Non-decodable book sent home

[drspouse]

DS has just started Y1, he's decoding nicely and building up fluency. He is still on Red partly I think because he tends to mix up some of his digraphs.
I've done the Yellow digraphs on Hairy Phonics and read a few bits with him too. But if they feel he needs more practice on Red that's great.
However we've just had a non-decodable book from school. New Zealand publisher, 1997, all repetitive/guessable, and on every page is the word Time. He's not done i-e. The title contains i-e too.
Shall I send it back and say maybe it's in the wrong band?
He's started trying to guess words which we have firmly discouraged and I try not to say "you've seen this word before" unless it's an official "tricky word" but that's how he'd have to read this book.
Maybe advice from @mrz?

Debate? Debate isn't allowed on this board! It's worship at the altar of phonics or else.

Quite frankly how people such as myself who were at primary school in the 1980s can actually read or write at all is a constant source of amazement really.

Grotto everyone has already told you how but you've stuck your fingers in your ears and shouted LA LA CAN'T HEAR YOU.

You were fortunate many others weren’t

Grotto, there isn't room here for flexible thinking or alternative points of view, because that will lead children to fail reading according to those who believe it. They are passionate about kids' reading, which is great. I've read a wide range of literature on the topic, some agreeing with Mumsnet's seeming consensus and some deviating from pure phonics.

From what I've read, pure phonics actually leads to higher test scores in the early part of elementary. This is because a child is used to being drilled in a certain way and knows how to respond (see: phonics check). In upper elementary, the children learning pure phonics lose their advantage as the phonics moves from learning to read to reading to learn.

It's fascinating actually. Phonics should be a major part of any literacy program, and no one disagrees with that. Fluency however can be overlooked by a pure phonics approach in the drive to have children sound out every word. Many children don't even initially realize that they can just say a word when they know it.

You're not alone in having another perspective. It's just not the popular one here, or the minority is very vocal.

For the vocal phonic proponents, I'm not anti-phonics in the least. I'm not advocating the dreaded "mixed methods." Letting kids absorb whole words on their own while they learn to read by telling them is not the same as teaching via a "mixed method." If a child reads "come" /k/ /o/ /m/ /e/, you can safely tell them the actual word without discussing first split digraphs and how this word is an exception to that rule.

In the past, all children learned to read simply by being read to. Reading to your children is the only parenting activity proven to improve your child's school performance, and that requires no phonics. Vocabulary, whole word learning (how else do kids recognize "Thomas the Train"), and story comprehension are all valued, non-phonics skills that can be overlooked by strict phonics programs.

“Fluency however can be overlooked by a pure phonics approach in the drive to have children sound out every word. “ there isn’t any such drive. The ultimate aim of phonics is to be able to accurately and automatically read any word they meet so achieving greater fluency and understanding.

“If a child reads "come" /k/ /o/ /m/ /e/, you can safely tell them the actual word without discussing first split digraphs and how this word is an exception to that rule. “ why not tell them the spelling o is the sound /u/ and the spelling me is a different way to spell the sound /m/ then you can apply that knowledge to other words and be able to read come? Obviously you wouldn’t tell them it’s a split digraph.

Oh God huge post just vanished.
Anyway it's just got worse, teacher won't admit that the 1980s look and say book sent home isn't phonics and won't give me a list of sounds DS is supposed to know (as he keeps telling me he hasn't done sounds he has) so now I have NO CLUE what to do since DS raced through a decodable book from school earlier in the week so now expects to do the same with all the books.
So I've basically blotted my copybook with the teacher and got no further.

You could follow this up with the Head, as I did pre-new NC - although it wasn't so much following it up as being hauled in because I'd apparently made the Y1 teacher feel 'uncomfortable', what with expecting her to actually teach my child to read, and all.

After that, I gave up and taught him myself using Reading Chest. I could have used my own school's books but part of the draw for ds was the huge envelope addressed to him on the doormat.

Well our conversation was cut short as DD was desperate for the loo but I was trying really hard NOT to make him uncomfortable but may not have succeeded!
However our head is lovely and is unlikely to haul anyone in, though I might have a word if nothing improves.

Does anyone know if there's a list on the web of the sounds that SHOULD be taught at each stage?
For example DS says he hasn't done V-e, teacher says he has.
I was under the impression that Yellow was all about digraph vowels.

Is your school using Jolly Phonics?

Ours uses Letters and Sounds (I know not universally liked on here!), and this info is easily available: www.letters-and-sounds.com/what-is-letters-and-sounds.html

I can't easily see the same for Jolly Phonics but hopefully someone will be able to help.

It's ORT, I suspect that's why they think it's OK to keep giving out 1980s ORT books that say "practice the words mum, dad, and..."

At some point it's easier just to ignore school books and do your own thing. Songbirds is good for quickly and systematically covering phonics, and goes through in approximately the same order as most schemes. Though there's some slight divergence in exactly when e.g. split digraphs start coming in - iirc it was a stage later in Songbirds than ORT phonics, though it could have been the other way round...

Makes me cross for the other kids in DC's classes though.

Further words with DS teacher - he says they are only or mainly sending home books with sounds he knows. But DS denies knowing them and I don't really know how to re-teach them. And he is also supposed to know a whole load of tricky words that a) I don't know if he's supposed to be able to decode or if they are not actually SUPPOSED to be decodable (e.g. walk, some, come) and b) he tells me he's never seen before and can't decode.

DS wants to read the school books and I want to support him to be listening to the teacher. Especially as he tells me he hasn't done stuff that he has!

If the school are using letters and sounds, and they most likely will be, it's not going to be that easy to figure out what he has been taught.

You can safely assume all the phase 2-3 sounds should have been covered in the order suggested. But phase 5 isn't that easy to decipher IMO. And schools might have different ways of ordering the sounds.

A list of pseudo words might be a good way to work out what he knows. If you used one of the phonics play phase 5 games and got him to read the words out to you then you might get a good idea of which sounds he doesn't yet know.

Haha 80s mum! God knows how we learned to read without all this phonics stuff!
First and foremost, children should be surrounded by a plethora of books not just ones that can be decoded. Reading new words by sight and context is equally as important as blending and segmenting phonemes in unknown words.
By all means go into school and make the teacher feel absolutely crap. That teacher just might have worked a 60 hour week, again, for a miserable salary, have to manage 30 plus children whose mothers sole aim seems to be to tell them what a rubbish job they are doing on a public forum, possibly without a degree in education.
By all means, check what the purpose of sending reading books home is in your child's school, then maybe offer to go in one morning a week to listen to them read and change reading books.
Show some support for your child's teacher!

Reading new words by sight and context is equally as important as blending and segmenting phonemes in unknown words.
NO IT ISN'T.
How do you read a new word by sight anyway? Do tell.

Yes, don't you dare tell teachers to adhere to the statutory curriculum,, stop using long discredited methods that had no basis in fact ever, to teach to evidence based research or actually teach children the most basic skills they will ever need. Bless them.

Fuck that.

Surrounding them with books is another lovely, but famously discredited strategy.

To clarify, surrounding kids with books is always desirable. But it's not a strategy that unfailingly teaches children to read on its own.

It's also a bit of a kick in the teeth if you surround your children with books thinking that's all they need and then they don't learn to read.

I'm not sure anybody has ever said children shouldn't be surrounded by books anyway.

“First and foremost, children should be surrounded by a plethora of books not just ones that can be decoded”
Unfortunately surrounding your child with a whole library of books won’t guarantee that they learn to read. If that’s all it took every child would learn to read and we wouldn’t be worrying about literacy levels. Sadly this was the philosophy widely adopted that failed thousands of children leaving them unable to read or write beyond a basic level but it didn’t do you or me any harm so it doesn’t matter does it?
“Reading new words by sight and context is equally as important as blending and segmenting phonemes in unknown words.”
Yes those are the strategies employed by poor readers. I’m not sure how you imagine a child can read a word they’ve never seen by sight (the whole thing about sight words is you’ve learnt them by memorisation and to do that you’ve seen them and they are familiar not new - Teach one word by sight and the child can read one word by sight) then context - context is great for working out meaning but not so great for accurately reading new words. At best it’s a guess.

“Essentially when you teach whole words by memorisation you’re sending the message “I am going to teach you to read. Some words are can read by decoding and some you must memorising how they look. You won’t be able to tell which kind a word is just by looking at it, so you’ll simply have to guess which strategy to use, and sometimes, just guess what the word is”

“Show some support for your child's teacher!” Would you support your child’s doctor if they were using leaches to cure his/her cough? I doubt it because we’ve learnt better ways so why accept outdated ineffective teaching!

I hate that people think phonics is the ONLY way to teach children to read. Yes it works for some children, but others just can't get to grips with the sounds but can memorise the words. My brother and I both read before we started school at age 4 and I had never heard of phonics until I started working in a school! I learnt by sight memorising the words and at age 9 had a reading age of 14. I didn't get to 1000 or so words and not be able to remember any more! That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever read!

So every new word you encountered had to be memorised before you could read a text? That must have been very frustrating for you

Has anyone said 1000 words or so?
The actual figure is between 3000 and 8000 words not many when there are over a million in the OED.

Children that 'don't get phonics' and skilled adult readers who were early readers but weren't explicitly taught phonics aren't the same thing. They probably shouldn't be conflated but they often seem to end up being used to make one argument.

Actually, what do you mean by children who don't get phonics?