Books to help DD with her reading

[cakeycakeface]

I would like to buy some simple books DD can read herself. She's bringing home Oxford Reading Tree books from school, and the one she currently has is Stage 2. I don't really want to buy these, since she'll probably get them via school.

Can you advise an equivalent reading series I can buy, and would the level be the same?

I'm worried she's not getting the hang of reading as quickly as her peers, and want her to practice at home. She enjoys reading with our support, but I think that maybe we're not doing enough with her.

Also, the criteria of being able to read 75 - 80% of the words might be fine so long as the 20 - 25% of unknown words are decodeable with the phonic knowledge the child already has, but somehow I don't think that's what you mean, LongtallJosie

Eh? It's exactly what I meant! What other option is there - that 20 per cent of the words were completely closed off to them?

The idea that children should read with 90% accuracy (not 80%, btw) is embedded in sight word reading schemes. Decodable schemes allow for children to read as per their developing phonics knowledge - so they should read books in accordance with what they have been taught and what they know and progress as their knowledge develops. So they should be allowed to practise what they already know - the 10% difficulty in decodable schemes would have to come from phonics they have yet been taught, and that's not the idea at all.

Castle kids like nothing more than the sense of achievement they get when they realise that they can actually read the words on the page because they know how those squiggles relate to spoken words. Now we can leave that knowledge for them to work out for themselves (a few will manage with no real problem given time) or we can share the knowledge by teaching phonics and not teaching guessing as a strategy.
Children don't learn to read by osmosis (as suggested by Mr R ) and some won't learn no matter how many books are in the home or how many are shared in school.

The idea that children should read with 90% accuracy (not 80%, btw) is embedded in sight word reading schemes

I thought that Longtalljosie was using the 75 - 80% as a criteria for a text's 'readability'; this is also a Whole Word/Look & Say mantra (though I've usually seen it as a higher percentage, 90 - 95%). This (WW/L&S) is how the figure is usually used when I'm in 'discussion' with anyone, so I apologise, Longtalljosie if I have made a wrong inference.

Of course, Longtalljosie has put her finger unerringly on why using it in a 'Whole Word' way is a very bad idea:

..What other option is there - that 20 per cent of the words were completely closed off to them?

Precisely, it's a rubbish option but one that children are still being subjected to by schools which persist in using the old Look & Say reading schemes. The most widely used 'old' scheme being ORT*

(* the new, phonics based ORT is fine)

I've got no experience of whole word / look and say. I wouldn't have the first clue how it would work. So if anything I've said was taken in defence of look and say then that was unintentional...

I would say though that the idea that children can automatically read any phonetic words put in from of them if they know the relevant phonics / digraphs as Feenie suggests upthread isn't my experience when reading with kids in a Y2 class. It's like a muscle - they know what to do, those who are struggling a bit just need to learn to keep on doing it until it feels easier...

I've had similar thoughts recently op as my reception ds doesn't seem any further along with his reading either. He's September born, so one of the oldest, but he's also generally been the later end of normal for lots of developmental stages. So I'm not worrying just yet. And school haven't said anything either.

Just keep reading to her for fun and let her find her feet I would say :)

Oh, and ds doesn't know all his set keywords yet and seems unable to sound out words (but loves phonics as an idea) and definitely memorises books rather than reading them.

Set keywords? Your school is using mixed methods, not exclusively teaching phonics as they are supposed to.

My Y2 class can, longtalljosie. At varying levels of ability, but all know how to decode using the sounds they have been taught.

Yes, I've just started looking into it and the school uses 'letters and sounds' - which doesn't sound like pure phonetics. Is that bad? I've been looking at the sue Lloyd website and she explains it all so clearly - would it be counterproductive to start doing some of that with ds? I was reading before I started school and haven't the foggiest how I learnt.

These are some of the words he was sent home with at the beginning of term:
It
A
if
am
of
in
is

What scheme is that then?

Sorry to hijack op!

mrz Sat 17-Dec-16 06:02:31

Children don't learn to read by osmosis

No decodable scheme expects children to learn lists of words in isolation. Hopefully it's just this expectation that's inaccurate - some schools insist on doing this, even though it's unnecessary. Unfortunately, some schools also.say these words are not decodable and must be learnt as wholesale, which is rubbish. Is the scheme a decodable one?

Wholes, not wholesale, stupid autocorrect.

The school say that they don't use just one scheme, but bits of lots of resources. I think I've heard floppys phonics, phonics international talked about, and letters and sounds is the one mentioned on their bumpf. Ds never has a decodable book sent home, just one picked from the bookcase at random.

Oh, misty9, those lists of words!

This is why teachers do it (copied, pasted and edited from a post I made on another thread)

It starts in the days when phonics was completely taboo and Look & Say reigned supreme. Suddenly fewer children were learning to read effectively. so someone came up with the bright idea that if children were intensively taught to remember the most frequent words which occurred in text (by memorising them as 'wholes', of course) they'd be able to read at least 50% of the texts they were required to read. Sadly this didn't really work very well either because most of these words were 'function' words (the, and, off, in, up, down etc) which only served to connect the more interesting, but less frquently occurring, content words. The ones which actually gave a clue as to what the text was about. However, the High Frequency Word myth was out of its bottle and there is no putting it back. "Children have got to learn the HFWs."

Well, children really have to learn to read all the words they're likely to encounter in their reading journies.

Along the way, as phonics began to creep back under the radar, the myth acquired an extra facet as it was declared that these HFWs were 'not decodable'. Well, if you've ever looked at a list of HFWs you will find that is palpable nonsense. Your list of words is a prime example, what is in the slightest bit difficult about sounding out 'it', 'in', 'if' and 'am'? 'A', 'of' and 'is' are slightly more difficult as the 'a', 's' and 'f' don't represent the sounds they have probably learned for those letters but it only takes a slight 'tweak' to get them sounding correct. There are a few which contain unusual or unique letter/sound correspondences and which are useful in early reading texts (though not essential) such as 'one' and 'two' but the rest are easily decodable as long as you know the code. The only reason the Jolly Phonics authors dubbed them 'tricky' was that they did contain very unusual code, or code that the children had yet been taught.

So do I need to be concerned and talk to school? Dh says we should be more concerned that ds can hardly hold a pencil...

Dare I say you worked out the relationship between the sounds in the words you heard and the saw and the letters on the page representing those sounds MM rather than osmosis? That's exactly what the fortunate few are able to do but until a child begins to struggle it's impossible to know who will and who won't work it out for themselves (or how much they will be able to work out)

The words are high frequency words (basically common words that frequently appear in books) that are really useful. Unfortunately for some teachers "tricky" "high frequency" and "key" seems to be a synonym for words that must be taught/learnt as Wholes

Teach your child how to decode the words in the list because they are seen so often in text children soon read them automatically which us the ultimate aim.

My DS is 4 and in reception he also brings home level 2 ORT but much prefers read, write inc. Phonics books that we read at home.

I bought a bunch off amazon (they're cheap and don't look as nice more like leaflets than books but my DS doesn't seem to care). I like that they don't jump around as much as ORT and consolidate the tricky words much more. He's come much further with these than ORT.

mrz Sun 18-Dec-16 06:16:57

Dare I say you worked out the relationship between the sounds in the words you heard and the saw and the letters on the page representing those sounds MM rather than osmosis?

I think we will have to disagree with the definition of osmosis