Reception - reading

[Ifyoubuildit]

I'm sure this has been asked before but I wanted some insight from those in the know, so bear with me.

DS started in Reception in Sept. He brings reading books home every night but they are soooo dull and repetitive (GINN 360) and they don't provide any challenge to him.

Is this deliberate? I can understand them trying to build his confidence but to drain any love of reading out of him with this dull, repetitive, story-less material seems strange to me. But then I'm not an expert.

This sounds wrong to me. My DS2 is in reception and his books are varied and challenging (but not too difficult for him). I'd make a note in his reading record or have a quick chat with the teacher if I were you.

Super dull books here. DS gets 2 books on Monday that are meant to last until next Monday, he reads them fluently first time through. He's not been heard read since the start of December.

We've signed up to Reading Chest for some variation and books at a proper level.

DS gets a new book every day from a range and it invariably hard to engage him in the Ginn ones. My heart sinks a bit when I see one in the book bag.

I second signing up to Reading Chest, especially if school are not sending lots of reading home.

We get Biff, Chip & Kipper books here - I've seen a few people on here who say they're dull, but ds seems to enjoy them. Although we have the same problem as a pp: books changed on a Monday and we have to make do with them till the following week most of the time...there's been a handful of times where they've been changed on a Thurs. Usually ds will want to read the 2 books on the first night he brings them home and then that's it for the week.

Could you try your local library? Most libraries these days have online catalogues that you can browse and see what they have.

Early Ginn 360 are mind numbing and don't meet the government expectations that children are given books that support learning to read with phonics!

Thanks. The phonics is a good point, he has phonics sounds to learn and he knows them all but the reading books don't seem support this at all. The thing that really gets me is that there's no story, it's all "you can swim here, I can swim there". snore.

Are the school teaching sounds/letters in isolation or do they teach the necessary skills alongside?

Hi mrz - what do you mean by skills?

Being able to blend sounds to read the words and to segment words into the separate sounds for spelling (decoding and encoding). Children should be applying both these right from the earliest days when learning phonics.

He was doing that type of thing to begin with- matching phonics words to pictures and identifying the first and last sounds within words but he hasn't been doing it at home since he strayed bringing reading books home. Now he's just working his way through these tedious GINN 360 books, doing every single one in the series. I asked one of the other mums in the class if their child was reading the same thing and her little girl is doing the biff and kipper books.

There's no challenge in the books at all, he doesn't find any of the words difficult and they're so repetitive.

No advice as its all new to us too!

Can you put in his reading record comments like read with ease, word perfect first time and ensure you get acroos that hes understood the story

Thanks Mrs CB - I have been doing just that. We've just come to the end of a level (last book tonight!) so keeping everything crossed that we get something better tomorrow.

Ginn 360 are very old Look & Say books that have very repetive text (theory being that the child will memorise whole words by sight) they also require the child to guess words by looking at the pictures and using initial letters to predict what a word might be rather than teaching the child to read.

Interesting Mrz - I can remember reading some of the books he's reading and that was over 30 years ago. Do you think I should say something? I don't want to seem like a pushy parent, especially as we're only a term in.

It's difficult to approach the problem with schools who are clearly not prepared for change. You could casually enquire if they have any books that support the "excellent" phonics teaching your child is receiving in class

Yay! We got a biff and chop book today. Very easy and DS sailed through it but it was all phonics, finally!!!

Just had a look at reading chest, bit expensive?? Why not use a library?

Libraries often have phonics books available - ours has a lot of biff and chip, and Oxford owl website has some available online as ebooks for free.

Worth mentioning to your school that phonics "suits" your child better (and perhaps that you thought the new directive was toward phonics anyway - how do they hope to achieve the Y1 phonics screening results etc?)

Unfortunately a lot of families are getting these kind of problems. At just the time when children are most receptive, and good teaching with appropriate books and resources COULD be improving literacy for children (as the Government wants) yet many schools are STILL using books and methods that are thirty years out of date!

I wonder if MN are in any position to apply a little pressure?

If you want to move your child on yourself, try this:

An inexpensive and easy to use book, that can encourage children with reading, spelling and writing, and really help them to understand Phonics, is reviewed in the MN Book Reviews section. Just search ‘Phonics’.

I just use the school books and then I read loads of proper books at home and pick out words etc, much better!

Which is ideal if the school supplies high quality books.

I have been actively sourcing better reading books for my ds from all the neighbouring libraries - he gets ORT from school and has recently been moved up to Stage 2 (which I believe is part red and part yellow book band) but all the books he gets home seem to heavily rely on the "tricky words" he has to learn at home.

Some of it is decodable, but I will usually always have to tell him big long words or he will guess them from the pictures.

You would have died looking at his reading record mrz - his teacher wrote "good use of picture cues". There was me thinking that was what the whole phonics approach was trying to avoid...

What have all these schools said at parent teacher evening?
If their reading schemes in Reception are so bad are the schools failing higher up? Do they have bad OFSTED reports?
Just let your kids read whatever they can get their hands on if you feel the school book isn't being changed often enough.

If their reading schemes in Reception are so bad are the schools failing higher up?

Could be worth looking at the KS2 SATs results:

www.telegraph.co.uk/education/leaguetables/11285117/Primary-school-league-tables-2014-compare-your-schools-performance.html#England

A school teaching a good foundation in reading in KS1 should have English results in the 90%+ L4 range, whatever their intake.

For example, if you look at Newham LA (London) I know that at least 2 of the schools in the 90%+ range, Elmhurst and Curwen, teach rigorous phonics and achieve excellent results despite having a very large percentage of EAL children and high deprivation (50%+).

You might also note that they both have a low percentage of SEN. This is because, I know from experience, most children on SEN registers at primary (and beyond) are there because of poor reading skills.