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.

Sorry, that was to mrz. I'm aware there are other people on this thread.

Yes we have low staff turn over but provide training whenever new staff join. We've also trained regular supply staff.

Sounds Write is a four day intensive training programme so it's a huge commitment

Actually we had some Collins big cat as well. And a few Rigby star phonics. Never more than one set of each though. Compared to several 6 pack class sets of ORT. With the match funding they chucked out the ORT and replaced with phonics bug, but that was long after I left.

I do like the look of the structure of the dandelion readers/launchers etc. Just out of interest, assuming they follow the same structure as sounds-write, show much of that content would you expect to cover in reception? Presumably the first 20 units, and then some of the more common alternative spellings?

Mrz, Can I just ask then, when considering the very low ability children how would you ensure they were fully engaged in the session when teaching them complex phoneme graphemes correspondences? When they haven't yet mastered blending.

Do you teach isolated phonics lessons or is it just part and parcel of literacy/english?

What would you do with children who have little or no language (not eal but little language in any language) alongside an inability to blend and poor visual auditory memory? Oh and as well as struggling to pronounce sounds?

Would you continue to expect these children to learn alternate spellings e.g the phoneme correspondences to spell elephant, even though they do not yet know single phonemes? My thinking would be that they would pick up nothing as they were being bombarded with information they couldn't use however I'm Interested as it would make it much more simple. I do understand if it's too much to try explain in the context of an Internet forum.

Oh and what do you do with the children who appear throughout the year? E.g they arrive in January year 1 with no previous school experience. Do they learn the complex phonics and be expected to just pick up the rest?

What is the ability range of your class out of interest?

mrz, I did specifically acknowledge that clued-up teachers like those posting on this thread would back-fill in the gaps. But you seemed to be blaming children not knowing single-letter sounds by juniors on teachers differentiating by spending more time on single-letter sounds rather than moving on, which seems illogical. That sounds more likely to be a consequence of (poor) teachers moving on and failing to back-fill.

Surely your kids who are reading chapter books must have somehow filled in the remaining phonics to get there? How, if you are teaching the correspondences at a fixed pace? Do they pick it up from the incidental teaching? (but then they're not really learning with systematic phonics?) Or are these phonics scheme missing half the sounds chapter books? (but I couldn't have stopped DS from attempting random home books if I'd wanted to)

No catkind I'm baking it on poor teaching practice which isn't the same thing. As I keep saying the stupid phases in ?etters and Sounds have become a barrier for some pupils and they were never intended to be used that way.

Blaming nor baking

Beebee I'll try to answer when I get home to a laptop phone screen isn't best to read and write longer posts.