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.

It's worth looking at Book People for cheap box sets of early reading books. We picked up a full set of Biff, Chip and Kipper etc for about £10 that has level 1, 2 and 3 books split in to phonics and stories and with a parents' guide as well. I find them really tedious and much prefer the Julia Donaldson (Songbirds?) ones, but my 5 yr old year R DS adores the "Floppy books" and will happily choose to try and read one as his bedtime story!

As a contrast to some, his school has tray of the various level reading books out, and they can change their book as often (or not) as they want. When we drop them in the morning we can do it with them - and choose a more grown up story book to borrow. Plus they go to the libary to choose books once a week (some hilarious non fiction choices so far - I know loads about mining trucks and the history of the motorway). They're heard read by a teacher or TA at least once a week, and have an assessment once a month - all this is in reading log along with worksheets home with tips of things to work on/games to play out of school. As a result, he loves reading - so worth pushing schools that don't change books regularly.

Just checked ds's school and they had 95% level 4+ for Reading and Writing in the most recent tests so I suppose I should shut up and have a little faith

Hmmm so I think the GINN books have totally screwed up all DS's lovely phonics de-coding. He just tries to guess the words now, even really simple ones that he used to be able to do with no problem (hat, dog etc). He doesn't even try to sound it out, he just looks at the picture and the first letter and guesses. Grrr

A sudden jump like that is a bit suspicious. Not saying it is impossible, but you might like to read this thread

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/primary/a1781029-How-common-is-cheating-on-SATs

Have the same issue here. DS had beautiful decoding of CVC words before Christmas but recently started guessing words in his Ginn 360 readers. Guessing whole words that aren't even on the page! I've taken to covering up the pictures and all the words apart from the one to decode and having some success in bringing him back around.

Why aren't they getting 100% L4+? It's not that difficult to scrape 19 out of 50. I had a child with no English in September get a 5c in May. Her comments were telling: ' But I didn't understand it, Mrs Feenie!'

Depends what SEN, doesn't it - it shouldn't automatically be sent barrier to level 4 reading.

my dds school uses mixed methods, but they scored very well this year

So do thousands of other schools using mixed methods which the SP experts on here regard as evil.

If English spelling was phonically consistent, nobody would ever want to use anything but phonics. But when it comes to learning to read words like
'and, any, father', 'on, only, once', 'won, woman, women'
those who claim that these are easily teachable with just phonics too are giving the word 'phonics' a totally abnormal meaning.

What works with such words is simply going over them again and again until children recognise them as wholes and no longer need to decode them.

Even the phonics experts on here have repeatedly admitted that many children need a great deal of help with decoding such words before they can read them easily. When it comes to learning to read such words, there is really very little difference between what different teachers do. They all have to keep going over them until they stick.

Many children start to struggle a bit more with reading after Xmas, because by then the pure phonics phase of 'a cat sat', etc. is mostly over. There is increasing exposure to words with phonically irregular graphemes like 'here there were' or 'once only', and the harder part of learning to read English begins.

It's not surprising that Finnish children can nearly all read fluently by the end of their first term at school. Finnish graphemes are phonically all completely regular, i.e. they all have just one pronunciation. Pure phonics works beautifully with a spelling system like that, but English is not like that.

I've just had a look at The Book People Phonics and they have some really good stuff at very reasonable prices.

all depends on what it meant by scoring very well.

To me it means 100% at level and above and somewhere significantly over 50% level 5s for a mixed intake.

Is there somewhere that you can look up the KS2 SATs results over time? Last year's for DS's school were relatively low if they should be >90% . But the school has been through some difficult times, and appears to be on the up...

We're on Biff et al - DS seems to enjoy them. He's not above a sneaky guess though , and he's listened to reading at school 2x/week.

Mashabell

Imo, 'and', 'on' are all easily decodable.

The others all need the child to be aware that letter have more than one sound - you need to know that some letters (mainly a, e, i, o, u and y) can all have different sound - eg: 'a' can be 'ay' as in hay, 'a' as in hand, 'eh' as in many or 'ar' as in park.

I've watched DD read words and something like 'price', she'll initially sound with an 'i' as in pink, she'll notice that the word doesn't sound like anything she recognises and instantly try it again with the 'eye' sound.

Does this mean that they are not phonetic? I don't see it as different from learning that 'th', 'ph', 'ce', 'gy' all have a special sound.

I do think Italian children are lucky that everything is pronounced the way it's written. Much easier than English.

I tend to glaze over when it comes Masha's lists for that very reason - no one who has ever taught children to read would seriously think and or on were in any way difficult.

Elfonshelf
An and on are indeed decodable.
It's the words in which a, e, i, o and u have different sounds which cause decoding difficulties.

And they are by no means the only ones:

I read every day - i read yesterday, friend - field, even - seven, paid - said, fruit - ruin, sound - soup, through - rough, good - food ....
At least 69 of the 205 English graphemes (single letters or several letters used for spelling the 44 English sounds) have more than one pronunciation. They are the reason why learning to read English takes much longer than all languages apart from Chinese.

It is true taht Italian children are lucky that everything is pronounced the way it's written. So are all other Europeans.

Most children (4 in 5) manage to learn in the end, but not just with phonic decoding.

You said:

But when it comes to learning to read words like
'and, any, father', 'on, only, once', 'won, woman, women'
those who claim that these are easily teachable with just phonics too are giving the word 'phonics' a totally abnormal meaning.

How on earth are 'and' and 'on' not 'easily teachable with phonics'?

Has anyone seen Masha's credibility, please?

I am no educationalist, but as a second language ebglish speaker, I can attest that the fact that there are seemingly endless sounds per vowel and not to mention the countless ways of spelling consonant sounds in English, makes it a much harder language to learn by simple phonic decoding, and that I am su re that although phonics is the building blocks upon which reading MUST be built, it is fallacious to pretend that children become confident readers of English simple through phonics

TheRealMJB there aren't countless vowel sounds in English, just 19 and 25 consonant sounds. These are very learnable if taught systematically.

Fair enough. But having never been taught them formally, and coming from a first language where there is only one sound per vowel I.e 5 (6 if you count 'y') it seems vast and initially was very confusing. As I imagine it must be for a 4/5yo.

4/5 year olds take it in their stride quite happily

Adults seem to be the ones who find it difficult ... perhaps they over think

Teaching children how English spelling works or doesn't work is a good idea.

What is not so good is pretending
that it has a spelling code like other alphabetically written languages,
that children can be taught to read and write with just phonics,
that a mixture of phonics and other approaches is bad,
and that all teachers who disagree are wicked and stupid.