's unlikely to remember any of it tomorrow if he sees the word out of context?

Can't help feeling we need a lesson for the parents first - and this is Kindergarten, it's only going to get worse!

They're not sending home phonetically decodable books at his level them, which if they're going to start sending home books is what they ought to be doing!!

Ah as above. Especially if still pre-school, let him get a sense of letter sounds and enjoy reading real books to him.

You can ditch the school books and get phonetically decodable books,from Reading Chest, OP.

Ime, having done some consultancy work for a very well regarded local private school, is that they can tend rely more on their enviable high adult ratio/small class sizes/parental interest factors and less on the mechanics of reading. They didn't have a clue. It was frightening, actually.

I think they go either way Feenie. I know some who've switched to phonics since the Rose report, some still teaching mixed methods and plenty that have been teaching phonics for decades because that's how they've always taught reading.

Of course, if you can manage out the children that don't learn to read so they don't affect your list of leavers destinations, then you don't really have to worry about which method you use. Not a option that's available to many state schools.

Oh yes, they do that at year 6 before they go into secondary - sift them out and ask them to leave.

With 69 English graphemes and letter strings having more than one pronunciation (see list below), learning to read English invariably involves quite a bit of working out / deducing / guessing - rather than mere decoding or blending, irrespective of what phonics fanatics claim. Using pictures to help with this is not a crime.

The final aim of learning to read is to be able to recognise all common words (roughly 7,000) by sight, as we all do now. Not everyone reaches that stage by the same route.

a: and – any, father, apron
a-e: gave – have
ai: wait – said, plait
al: always – algebra
-all: tall - shall
are: care - are
au: autumn - mauve
augh: daughter - laugh
ay: pays - says

cc: success - soccer
ce: centre - celtic
ch: chop –chorus, choir, chute
cqu: acquire - lacquer

e: end – English
-e: the - he
ea: mean - meant, break
ear: ear – early, heart, bear
-ee: tree - matinee
e-e: even – seven, fete
ei: veil - ceiling, eider, their, leisure
eigh: weight - height
eo: people - leopard, leotard
ere: here – there, were
-et: tablet - chalet
eau: beauty – beau

• ew: few - sew
• ey: they - monkey

ge: get - gem
-ger: anger - danger
gi: girl - ginger
gy: gym – gymkhana
ho: house - hour
i: wind – wind down, ski, hi-fi

• ine: define –engine, machine

ie: field - friend, sieve imb: limb – climb ign: signature - sign mn: amnesia - mnemonic

ost: lost - post
-o: go - do
oa: road - broad
o-e: bone – done, gone
-oes: toes – does, shoes
-oll: roll - doll
omb: tombola - bomb, comb, tomb
oo: boot - foot, brooch
-ot: despot - depot
ou: sound - soup, couple
ough: bough - rough, through, trough, though
ought: bought - drought
oul: should - shoulder, mould
our: sour - four, journey
ow: how - low

qu: queen – bouquet
s: sun – sure
sc: scent - luscious, mollusc
-se: rose - dose
ss: possible - possession
th: this - thing
-ture: picture - mature
u: cup – push
ui: build – fruit, ruin
wa: was – wag
wh: what - who
wo: won - woman, women, womb
wor: word – worn
x: box - xylophone, anxious

• y-: type - typical
• -y: daddy - apply

z: zip – azure

Masha Bell

The final aim of learning to read is to be able to accurately read any word you encounter in a text and in order to do that you need an effective strategy

As Professor Martin Kozloff points out, a child who makes the effort to learn ten words in this way is left recognising just the ten words. But a child who learns ten spelling-sound correspondences is able to read hundreds of words, including of course words that the child has never met in print before – let alone had to commit to visual memory.

(real spelling sound correspondences not masha's confused version) www.phonicbooks.co.uk/pdffiles/phonic_code_table_colour-51.pdf

The CVC words are the important ones here. He won't be expected to learn 'sandwiches' etc at this point! These words make a book interesting to a child, and also serve to show that there are different ways of pronouncing the letter 'a'.

He will memorise those bigger words in the context of the book if you teach him them, but it's the CVC words he will be actually learning to read, IYSWIM.

Can I just say, as an Early Years teacher, that getting a child interested in books is vital to reading in the first place. Any book a child reads, if guided by a trusted adult, is going to be useful.

Maybe it is just to introduce him to the concept of a book. After all, they often start reading with those books that have no words at all in them - the very beginning of the ORT. Mind you, at least they have a little story going on via the pictures.

Pictures are useful as a way to engage a child's interest in the story, motivate them to read, guess at what the passage MIGHT be about in a detective-like manner that's followed by a statement such as: "Oooh, I wonder! Shall we read it now and find out whether you were right?", etc. the pictures are also useful when reflecting upon / paraphrasing what has been read - IF they are representative of the passage read - which they are often not. If not, I'd not focus upon them much.

OP - have a look in the MN Book Reviews, "Children's educational books and courses" section. The Oxford Phonics Spelling Dictionary might help you gain an insight to using Phonics, and it is a book that will last a child right through primary school, and into secondary.

I would be wary of thinking 'opinion is divided, and therefore there is no right or wrong' in any context!

I was surprised to find our school promoting picture guessing. I decided to have have no truck with that (as I'd been trying for some time, at home, and was hoping school would have more success with phonics). I read about it on here, and decided to sound out non-decodable at his stage words for him, to demonstrate, and pretty much disengage with school's teaching (only at home, and I think (hope) the teacher thinks I'm fully supportive of what they do), and teach him myself using phonics methods. It has been miraculous, speedy and enjoyable. Now we're getting to where he has to sight read some words (laugh, for example, I can't get that to be decodable in any way!), but phonics has worked, and worked well.

Looking back, I realise I had to work this out for myself as a child, how to decode, and why would I not make this easier for him by teaching him?

I'm confused by the requirement to not use context/pictures - when a child using phonics first comes across the word bear (for example) how do they know whether it's the animal or daddy's drink?

Don't they have to learn to associate different word shapes with words - and how does this work with a purely phonetic approach?

And how does it work with words that are spelt the same but have different pronunciations depending on context e.g. lead or read?

(DS is nearly 3 so still early days for us!)

How do you know the word is bear (animal) or bear (drink)?

the picture doesn't help (no bear in sight) and neither does context (they could be off to the pub)

experience ...

so the simple answer is your child may not know which is correct at first so you might have to help.

laugh, for example, I can't get that to be decodable in any way!

3 sounds /l/ /a/ /f/ or /l/ /ar/ /f/ = /l/ = either /a/ or /ar/ (depending on accent) and = /f/

magpieC generally when people are talking about using context/picture clues, they are talking about looking at the first letter of an unknown word, reading the rest of a sentence and then guessing a word that begins with that sound that would fit. So in mrz's example 'We're Going on a B.... Hunt'. Bear Hunt? Beer Hunt? Balloon Hunt? There's a huge number of possibilities. Even more if you are in the early stages of reception and don't know even the very simple letter sounds.

I've seen it taught on more than one occasion by covering on or two words on each page with post it notes and getting the child to 'read' the sentence. It's not a very helpful skill at all if you want to teach children to read sentences accurately and it holds a lot of children's reading back because they will insist on using it as a decoding strategy even after they have developed the phonics skills to decode a word or sentence accurately.

It's a very different skill to:
a) sounding out /b/ /ear/ and using context to work out whether the /ear/ is pronounced or

b) using context to work out which of two pronunciations of a homograph is the correct one
c) using context to work out the meaning of a word they have decoded.

The use of context for meaning refers to something quite different from the use of context in word reading and is something that is encouraged in phonics teaching.

For example when the child encounters a word that isn't in their spoken vocabulary context often helps them to work out the meaning of the word and of course context helps when words have the same spelling but different pronunciations and/or multiple meanings (e.g., The bandage was wound around the wound. or I watched the fly fly by.)

What we wouldn't do is teach/encourage a child to guess what the word the child is unable to decode might be using context alone - decode first then use context for meaning or to identify homographs.

Neither would we use word shape as it simply doesn't help.

I get the feeling there's a lot of confusion because 'context' is being used to refer to both 'context for meaning' and 'context in word reading' and people aren't always clear about which they are referring to.

Jelly and a Bean is a fab series you can buy to help at home.

I agree

"context for meaning" is a useful strategy used by fluent readers when they encounter unfamiliar vocabulary

"context in word reading" ineffective strategy more likely to be used by struggling readers to guess unknown words.

When does 'au' ever = the a sound in another word, though?

It depends on accent in my accent words like laughter, draught, aunt have the spelling for the sound /a/ in other accents the spelling will cirrespond to the /ar/ sound

Oops, didn't mean to start a huge debate! Well we gave up on the school book and read one of Julia Donaldson's Songbird ones instead. And then the usual 3 books that we read to him before he agreed to go to bed. No danger of him not liking books!

I'm fine with the idea of phonics and we've watched enough Alphablocks to know how it works ; it was just the jump from his first book which was entirely CVC to this that threw me.

Oh well, he's done some reading this weekend which is the main thing. And I've discovered quite how much controversy a simple reading question can cause!

Mrz

How would decode pure and cure?

A friend's reception child had cure for a spelling test and I can't figure it out. I'm a primary teacher and this has stumped me.