How do you use the non-phonic ORT books?

[Purplelooby]

Just that really! As my son's reading improves they are sending him one phonic and one normal reading book (mostly but not exclusively ORT). With the second type - do you read it first to them or what? The Biff, Chip and Kipper non-phonic ones seem to contain a lot of words that aren't in the top 100 most frequent and aren't decodable which I'm guessing is on purpose. So far he's figured it out by context or by the pattern of the book - is this how it goes?

If it's any comfort, most children do not have a problem with mixed reading methods. But for the ones that do, unpicking the damage done takes a very long time.

Purple, my ds was/is a good reader. He learned to read without proper phonics. He learned phonics in school, but I had no knowledge of it because I am not native English speaker, and didn't know MN back then.
I let him read mixture of books. Some phonics books bought from book people(without understanding what phonic really is.), some bought randomly from charity shops, book stores.
He is in yr4 now, doing fine.

So I'm that link they identify that many of the 100 common words can be decoded, e.g. in, it, and. My son now recognises them but started by blending them then just got used to them. I'm assuming that's fine to recognise words so long as they've been worked out by him, not taught as a whole word?

In terms of the remaining top 100, I didn't quite understand what the best way to teach them is. The article identified that certain words (I think they mention 'of', 'is' and 'the') are so common is texts that they 'can't be avoided' but I got lost about how they should be handled.

And again thanks for taking the time to explain all this to me xx

Sorry to everyone I keep cross-posting with by the way, I'm genuinely grateful for all these responses

Being secure with phonics is truly important, IMO, even dc is good reader already.

From Letters and Sounds

Can't you just let them read the words they can read and then help them with the others? Isn't that normal?

The ultimate aim is to read them automatically (without needing to consciously sound them out) but not learning words as wholes ...imagine having to learn over a million words

Unfortunately what Bluepowder says isn't actually true. Most children will learn to read whatever the method but mixed methods impact on spelling too and unfortunately until a child fails there's no way of knowing who will struggle.

Letters and Sounds. Now there's a document that lots of people using haven't read properly.

Mrz, I agree about the spelling, and of course all children should be taught with phonics and decodable books to support.
But having worked in lots of schools that used mixed methods, it seems to be about 20 % who really struggle. A few of those just don't get enough support in reading at home but knew enough phonics to use Catch-up with great success. The others usually need fairly intensive phonics intervention.

For the record, my comment is only aimed at OP, who said her dc is already a excellent reader. I don't agree with mixed method at all.

In some schools it's much higher figure ...just look at PSC results. A junior school I know has something like 90% failure and many secondaries report high percentages of pupils unable to read well enough to access the curriculum

Thank you mrz that's very helpful! I think my son has maybe been taught that way or has figured it out that way because he figured out 'so' based on already knowing 'go' and 'no'. He's a bit obsessed with words that don't follow the rules he knows (e.g. his which he sounds out as 'hiss' then remembers should be pronounced 'hiz' and conpates with the word is). It makes total sense that these do follow rules, just not the basic rules. He's a real stickler for rules and I think this is helping his reading but I can see now how the whole-word method could make complications for other children.

I should here that I'm a real fan of phonics and whenever I hear of a friend trying to teach a pre-school kid to read (my son is late August born so half of his age-peers didn't go to school this time) I push them to websites that explain phonics and buy them phonics-games. Compared to other parents I know, I know loads about phonics but it turns out that isn't enough!

*compares with the word 'is'

Purplelooby Your son might enjoy having one of these charts, as it shows all the phonic variations:

phonicsinternational.com/unit1_pdfs/The%20English%20Alphabetic%20Code%20-%20complete%20picture%20chart.pdf

I believe you can get one for free from the Phonics International website.

kesstrel, your link reminded me! We had a poster like that which we bought from library. Back then, I didn't know about phonics, but my ds loved the pictures, and we kept saying those sounds. Now I realised that my ds learned to read with phonics after all.

The spelling can be the sound /z/ as, has, is, his, was, legs, busy, Joseph, absorb, music, nasal, misery, cosy, basil, casual, museum, beans etc etc

Irvine

Mrz Yes, that's covered by Z in the left-hand column, by "fries". The furthest left-hand column represents the sounds, with the possible associated graphemes listed to the right. This isn't obvious at first glance, of course. Before you posted, I was thinking that if you had a similar chart on a tablet or computer, it could be set out so that if you touch the "sound" square you would actually hear it vocalised.

Mrz oops, sorry, I didn't realise your post was addressed to Looby's question!

Some children do grasp the basics and start making comparisons very quickly.

IMO one of the advantages of teaching children to blend the tricky words is that it gets them used to the idea that the English spelling system is complex quite early on. There's no big 'reveal' after you've spent the first year teaching them one spelling for each of the 44+ sounds.

That chart will be very handy for me apart from anything else! He asked me what the word 'day' said in a story book and when I told him he started pointing to it and saying 'd-ay' in the right places. I'm going to be controversial here... is there any advantage in some children figuring some phonic rules out for themselves with support? We think he did this a bit when he was much younger although he never showed any indication he could actually read as such. More than he started to pronounce some words phonetically but incorrectly (like wool, mirror, look). I'm just wondering whether in some instances giving phonics rules isn't the right way for a child to learn.

Don't worry, I'm not suggesting that he doesn't learn phonics

I think that's normal for some children. They use the basics they've been taught and make links and comparisons and 'self-teach'. You still need a systematic scheme to ensure all the gaps are filled in, but these children will largely teach themselves quite effectively just through exposure to words.

The biggest problem is when they grow up to be literate adults that they learnt to read and write fine without phonics so it obviously isn't necessary.

There's a stray 'they' between 'that' and 'learnt' in that last sentence.