Writing and Spelling - Cause for Concern

[SoulSista85]

Sorry if this is a topic that has already been raised.

My daughter is in year one now and we are having issues in that she is being taught to write in cursive and spell words as they sound - in short: incorrectly.

She can barely read her own writing and I can't either.

When addressing this with her teacher and his TA, I was told that this is the National Curriculum now and that this is the way writing is taught, pure and simple.

She can read perfectly well as the text in her books is all standard font.

It just strikes me as absolutely bonkers that this is what they're teaching in schools.

Anyone else having any issues along this vein?

It would be helpful to read other people's tips and experiences as I feel at a loose end with my child who is confused, being taught to spell incorrectly and can't read her own writing because of a frankly fucked up way of learning.

I just picked random phase 2 sounds I could have said struggle with s, t, m but find oo and oo and th and th easy

There are degrees aren't there. Got the concepts and forgetting a few letters, fine, move on and they'll pick it up. At one extreme I can think of a couple of august born children who haven't even got the concept of blending by the end of reception, working on phase 4 and phase 5 sounds with them would seem totally pointless. (And there have been threads on here too where the children are struggling with the basics and being sent home work on phase 5 sounds that they can't start to approach.)

At the other extreme, some children start reception with full mastery of phase 4 or even 5. Would you (or rather L&S teachers) spend 24 weeks covering ground they already know?

Phase 4 is a bit of a non phase as no new sounds are taught

I don't use Letters & Sounds so can only say what I would do. I'd start by assessing what they know already and start from there.
It quite easy to include these children in whole class lessons by using poly syllabic words containing the sounds taught while extending by introducing more alternative spellings for the sounds and more difficult individual readers.

I don't think I agree it is pointless catkind. Both of my nieces struggled with blending and neither really cracked it until part way through year one. Because they were both in schools that taught through phonics but not letters and sounds they had been taught all the sounds and many of the alternative spellings even though they couldn't blend. Once the blending clicked they could apply all of those straight away and really took off with their reading very quickly. If they'd been left on phase 3, or worse, 2 because they couldn't blend they would have had a lot of catching up to do.

Your point about differentiating for the most able is precisely why the phases of letters and sounds are rubbish. Only about 11 of those 24 weeks includes teaching new sounds. 3 weeks are introducing words with adjacent consonants and the rest seem to be assessment or revision. If you teach phase 4 alongside phases 2-3 then you will challenge most of the children in terms of reading and writing. For the small number that are able to read and write Cvc words, words with consonant clusters and polysyllabic words using all the phase 2 and 3 graphemes on entry you could probably teach an alternative spelling of the sound you are focusing on with the rest of the class. That is likely to be a very small number of children though.

That's interesting Rafa. Very synthetic phonics learning the correspondences in complete isolation like that! I guess my example was a bad one, but are there not children who are slow at learning correspondences, just as your most able ones already know them or gobble them up as fast as you can feed them in, and a range in between?

I don't know, it just seems odd to give them all phonics at the same speed but then give them reading books at their own pace. It all ends up mismatched. This may just be me seeing DS school doing it badly though! We ended up teaching him phonics at home as they were sending home reading books way beyond the phonics they'd taught him.

Very synthetic phonics learning the correspondences in complete isolation like that

Have you just expressed yourself rather unclearly here or do you truly believe the canard about synthetic phonics 'teaching sounds in isolation'?

If your school is sending home reading books way beyond the correspondences your DS has learned then they are, indeed, doing it badly!

I know, from an impeccable authority, that the Letters & Sounds 'phases' were never intended as 'differentiation'. It's just very unfortunate (though perhaps inevitable, given the paucity of training) that some teachers have interpreted them that way. Best practice is to teach the class the same correspondences and provide extension activities for the fast learners and intensive catch-up for the slower to learn.

It was kind of a joke maizie. Never mind, it clearly didn't work.

And now I'm confused as to what good practice might be. If you're not allowed to teach the correspondences faster for the more able children, and you're also not allowed to give them reading books ahead of the phonics they've learned, how do you differentiate?

Unfortunately it seems to be common practice for schools to teach sounds in isolation and to differentiate using those stupid phases, often sending the children who are struggling off with a TA.
I've has KS2 teachers tearing their hair out when faced with children who still haven't been taught all the single letter sounds. I don't see how anyone could believe that is good differentiation!
It's perfectly possible to challenge the "more able" children by using a more challenging words/text with the same focus sound/s.

Ooh, catkind. Sorry I didn't get the joke but the sentence wasn't quite clear.

I think mrz has covered the 'differentiation' point.

Reading and writing are complex, catkind. Even within just decoding or encoding there are subsets of skills. Children can struggle with all of those, none of those or maybe just one or two of them. You could argue that holding children back on all the sub-skills because they don't get one or two is poor differentiation.

If you include CVC, CVCC, CCVC, CCVCC and polysyllabic words in your teaching all the time you will challenge most children. You might find you are doing a lot of scaffolding and supporting at the beginning but it also has the advantage of allowing children to move on to longer words as soon as they are ready, rather than when they are secure with the graphemes from the previous 2 phases.

In my experience, I have two DSs now in year 3 and 4, and in some cases (my youngest) the child will develop visual memory of the words and will be able to spell correctly from year 1 (but this is unusual). DS1 and most of his friends are really starting to spell most words correctly from year 3, when they consolidate all of the sounds (including the more complex sounds) they have learned, and reinforce learning the difference between spellings such as 'bottle', 'travel', 'hospital', which sound the same but are spelled differently.

I remember being very sceptical about the method when the boys were in year 1, but DH (who is a primary school teacher) always encouraged our children to write with a steady flow, focusing on the content, energy and structure, as well as a diverse vocabulary. The spelling is one aspect of writing, and in my experience spelling correctly falls into place in year 2-3.

It was very common with mixed method teaching to ignore spellings until poor habits had become established

Do you guys have reading books that support more advanced other skills but still don't use half the correspondences? Our school clearly don't.

Yes we have 4 levels of difficulty

That should say four levels if difficulty for each sound

I've has KS2 teachers tearing their hair out when faced with children who still haven't been taught all the single letter sounds. I don't see how anyone could believe that is good differentiation!
But isn't that more likely to happen if the teachers carry on teaching the next sounds than if they focus on teaching the lagging children the single letter sounds first? Not suggesting you guys would fail to also reinforce the single letters, you're clearly very interested and engaged phonics teachers. But for those just following the programme, if the programme is teaching single letter sounds, they'll get taught - if they're motoring through at the standard speed and ignoring gaps they might not.

Respect to your phonics programme mrz.

Are you English coordinator as well as SENCO, mrz? It's great to hear about phonics being taught so well. I think it is in my DD's school, but certainly is not in mine.

You seem to be under the impression that teachers move onto the next sound and completely ignore what has gone before. The teacher should be aware of any gaps in knowledge and be ensuring that those gaps are filled by including those sounds alongside new. Choice of words should provide opportunities for those just beginning to blend and segment and provide challenge for those who have mastered these skills.
Some children may be reading books with a brief caption per page others may be reading chapter books and all variations in between.

Yes I'm English coordinator and SENCO and class teacher and ...

Busy!

I'd have loved to have had 4 different levels of difficulty for each sound. There seems to be so much more stuff around than there was 10 years ago. We can thank the government for that at least. I think I had a couple of sets of JP readers, a few yellow door and an endless sea of not very decodable ORT.

We replaced all our reading scheme books with phonic readers about twelve years ago (long before the government became involved). So we had Big Cat phonics, Rigby Star phonics, Rag Tag rhymes ...over the years we added Šongbirds, Rapid phonics, Comics for phonics, Project X phonics, Floppys phonics and Phonic Bugs but now mainly use Dandelion Launchers and Readers in reception (as they match Sounds-Write) alongside Alba, Magic Belt, Moon Dog, Talisman and Totem books.
We used the government matched funding to provide high quality training for all our staff - nursery to Y6.

Do you have low staff turnover, or (and?) are you really good at training/ motivating new staff?

I think I've read a comment from you before about how staff at your school never want to leave. Or maybe I got that wrong.