'Using picture clues and context are great for developing comprehension'

[Sleeperandthespindle]

This is the response I got to asking for decodable books from school for 4 year old in reception who is guessing from pictures when presented with Biff and Chip.

I don't agree. I can ignore the books sent home and give him others, I know, but he is clearly being taught to 'guess' in school.

The school are unlikely to change their mind, I realise, but older DC (in the same school) is struggling very greatly with literacy and the general approach seems unhelpful.

We have ORT levels 1 to 6, @ 8 books each level, half entitled "phonics" and half entitled "first stories". So it seems they aren't the Floppy phonics which seem to be a different set. I think that the ones we have are genius, and dc love them! We follow them in order and it is not a struggle because progression is slow. They also have games and a comprehension section. If anyone thinks they will lead my dc astray I would like to know though!

ORT have so many different schemes going it can be difficult to work out what's what.

The Biff Chip and Kipper core stories aren't decodeables and actively encourage guessing.
Bizarrely the decode and develop ones aren't decodable either.

Anything newer than that I.e. Floppy's phonics, Traditional Tales and some (but not all) of the project X stuff is. Largely they are in line with letters and sounds.

Scarlet, do you mind if I ask why you think teaching phonics in your school leads to robotic readers with poor comprehension when it doesn't in many other schools?

The problem is it's difficult to know which children are going to have problems with mixed methods and which aren't until you've done the damage.

And when thinks like looking at the picture and first letter and making a guess are really ingrained they are a total PITA to unteach.

I would say if their first approach to an unknown word isn't always to attempt to sound all through the word and the accuracy of their reading is being affected you might be storing up an issue for the future. In the early stages those things are more important than fluency.

Floppy's Phonics used the character of the dog from Biff and Chip but a phonics approach.

All the characters are in it.

rafal it is funny but without any training or specialist knowledge on my part what you have said has been exactly my instinct - I ask dc not to guess and to attempt to sound through the word when we are reading and they initially can't read a word.

The phonics books in the sets I have seem to be decodable, from memory. The stories seem to contain words which are not decodable, or at least not decodable based on the knowledge already built up.

If you are encouraging them to do that, then you could try just giving them the bit of the word they don't yet know.

If there are too many words they don't yet have the phonics for I would be tempted not to use those books yet. The book people often have a set of 36 songbirds for a reasonable price if you wanted to supplement. They occasionally have the Traditional tales books too.

Just checked one of the phonics books and all the words were very easily decodable, other than "said" which was learned as sight word a while ago, or so I thought before I was told than sight words don't exist.

rafal actually none of the words in the phonics books present a difficulty. We have not had difficulties so far, but I don't want to start bad habits. I can't remember the last word we had to stop on. I find myself saying "don't guess, sound it out" a couple of times a night and dc then usually gets the word, or we break it down, or sometimes it is tricky and i tell dc and dc then remembers - though I now assume this last option is wrong. When we first started reading "you" and "your" for example, they were not decoded, but remembered.

Sorry, I feel as though I am hijacking the thread. I am just interested.

For 'sight words' I explain the different spelling so in 'said' I just tell the child that the ai makes the sound e in this word, then they sound it out as normal with the knowledge of what sound the 'tricky' bit should be.

mogonfoxnight I think those are the biff and chip read at home books

mistoffelees I did the same, but earlier in the thread you will find people who know the latest research who say that there are no "sight" words, or a very small percentage, that all words are decodable (unless I am being dense).

Gosh, I have really disliked the songbirds, and so did my DD2. We got the from the library. I think the best one was level 4 (which I think is the first one we got), but in general the stories are not existent and full of repetitions within the text. Not something I would read with interest. We went through them very quickly, but never wanted to look at them again.

As for the pictures my DS started to cover them over at times as he found them distracting at times.
What will these children do when the pictures become less common?

The crux of the matter is that 80% of children learned to read successfully using mixed methods. So posters, eg the lady who is the lawyer upthread (sorry, haven't checked who) who learned to read without phonics may well think the approach is unnecessary. The issue is the 20% of children who didn't learn to read. Phonics has a success rate of 95-99% success, depending on which studies you look at. Most children would still be able to learn to read without phonics teaching, but good quality phonics teaching also reaches the 20% of children who were failed by the old system.

The whole 'using pictures to work out the words' business is so nonsensical. Words previous posters have cited as being 'not phonetic' or 'impossible to sound out' include of, often, to, was. How is a picture going to help a child work out any of those words?

The pictures are there to aid overall enjoyment and comprehension, not decoding. A picture can help a child understand that a thrush (which they can easily decoded) is a bird, for example.

The word "said" is decodable if you understand that the digraph ai can make the 'e' sound. Obviously that isn't one of the sounds children will learn when they are first learning to read.

"I am speaking from 15 years of experience of teaching hundreds of children with unique abilities and disabilities as everyone is different" whereas I'm speaking from twenty five years (in July) experience of teaching hundreds of children, with unique abilities and disabilities, most of it spent in reception and Year 1 as well as fifteen years as SENCO and ten as literacy coordinator plus as the parent of a child failed by exactly the methods you are advocating.

I use picture books with upper primary children in their general English lessons. The real joy of pictures is when they add information to, or subtly contradict, the information given in the words - so when the story is being told from one point of view, but the bigger picture is slightly different, for example. or where sophisticated pictures are used to give extra information about characters, setting, atmosphere, motivations, upcoming parts of the story...

Pictures are MUCH better when they aren't there to guess the text from - and it is the interplay of visual and textual information that gives them their particular joy.

Oh and in that time the only child to fail to learn to read using phonics had profound and multiple learning difficulties.

login sorry I meant what some people still refer to as sight words, the way I teach them is not for the children to learn them by sight and I call them tricky words to the children, I only do this for the words where the children do not know some of the code, not for all the high frequency words because many of this are not actually tricky for the children to sound out (e.g. did, not, for)

Login?! mogon

""said" which was learned as sight word a while ago, or so I thought before I was told than sight words don't exist." Said is a high frequency word (a word that is often found in written texts ( high frequency isn't synonymous for sight words).
The idea of phonics is that eventually children reach "automaticity" they read the words instantly.

https://www.literacyworldwide.org/blog/literacy-daily/2016/06/23/teach-ldquo-sight-words-rdquo-as-you-would-other-words

Phonics makes particular sense to me as a touch typist. I think I type in phonemes.

I think there is a confusion amongst some posters between:

• Words that are in the spoken or heard vocabulary of the child, but use a less common or secondary grapheme-phoneme correspondence. 'School' would be an example of this - a child reading using phonics would be able to sound out the two alternatives: s - 'ch' -oo -l and s-k-oo-l and be able to evaluate which matched the word that they know and which fitted into the sentence.

• Words not in the spoken or heard vocabulary of the child which contain an ambiguous phone / grapheme correspondence (by which i mean one with more than one alternative). So in a young child, 'archive' might be one of these - a word they do not know. In that case, they would need to sound out both alternatives, and require the person reading with them to say 'actually, in this case, it's the 'k' sound'.

That is why teaching children to read requires both teaching them really high quality phonics - so they arrive that the 'arkive or archive' decision point AND exposure to masses and masses of good quality literature so that they have more and more words in their heard vocabulary.

It isn't a reason to say 'phonics doesn't work because it arrives at a decision point that the child can only resolve if the word is in, or near, their vocabulary'. I would expect children to make inferences based on other known words, from their understanding of how common different phoneme / grapheme correspondences are, and from etymology, but there will still be points where they say 'I can't choose between pronunciation A or pronunciation B', in the same way as even a well-educated adult might with some biblical names or scientific terms.

But nobody says I can't read, or don't decode well, because I might come up with 2 alternative was to pronounce an obscure Biblical name, just as they wouldn't say a young child couldn't read because they said 'I don't know whether it is archive or arkive'.