Reading recovery programme?

[scortja]

Has anyone's child been on the reading recovery programme? DS1 was offered a place on it today and I am ashamed to say I cried!

He's 5 and 9 months and a fairly average reader (I thought) - the coordinator went to great lengths to assure me that he 'just needed a little help' but I assume he actually needs A LOT of help if he's been given a place on the programme..

mrz, I completely agree with you, BTW, that the teaching profession needs to take auch more rigorous, evidence-based approach to what and how they teach. I'm just not sure that that battle is the OP's to fight...

I was clearly referring to mixed method teaching. So the evidence shows that rr had no effect on 20%? That is a decent level of efficacy? . They'd use it as an evidence-based treatment for an illness. ..... nothing ever works for everyone.

My yr 4 dd has been selected to take part in a reading scheme called "Rapid Reading". Do you ladies know about this scheme?

I totally agree with Amber re trying RR.

Moreover, the OP's ds will still be getting plenty of phonics for writing.

Hi alittletreat

it may be this: www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/Primary/Literacy/AllLiteracyresources/RapidReading/Structure/Structure.aspx

My DD1 joined 'Rocket Readers' in Y4. This was run by a TA - held in a quiet corner of the school. It included a mix of one to one reading & group work. There was a dedicated library and the TA had a hand in suggesting reading books. Now she opted to level non-scheme books - she thought that by Y4 reading ORT or other series seemed babyish - so she went for a range of books (often linked to tv shows) which started out pretty low-level & lots of pictures and got progressively more challenging. She was always involved in selecting the next book.

She also kept it interesting by making it a contest (who read the most books/ who read out loud the best/ most improved/ hardest worker/ etc...) - prizes were clever - always related to child's interests and parties at the end of term (if you stuck with it). The interesting wrinkle was that you could quit at any time, but then no going to the parties - kept a lot of reluctant readers reading because this teacher's brownies & hot chocolate are to die for.

Anyway - give it a go - if you know you have a struggling reader it's worth a try. Year 4 isn't too late - it made a huge difference. DD1 started barely able to read a whole sentence in biff and chip ORT books without help and finished the year able to read Harry Potter (with only a bit of help on pronunciation - which to be fair is needed with some terms in the book).

HTH

SeptemberBabies what percentage of your pupils achieve level 4 or above

The first cohort are currently in Year 4, after reading recovery in Year 1. We await them reaching KS2 SATs for more definite results.

6 pupils, 5 of whom are already 4c or above in reading. At the start of year 4, I wish to stress. The other is 3b.

I'm a governor and one of those first five pupils is my son. I have a vested interest. (Not sure if it is relevant, but I am also QTS)

@tobysmum

I'd be less worried about a 20% failure rate if RR weren't vigorously promoting their intervention as working with the hardest to teach children. It quite plainly isn't.

All that RR does is pick the low hanging fruit. And independent (i.e non RR controlled) research generally shows that even with that advantage the RR 'gains' wash out over time.

As for RR changing over time to include more phonics; what people don't seem to realise is that RR is very tightly controlled to ensure that it doesn't alter. Marie Clay set herself very firmly against including more phonics in the intervention at the time of the US initiative to introduce scientifically based reading instruction in the early years of this century. I have one of her RR manuals (which the RRF was directed to by Jim Rose at the time of the RR roll out in the UK in 2008) and the part played by anything remotely resembling phonics instruction in it is minimal.

If anyone can point me to explicit evidence that there is now a greater emphasis on phonics in RR sessions I would be happy to see it. None of the lesson transcripts or videos published by Every Child A Reader at the time of the UK rollout, which I studied carefully, showed any deviation from the programme laid out in Clay's manual;thus no significant increase in phonics input. If it has changed at all since then I would be (pleasantly) surprised.

It is clear from the NFER evaluations of the Phonics Screening Check that, even though teachers generally agree that phonics is an important element in learning to read, most of them still believe that 'other strategies' should be used as well. So it is more than likely that the children who, it is claimed, haven't learned to read with phonics actually haven't had rigorous phonics instruction at all; they've just had the same old mixed methods which have prevailed for decades.

the relative effectiveness of RR vs phonics-based interventions

I don't view any kind of intervention as (a) "verses" (b)

ECaR (Reading Recovery) and also very focused, one-to-one phonics-based interventions can and are used co-currently.

Indeed, the two were not separate in our school. The full time, none classed based Reading Recovery (senior) teacher which the governing body decided to employ followed ECaR and also gave phonic-based interventions to the selected children.

On a personal note, poor (Montessori) nursery education meant my son had no phoneme understanding upon starting F2. He recognised only the letters in his name, but applied no phonics. Team this with an F2 teacher who failed to notice his lack of phonics and dismissed parental concerns. When he started Year 1 he still did not recognise all 26 letters, let alone understand their sounds when read.

So his reading recovery - which did follow ECaR - also focused on his needs, namely phonics.

Other non-phonics tips were taught (to both him and us). These have value and I cannot understand why anyone would suggest these should not be taught, just because they are not phonics?

maizieD

Would it be reasonable to consider that a teacher employed for reading intervention in a school might use ECaR alongside phonics?

Does that make ECaR pointless?

It wouldn't be reasonable IMO for a school to use ECAR alongside phonics because the methodologies are completely different and potentially very confusing.

In the RR stuff that I examined a form of phonics was only used in the word building section of the lessons. During the actual reading sections multicueing was encouraged (guessing from pictures,initial letters & context) which rather negates the whole purpose of learning phonics, which is to be able to work out what words 'say' by decoding and blending. In addition, the books used gave the children no opportunity for sustained practise in using the correspondences they may have learned in the word building section.

I also suspect that SeptemberBabies RR teacher was deviating (wisely) from the prescribed RR lessons by incorporating extra phonics. As I said earlier, if anyone can show me explicit evidence that this is now officially part of RR I'd be interested.

However, if it is an extra emphasis on phonics that is needed to help a child to improve any well trained teacher (or TA) could do that at far less cost. (Remember, RR costs about £2,500 per child)

I know the costs of RR maizieD. There is no getting away from the fact that it is expensive. The cost of a non-classroom based well trained teacher is going to be expensive anyway.

RR teacher was deviating (wisely) from the prescribed RR lessons by incorporating extra phonics

I disagree with the word "deviating", but agree with the sentiment. Phonics can be taught alongside, rather than as a deviation from prescribed RR lessons.

During the actual reading sections multicueing was encouraged (guessing from pictures,initial letters & context)

YY to all of this.

Why do you find it so terrible to consider using multicueing alongside phonics? It is not an all or nothing. All factors taught together work for many children.

Why do you disagree with 'deviating'? As far as I can see, and until someone provides good evidence that RR has officially changed significantly from Clay's prescription, the teacher is deviating from the lesson format.

Multicueing is a damaging strategy for children who are struggling with reading. It is essentially guessing, no matter how its advocates try to disguise it as 'predicting'. Look at a picture and guess what the word might be, look at the first letter and guess, look at the context (assuming that the poor child can successfully read all the context words) and 'see what makes sense'; i.e guess, because lots of words might make sense...

The only reliable way to identify a word is to sound out and blend the letters all through the word from left to right. It is well documented in research that it is sounding out and blending which offers most effective route into securing words in long term memory as 'sight words'.

This being so, why teach children to guess their way through a text? it ultimately fails as texts become more complex (and unpredicatable) and just adds to the cognitive load.

While it may not explicitly do so, RR methods encourage memorising words as 'wholes', primarily because decoding is not the prime strategy used for identifying unknown words; if children are not taught to routinely decode they have no alternative but to try to remember words as wholes. Also, the pace of the RR lessons and their emphasis on 'fluency', before children can properly identify words, gives the struggling child very little opportunity to use and reflect on phonic strategies.

Many 6 y olds may well be able to memorise a number of words as 'wholes' but these strugglers in RR are most likely to be the ones who can't do this, so more of the same isn't going to make any difference. Besides which, the number of words which can be memorised as 'wholes' is finite, around 2,000 - 3,000 words, which is a tiny proportion of the some 250,000 words in the English lexicon. The children who end up as successful readers in a mixed methods classroom are generally the ones who manage to intuit the phonic knowledge they need, even though they may not be explicitly aware of it.

The cost of a non-classroom based well trained teacher is going to be expensive anyway.

If classroom teachers and TAs are well trained in the teaching of reading, particularly the teaching of phonics, there is no need for a expensive extra teacher spending hours with children one to one, particularly if they are wasting time teaching useless multicueing strategies and 10 lessons at the start spent 'roaming round the known'! (What on earth for? Why don't they just get on and teach the poor child?) And they still can't, on their own evidence, teach the 'hardest to teach' children. What happens to that poor old 20% who get 'referred on'? Referred to whom? The class teacher who couldn't teach them in the first place?

"The simple fact is schools using RR aren't meeting their legal duty to their pupils ... it seems some heads are happy to break the law."

Mrz, could you elaborate on this point please. I'm trying to get my DS off a version of RR. He did another version last school year and made no progress. I don't want more of the same!

Thanks PSBD, my dd can read and write very well. Her comprehension is not as good as it should be although she s within the lower end of the expected level.

I'm not suggesting it is the OPs battle to fight Amberthecat but I do think the OP has a right to have the facts don't you?

I've said earlier if it were my child I would want to know when any intervention will be carried out - will it mean my child is withdrawn from the class? If so what will they miss and how will this be addressed?

The new national curriculum which state maintained schools must follow states "If they are still struggling to decode and spell, they need to be taught to do this urgently through a rigorous and systematic phonics programme so that they catch up rapidly." and RR is NOT a rigorous and systematic phonics programme

Here is a free phonics assessment package (various assessments at alphabetic code and word level) which will enable any mums who are curious as to the level of alphabetic code knowledge of their children to get an indication.

Some schools teach alphabetic code knowledge in Reception well so that children know reasonably well a 'basic' code or 'simple' code. They may also be taught the phonics skills of blending all-through-the-word for reading and oral segmenting all-through-the-spoken-word for spelling very well.

But if the children don't go on to learn a more comprehensive range of letter/s-sound correspondences well, then such children end up having to resort to guessing the words - and then again can only 'guess' at the level of their spoken vocabulary - and yet many words in literature are words which are new and unknown to the child.

So, regardless of what people say about learning styles and different ways to read (OK), all learners still need to be able to apply code knowledge and blending skills for lifelong literacy.

When the pictures disappear, when many of the words are new, there IS only phonics (a print to sound process) which will enable the reader to lift new words off the page.

The more experiences that children get which take them away from a very strong and persistent focus on learning alphabetic code knowledge securely and comprehensively, the greater the likelihood of longer term difficulties with reading - so getting through reading books with multi-cueing does not really serve the young reader.

The pictures and context within the books, however, are invaluable for 'language comprehension' development - but detrimental when used for guessing many of the words within the books.

On the subject of dyslexia, there is a school called the Chiltern Tutorial School for dyslexics which is incredibly successful in restoring the literacy skills of deficits of severely dyslexic children. They have produced a short video on their website which consists of nothing but comments from the dyslexic children themselves. The video can be seen on

It can also be seen on this TES thread together with a video from another school with the children themselves making giving their views.

community.tes.co.uk/perceptual_learning_in_action/b/weblog/archive/2013/05/11/perceptual-learning.aspx

Oh bloody hell, eddie carron's found MN.

????

Scortja, I wish I could give you a virtual hug.

I think it is great that the school is focussing on your son. They care and you care which is the right place to be.

5 years and 9 months isn't very old. Some kids need a little more time to develop before they can get going. Being first to do something doesn't mean you'll go onto be the best. The kids who walk first don't grow up to win the 100 metre dash in the Olympics, the kids who talk first don't win the Pulitzer Prize, etc. So, the fact that he is a little behind at reading at age 5 isn't indicative of his future potential. The fact that the people around him, his family and the school, care about his future potential is.

Finally, I don't understand the debate around RR vs other phonics based interventions. I cannot see how RR would hurt. If you want to do phonics based interventions at home you can. My first dd was taught to read without phonics, as far as I could tell. I was concerned because she wasn't doing well. I bought a computer program based on phonics for her. She enjoyed it. She got half way through it, and then read so well she quit because she was busy with more interesting books. I used www.headsprout.com
Unfortunately, it appears to be for classroom use rather than individual use now. I liked it because it was developed with behavioural psychologists and really thought through. It was US based, though.

I don't understand the debate around RR vs other phonics based interventions
Firstly RR isn't a phonics based intervention and secondly the debate isn't about RR v anything it's simple about the overall long term effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of RR.

People should not be debating the value of one reading strategy against another. The majority of children use a variety of strategies to learn to read. Children with dyslexia find the phonic code very difficult and must be taught it in a structured sequential manner in order to learn it - they can get there but it is usually a slow process and needs 1:1. However other strategies are equally important. As competent readers most of us use prediction to read fluently otherwise reading would be a slow and painful task very time we picked up a book.
Like most of you I had no idea of the phonic code and at school was taught the basic initial letter sounds and then just picked up other strategies through practise. This is how most children learn to read and those who don't use all of the strategies need to be shown how to do it. From what I understand of RR the child's reading behaviour is analysed and then he/she is given help to access all strategies to improve reading - including phonics.

Really? Is that why it's the recommended methods