Avoiding " mixed" reading methods

[MrEBear]

DS is still in preschool but will be one of the oldest in his class when he starts in 2016. I put the question here rather than preschool as I thought I would get better answers.

The schools around me all seem to do Jolly Phonics and the old Biff chip books. Which seems daft. They also start giving out reading books before the kids have learned all the letters.

I had the idea to try to get him reading using phonics before he starts school. Therefore avoiding the confusion that mixed methods can bring and he can also go at his own pace. I've got the jp activity books at home currently working on book 2 and we have the Songbirds books but not looked at them yet.

Am I doing the right thing or should I leave it until he starts school?

The Dandelion books are available online and I highly recommend the Sounds-Write app for beginner readers.

www.phonicbooks.co.uk/ibooks.php first set are free

www.sounds-write.co.uk/apps.aspx first unit is free

I'm a teacher and recently moved from England to Scotland.

P1 and reception are the same thing, but where I am P1 is more formal than most reception classes I have taught.

All readers use "mixed" reading methods! Think about what you do when you encounter an unfamiliar word - you break it down, or "sound it out" which is what kids learn to do using their phonic skills. most of the time, you don't need to do this because you recognise the words and this is what kids are working towards as they learn to read. Some words cannot be sounded out, because English is a very irregular language, and this type of word has to be taught as sight recognition from the start. Schools often call these "tricky words" and you'll probably meet lists of them fairly early on in your DS's school career, they include; the, is, by, me. The Early ORT books and other schemes contain a lot of these for this reason.
Kids who are overly dependent on phonic strategies run into difficulties from an early stage because they try to sound out every single word including tricky words. The huge (over)emphasis on phonics in schools in recent years has contributed to this problem.

At four and still in his pre school year, your Dc doesn't need to be doing phonic work with you at home. I have one the same age and there is some gentle and contextualised sound work going on in nursery, which we follow up with him at home if he brings it up. I can understand that with your history of dyslexia you might feel that it is very important to start early, but please be reassured that it's not necessary to start on phonics now. The school will have their own preferred scheme to follow and often we find we have to undo errors that parents have unintentionally introduced. Kids are hothoused in our system and are often introduced to learning experiences before they are ready. In the longer term this can have the opposite to the desired effect. Remember that many of our European neighbours don't begin formal learning till around 6 and by 8 their children are doing better than ours.
Your Dc is lucky to have such an involved and interested mum, and there are lots of things you can do to help develop his early literacy skills;
-Read, read, read together. Go to the library, look at magazines, write captions for your photos (he makes them up, you write them down!) he can draw your shopping list and you write the words beside his pictures. Modelling of reading and writing behaviours by the adults in jids' lives is key to their attitude to Literacy later on.
-Talk about everything you read and do all the time!
-Identify words in the environment. Kids can "read" words like Sainsburys, McDonald's, minions, long before they can identify the individual sounds because these words are everywhere and they recognise them as a whole. This is called the logographic stage and is a precursor to other reading skills.
-Go to bookbug, sing the songs and play nursery rhymes and kids songs in the car. My dc listen to stories on cds during quiet time after lunch, I'm really noticing how much new vocabulary they use, and they tallk to me about what they've listened to. ??
-Clap the syllables in words as you say them and make a game of it; "time-for-tea" "put-on-your-pyjamas". Syllabic segmentation is a very important skill which is now given very little time because of the focus on phonics.

I hope this helps. If you would like other ideas, just say.

Tricky words are not words that can't be sounded out and need to be learnt by sight. There aren't any such words in English.

They are words with a piece of the alphabetic code that hasn't yet been taught. This piece of code should be pointed out to the children, then they should blend them like any other word.

Eventually, you are right they will have seen the most common words enough times that they don't need to sound them out. But no words 'need' to be taught as sight words.

Some words cannot be sounded out, because English is a very irregular language, and this type of word has to be taught as sight recognition from the start

Oh dear - poor Letters and Sounds training strikes again.

It doesn't say that in Letters & Sounds!

Though, admittedly the main guidance on teaching the 'irregular' words is not actually in the main handbook; it's in the Notes of Guidance which seemingly no-one ever bothers to read.

It is nearly 40 years since Stanovich discovered, through his research, that skilled readers use the phonological route (i.e sounding & blending) for working out new words. Yet the readers use 'mixed methods' myth still persists.

Can't decide whether the tricky words as sight words comes from not reading it at all or a chronic misunderstanding of what it actually said. Probably the LEA advisors misunderstood and peddled the wrong message from there, with teachers repeating the same garbage without ever having actually read it at all.

Jolly is in Scotland, so I doubt it is Letters and sounds training in this case. I've no doubt there are many other forms of inadequate phonics training though.

Teachers, own knowledge of the alphabetic code probably doesn't help, Feenie. If you don't have an explicit knowledge of all the 180Ish more common spellings, then I can see how it might be easy to fall into the trap of thinking that many words in English can't be decoded using phonics. Particularly if all your pre synthetic phonics training taught you that some words have to be learnt by sight and children need lists of sight words to read.

Oops. See she has recently moved from England to Scotland, so maybe it is L&S.

But Jolly said she had moved to Scotland from England. Presumably English trained.

Feenie said: Probably the LEA advisors misunderstood and peddled the wrong message from there

I always thought it extremely strange that LA advisors were expected to change overnight from pushing, & training in, the NLS Searchlights to giving high quality synthetic phonics training when they were clearly totally incapable of doing so. If you genuinely believed that the Searchlights were the correct method there is absolutely no way on earth that you could believe SP would be effective; unless you were trained in it by a'proper' SP expert and used it for yourself. Which is not what happened to LA advisors. I've experienced some utter cr*p SP training from LA advisors in the last 10 years!

LAs should have appointed some SP experts to do the local training...

JollyG I recommend Phonics Forever training www.thelearningzoo.co.uk/phonics-forever/

Its looks like the OP has plenty to get her started. Her son might like the website

www.starfall.com

Its very american, but another source of decodable material and games to learn the sounds.

Its a real pity that English and Scottish children sit different national curriculum tests. It would be really interesting if English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh children all sat the same test to see which teaching methods work.

Scottish children currently don't sit national tests

I think there's enough variation in teaching methods within England to not need the help of the rest of the UK and Ireland to to that.

Or the "balanced literacy" of the USA (mixed methods by another name is still mixed methods)

I believe the Scots and the Welsh are rather worried at present about the state of their children's literacy.

Or reading recovery, in Aus & NZ. Or anywhere for that matter

My ds is in p1 now and we have what sounds like exactly the same system as saltedcaramel's dc.

Including the guessing from pictures???

There are pictures which I suppose help, but he's learnt all the sounds in the book already so theoretically could do it without the pictures.

I don't think it has ever occurred to my daughter to guess from the pictures because neither her school nor me have ever encouraged her. It hasn't occured to her that the pictures might help her with a difficult word.

Good illustrations make a book more attractive. I believe that pictures can aid comprehension and vocabulary building, but that is a different activity to learning to decode text.

My daughter's writing is so far ahead compared with my son seven years ago. At the age of six she can have a recongisible attempt at spelling almost any word. She has been taught more complex phonics which means that her writing does not look like something written by Winnie the Pooh.

I'm confused, are recent posters saying we shouldn't be teaching 'tricky words' like 'the' and 'said' etc? The songbirds books I have list these in at the start of each book and the Jolly Phonics website talks of these as well. I thought the only way to learn these words was by recognition (parent of new reception child here, so all this is new to me).

I found that my daugher learing phonics has improved my spelling. Extended phonics gets complex

www.twinkl.co.uk/resource/t-l-134-sound-families-display-posters

www.tes.com/teaching-resource/phase-5-sound-families-alternative-spellings-6385822

Darcourse
Most of the "tricky words" have some phonics part and the children simply tweak the words. Ie. s-ai-d becomes sed. The s and the d follow the phonics rules but the ai makes the e sound. Personally I don't think it does children any harm to learn a few sight words. It is next to impossible to write a decent story without the word "the" or "of".