Over-reliance on phonics leading to poor spelling in Y3 & 4?

[pickledsiblings]

How do you mitigate against this? Lots of reading?

Is a whole word approach to spelling in these years for these children the right thing to do?

One thing I would look at is how much time individual children are spending actually reading/writing/using their phonics skills during the session. It think you are probably likely to see lots of fun/engaging whole class games but these sometimes come at the expense of more effective activities. Is there a lot of wasted time where children are just waiting for their turn? Are there any opportunities for quieter or less engaged children to not be doing what they are asked to do and rely on other children to be doing the work? How many words on average are children reading/writing over the session?

Also check that all of the skills are being taught across the session. Blending/segmenting and handwriting are linked processes. Retention is helped when teaching links those processes ime. As I think maizie said up thread, muscle memory is important.

Thanks for that Rafa.

Can anyone recommend any specific phonics training that I might suggest to the HT?

Difficult. As said up thread, the good stuff is usually linked to commercial schemes, which is likely to make it expensive.

Having said that, Debbie Hepplewhite seems to be offering online training now. The current 50% discount makes it £97+VAT and I think that would give a 12 month licence to all the Phonics International resources too.

Don't u find it a bit odd that, after more than a century of compulsory schooling in all Anglophone countries, there are still disagreements about how best to teach children to read and write? Don't u think that if there was a universally applicable, foolproof method, teachers would have found it and agreed on it by now?

I wonder how long it will be before it's decided that the current SP approach is producing no better results in the long run than everything else that's gone before?

Becoming a good reader and speller of English involves oodles of learning by rote, in addition to phonics, and the amount of learning involved is simply too overwhelming for some children. Always has and always will, unless English spelling gets modernised.

After more than a century of compulsory schooling, there are still disagreements over the best way to teach EVERYTHING. Witness the current controversy over "discovery" maths vs explicit instruction and practice.

This is because much of what has been taught in teacher training institutions over the last 100 years has been based primarily on armchair theorising and "educational philosophies" rather than on reliable research. Phonics is an exception because the evidence for it has been accumulated by painstaking research primarily in university psychology departments, using a much more rigorously scientific methodology than is found in most education research. "Educationalists" ignored and rubbished this research precisely because it didn't fit with their dominant philosophy of Whole Language discovery-type learning, not because they had any proper evidence to support their ideas.

there are still disagreements over the best way to teach EVERYTHING

• Not as ridiculous or passionate as about the teaching of reading and writing.

There have been no properly controlled studies comparing the effectiveness of phonics and other methods.

Apart from that, u don't need any research to understand that phonics cannot be of any help for memorising the unpredictable spellings which occur in at least 4,000 quite common English words, like
blue, shoe, flew, through, to, you, too
or freeze, cheap, cheese, these, police, fleece, geese
and especially not for the 300+ horrors like
been/bean, cheep/cheap, jeans/genes, there/their, here/hear .....

Phonics can provide a good start to literacy acquisition in English, but no more than that.
But if u decide to call the whole of literacy acquisition 'phonics', then it will do the job, provided u spend enough time and resources on it.

Oh, I have missed you, marsha

kesstrel how are they trying discovery maths this time? I remember being delighted by it, in one school (I moved schools almost every year until secondary). I had missed the times table chants (I missed the alphabet song too) and always felt stupid in maths classes. Suddenly I was in a room with sand, water, measuring jugs and stuff and was allowed to pick a card and work on the puzzle. I loved it.

I now know that the puzzle approach is highly gendered, young girls spend c. 3 times as long as boys working out puzzles, so am wondering how it is being offered now!

Blanche a lot of maths teaching is still discovery-oriented. The numeracy strategy implemented by labour in 1997 got rid of some of the worst of it (the idea that children don't need to learn times tables, for example), but a lot was left.

There have been no properly controlled studies comparing the effectiveness of phonics and other methods.

Lots of reading for you here, marsha: nifdi.org/news/hempenstall-blog

Ah! I am pre-National Curriculum, so have no personal experience with much of the central control

I taught in FE, spent the last 3 years leading the literacy/numeracy 'catch up' lessons. The effective removal of functional skills was the final nail in my teaching coffin!

Only commenting because the NZ study made me at its sheer lack of insight into Scottish linguistics. I am not an educational specialist but I am Scottish. I suspect the reason Scottish kids are not so good at recognizing made up words compared to NZ is that "Scottish" is a language in its own right which they hardly ever see in books but which they all talk in the playground and at home. There is also a very rich culture of word improvisation.

I have a speller who just can and a non-speller who just can't. I think the non-speller struggles from being left handed and intuitively wanting to read backwards. However what helps her is not writing out spelling lists but doing lots of written work with rigorous enforcement of using the dictionary. This was lacking in her y3 and y4 education and it has taken a long time to improve.

blog.bodil.co.uk/the-worst-of-all-forms-of-teaching-except-for-all-the-others/

I suspect there's probably a middle ground though.

There's nothing intuitive about reading from left to right; it's a learned skill. Hebrew is written from right to left, so Hebrew speaking children, whether left or right handed, have to learn to read from right to left..

And Arabic kids too! There is nothing intuitive about reading, But there is an overriding human desire to communicate.

As a teacher I would like to have spent my time facilitating that.

I totally agree! In my language, when written up-down(vertical), we read right from left.
When written side ways(horizontal), we read left to right.

No child seems to have difficulty there. It's learned skill.

right to left!

OK probably explained myself rather lazily. DD2 seeks to do everything backwards because she is translating something shown to her by a right handed person into her left handed head - having a left handed teacher in y6 definitely helped.

It might be just her or because neither of her parents is left-handed.

Sorry Op didn't mean to derail.

It makes a change from phonics

OP - Debbie Hepplewhite has already been suggested to you as a reliable source of information on Phonics. An excellent, and inexpensive, book by her is the 'Oxford Phonics Spelling Dictionary', ideal for use by children of all ages, as well as by parents and teachers. Currently the best prices are probably at "wordery.com" and "bookdepository.com" both of which offer free UK delivery.

There is a review of the book in MN Book Reviews, under Phonics.

Thank you Ferguson. The school currently uses Jolly Phonics resources. I have in the past shared some PI resources with the YR teacher. Do schools overhaul their phonics provision and move from one scheme to another?

I couldn't say, as I'm retired now so don't know what schools are currently doing. When I was last in class, in 2011, we used a range of decodable books, but didn't concentrate on any one 'scheme'.

If it doesn't have too much financial impact, I would guess a mixture of schemes to be preferred, as there is no single one that is 'perfect'. But then teachers probably like to stick with what they know - and what they know works.

From what I read on MN though, it does sounds as though MANY schools are still not teaching Phonics accurately and thoroughly enough.

[I didn't study all the NZ - Scottish debate on this thread, but I'll try to revisit it sometime.]

With the many different schemes on the market, it is difficult for teachers to know what exactly teaching Phonics accurately and thoroughly enough is.

From Rose

Fidelity to the programme
55. Once started, what has been called 'fidelity to the programme' is also
important for ensuring children’s progress. Experience shows that even
high quality programmes founder if they are not applied consistently and
regularly. It can be unwise to ‘pick and mix' too many elements from several
different programmes because this often breaks up important sequences
of work and disrupts planned progression.
56. Another important feature of the best practice was that, once begun, high quality phonic programmes were followed consistently and carefully,
each day, reinforcing and building on previous learning to secure children’s
progress.