How do you teach a child to read?

[rsa001]

I have been reading a few threads on mumsnet about teaching children to read. Aside from the debate about whether or not a parent should teach a child to read before starting school; how do teachers teach children to read?
Is it a matter of using phonics to make sure they understand the various sounds and then move onto being able to sound out words like 'in' 'at' 'cat' etc, and then progressing onto larger and larger words?

I was looking at ORT level 6 books, wondering how a child could go from not knowing how to reading to being able to read 4 - 5 word sentences in 1 - 2 years

"With "he" for example? Would you tell them that the "e" at the end is sometimes sounded out as "ee" or would that be confusing? " exactly! "Yes e can be the sound /e/ but in this word it's the sound /ee/ can you read it? /h/ /ee/ he...well done"

Thank you so much for your help! You're all so clever! I would have loved to have learnt to read phonetically, I love rules!

My DD only knows her letter sounds at the moment, at what point are they taught the letter names?

Hopefully as late as possible.

They aren't necessary for learning to read and can confuse some children.

Thank you Rafals!

Is there much difference between the various schemes; jolly phonics, floppy phonics, Oxford reading tree? I suppose the big mistake would be to use different schemes S they might confuse the child. Is there any one scheme that is superior, or preferred by teachers.

Biggest difference between Jolly Phonics, floppy' phonics, letters and sounds is largely order of sounds and pace of learning. Different schemes shouldn't confuse the child but it can be difficult to mix and match resources. Something decodeable in one scheme isn't necessarily decodeable at the same point in another.

There are bigger differences between those schemes and linguistic phonics schemes like Sounds-write and Sound Reading system/ phongraphix.

Letters and Sounds is the scheme that's probably used most by schools because it's free.

If you go with Oxford Reading Tree, make sure you go with Floppy's Phonics, not the traditional ORT (which is Look and Say) or Decode and Develop (only 60% decodable but with a very misleading name).

I was listening to DS read his Floppy Phonics book last night whilst pondering the article I read yesterday about UK literacy rates being some of the lowest in Europe. As DS struggled with reading 'eigh' (pronounced ay) then later in the same book 'eigh' (pronounced I/ie) and sounds such as 'ough' 'oul' etc. I wondered just how much of that was due to English being so much more bloody complicated than, say, Spanish to pronounce. If DS was Spanish I'm pretty sure he'd be able to read just about any word by now . Trying to explain why some words are spelled as they are without getting into a huge etymology debate can be tricky at times!

The English alphabetic code is complex but learnable. It just takes a bit longer. Nearly every child will have grasped it after 2-3 years of teaching though.

Whether it's currently taught well enough in all schools for children to be able to learn it is an entirely different question though.