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?

“There's an assumption there that good early readers won't also pick up phonics “ no if I’d been assuming that I’d have said “Unfortunately free readers do struggle later” instead of what I actually said “Unfortunately many of those free readers do struggle later”

We can learn to read the words by explicit phonics instruction or by deducing phonics for ourselves of course we also need vocabulary knowledge for comprehension or we can learn to guess using a variety of useless strategies.

If children are only learning to read via phonics, how does that account for all the children who are free readers or on higher bands before the end of year one, ie before the end of the phonics courses?

Based on my experience with my two DSs, it is because they happened to be in the 80% who were able to work out the code by themselves once they realised how it worked. Nothing to do with using other methods alongside phonics.

DS1 didn't know any phonics when he started reception (but I had already taught him how to read in the minority language). He picked it up quickly at school and ended up reception reading Year 1 books. Midway through Year 1 he finished the levelled books and was a "free reader". He also used to go for phonics lessons with the children in Year 2 while he was in Year 1. To me it means he only needed to learn the basics, and from there he worked it out.

With DS2, again, I taught him how to read in the minority language first, and then, as he was very keen and kept trying to read English with the sounds of his other language, I got him some flashcards and the set of decodable Songbirds books. I taught him the sounds he needed in his second language using only phonics. The same as DS1, he learned it very quickly and could read in English before he started reception. And I know it's purely phonics because DS2 can read any word in English even if he hasn't seen or heard it before and doesn't know its meaning. Or even in a book with no pictures and no clues from context.

So, yes, I'm sold on the phonics method being the most effective one. And completely agree that rather than wait to see if the children are in the 20% group that won't be able to work out the code by themselves and would need explicit phonics instruction, better to teach all the children using the best and most effective method.

how does that account for all the children who are free readers or on higher bands before the end of year one, ie before the end of the phonics courses?

Surely kids who find it easy to learn are just introduced to more phonics faster, there's no reason why a "phonics course" needs to take two years? DD has certainly never had anything but phonics, she's never looked at pictures and guessed because she's barely read books with pictures, she's never been given sight words to learn or re-read a book so remembering words isn't part of it, and she's quite capable of reading all sorts of made up names and words in any case.

She was just introduced to the phonics she needed as and when, ie they got through their "phonics course" quicker. It would be like suggesting a kid that learnt their 12 times table before year 2 must have done something different than just learnt the maths sooner, bonkers.

DD has certainly never had anything but phonics, she's never looked at pictures and guessed because she's barely read books with pictures,

So you never shared picture books with her when she was younger? Never read the gruffalo? How sad.

That's not her reading, Grotto

You seem to be confusing sharing stories with independently reading school scheme books. My eldest never picked up picture books to read himself despite being more than capable of reading them but we shared these at bedtime with lots of cuddles. His choice of reading rarely had illustrations (occasionally photographs) and were deadly boring except to him. There’s a place for reading widely for pleasure and reading for learning.

Deliberately confusing them, imo.

Never really a fan of the Gruffalo, but certainly it was read, but as drspouse said, sharing stories is not her reading, and the one thing we never did was try and shoehorn reading practice into any of the story sharing, we just read and chatted. She might've been following along the words by the time she could read somewhat - but then we generally read stories where the words to picture ratio was such that there was no chance to guess from them.

By the time she was wanting to read, her interest in books was in the same as the ones we read, so those are the ones she attempted which weren't her school phonics ones, that and things on the computer of course.

Grotto, I think OP is happy to follow advice of MN teachers who recommends phonics only approach. So what's the point of trying to change her mind? If you believe mixed methods works for your dc, great. But I really don't know what you are trying to achieve by making those comment, tbh.

I'm not confusing anything. children who start to read before school, how do you think that happens? It certainly doesn't happen in a vacuum so I'm guessing sharing books with a child has a lot to do with it.

Mind you I only have my own child to go by obviously so perhaps others just sit there morose whilst being read to and don't ever engage with the words.

I'm not trying to change anybody's mind - OP asked a question on a discussion board and it's being you know, discussed. So here's my answer - chill out OP, if he can't read all the words tell him what they are and if it's most of the words he can't read then he has probably been moved up a band too quickly. Let the teacher know so they can reassess.

Grotto, my ds was reading before school, but I assume he figured out code himself. He is one of the lucky ones. And I am sure he wasn't just using sight reading or memory because he was able to read the words he has never seen before. But still, I think phonics taught at school was good thing, he might have had gaps in knowledge.

I wish people would stop trotting out "they worked out the code by themselves". That cannot happen in a vacuum! You need some context to understand what you're reading.

Otherwise you could understand this
Fifufuc xys ihgd sok ohg.

All totally decodable in my language! Oh, you can't read it?

I don't quite get your point?
All children have sound-meaning links.
Some work out the phonics without instruction.
Most need instruction.
What's the relevance of that post?

Grotto, he can't read most of the words because it's not from a scheme with even approximately the same order of introduction of words as the teaching methods being used. If you didn't move them up till they knew all words in all look and say stage 1 books they'd be there all year.

Really don't understand why you'd want to encourage OP to go along with using a method which has a known higher failure rate than pure phonics and reading dull repetitive books to boot.

My preschool reader very definitely used phonics fwiw. There was about a year when she could decode simple words but didn't think of applying this to books, probably because we were reading her the gruffalo etc and she would just snuggle up and enjoy the story. Then she discovered Songbirds and she was off. We had to ration her to a level a week.

“Otherwise you could understand this^ Fifufuc xys ihgd sok ohg. ”^ if it was written using the English orthographical system you would be able to read it and if the words were in your receptive vocabulary you’d understand at least in a literal sense. You’re argument actually shows why we need to understand how our written language relates to the spoken (otherwise known as phonics).

“You need some context to understand what you're reading” to read at a basic level you need to be able to accurately read the words and the words need to be in your receptive vocabulary.
If you can’t accurately read the words context is pretty useless unless your happy to take a chance that you can guess well enough.

I always think of this lighthearted comment when people mention context as a strategy

Thank you Whole Language. Thank you for your many pearls of wisdom. Thank you for Context Clues. Thank you for Prior Knowledge. Thank you for the Initial Consonant. Thank you for Picture Clues. Thank you for Miscues.

But most of all, thank you for my wife. The other day she and I were riding along the highway and saw a sign for a town called Verona, so my wife read "Veronica". It's very simple, you see. First she applied Context Clues (she knew we were looking for a name). Then she applied the Initial Consonant ("V"). Then she applied Prior Knowledge (she already knew of a name "Veronica"). She put these Whole Language strategies together and ... success! At least, as much success as we can expect, I suppose.

Thank you William S. Gray for inventing "Look-Say" and the "Dick and Jane" series of basal readers. Thank you A. Sterl Artley for helping Mr. Gray and for your phonics-bashing diatribes of the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the National Education Association for giving Mr. Gray and his friends two years of free promotion in the NEA Journal in 1930 and 1931. Together you all had managed to essentially eradicate phonics from America's public schools by the 1950s and early 60s, when my wife went to school.

But more importantly, thank you for my wife. Awhile back she was reading a pamphlet about something that was described as "venerable". Now that's a word you don't see every day, so what did she do but cleverly pull out her Whole Language skills? Context Clues, you see, told her that she was looking for an adjective. Next was the Initial Consonant "V". Then out came the Prior Knowledge -- she simply thought of an adjective she already knew that was about the right length and started with "V". And voila ... success again ... she came up with "vulnerable". Perfect! Well, at least as perfect as things get in publik ejukayshun, right?

Thanks Kenneth Goodman for reviving the floundering Look-Say, adding a few New Age twists and renaming it Whole Language back in the early 80s. Just like the Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Grains and everything else that was Whole ... what else could it be but wonderful? Without you, Kenneth, the evils of phonics might have returned, and then where would we have been?

Thank you Dorothy Strickland for "Emerging Literacy" -- the idea that kids are naturally inclined to read if only we will surround them with literature. Thanks to all the other Whole Language textbook authors who cranked out textbook after textbook that either omitted phonics entirely or disparaged phonics openly. Thank you Teachers College, Columbia for promoting Whole Language to teachers' colleges worldwide. Can you even imagine how effective you were in eradicating phonics instruction throughout the English-speaking world?

Thank you International Reading Association (IRA) and National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). For decades you appointed people like William S. Gray and Kenneth Goodman to lead your entire organizations in the fight against phonics. Somehow you raised hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of dollars to pay PR firms to get their opinions so heavily quoted in the press that the public is now completely confused in its ideas about what works and what doesn't work in reading instruction.

But once again thank you for my wife. Awhile back she was reading about some Congregational Church. And do you know, even with the Context Clues and the Prior Knowledge (about what names churches might have, presumably) and the Initial Consonant, she still managed to come up with "Congressional Church". Even though this was years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday.

Thank you Alfie Kohn and Dennis Baron and Mike Ford and Gerald Coles and Harvey Daniels and Regie Routman and Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen and Jim Trelease and all the other propagandists who lash out continuously against successful practice in general and phonics in particular. Through your tireless efforts, the public is continually misinformed. Without the public's perpetual state of confusion and misinformation, Whole Language would not have survived a single day. Thank you for keeping Look-Say and Whole Language and Balanced Literacy alive to create yet another generation of people who can read as well as my wife does.

Speaking of my wife, last night she was reading a brochure aloud about a museum with an "eclectic" collection, and what do you suppose she said? You guessed it (and so did she): "electric"! Maybe the absence of the Initial Consonant threw her off.

Thank you Marie Clay for inventing the phenomenally expensive Reading Recovery, a program installed in virtually every public school, it seems, and designed to treat the educational effects of Whole Language by applying yet more Whole Language. Thank you for giving my school district more stuff like this to spend my tax money on. How is it that I am not clever enough to imagine things like this?

Thank you Richard Allington, current (2005) president of the International Reading Association, for your campaign of misinformation against Direct Instruction (a successful phonics-based program). The cleverness of your propaganda puts the Soviets, the Chinese Communists, and all the other tyrants of the 20th century to shame. You know of course that Direct Instruction (DI) participated in a huge study (Project Follow Through) in which all the participants except DI failed, and in which DI succeeded brilliantly. And so you twist this around to say that by virtue of its association in this study with the constructivist-favored instructional styles that failed so miserably, we should all conclude that DI must necessarily also have been a failure. Your logic, so typical of that of the IRA, the NCTE, and the rest of the Constructivist Cabal, is irrefutable.

But once again thank you all for my wife. Hardly a day goes by when she does not demonstrate the success of Look-Say, or Whole Language, or Balanced Literacy or whatever you all call it now. Really, it's so amusing I really can't even quantify it. I never know what she'll read next ... and neither does she! Just imagine all her Miscues!

The sheer unpredictability of listening to her read is astounding ... and unpredictability is the essence of entertainment, right? I mean, she might read "deleterious" as "delicious" or perhaps "injurious" as "injustice" or "parabola" as "parachute" or maybe "quintessence" as "quintuplet", or "signify" as "signature". I could go on and on almost endlessly. The laughs just never stop here. And all thanks to you. All of you.

So thank you, Whole Language. Where would we be without you? The possibilities just boggle the mind.

-- Anonymous

[Note: This author normally signs his work, but in this case declines because he doesn't want his wife identified in this manner.]

It's "your argument" and "you're happy" but I guess they're the same phonetically so it doesn't matter.

"Otherwise you could understand this
Fifufuc xys ihgd sok ohg.
All totally decodable in my language! Oh, you can't read it?"

Umm, sorry to be dim, but I still don't get your point. Is your "language" English? Otherwise no way I can decode that. And no way my ds could decode that either. I really don't know what you are trying to prove here, tbh.

“It's "your argument" and "you're happy" but I guess they're the same phonetically so it doesn't matter.” No they are the same phonetically but they’re ja symptom of my fat fingers and a small keyboard combined with my failure to read what I’ve typed on my phone before pressing post (and the lack of an edit facility on MN )

I just think it's just silly for you to point out mrz's typo to try to win the argument, grotto. If she is so terrible with her grammar, she would have lost respect long ago. Nobody cares, since we know it's a simple typo, not because we respect the teachers no matter what.

Thanks Irvine I’m totally guilty of making silly errors and I could have kicked myself when I read the posts. No excuse for not checking before I posted.

Nobody cares

Actually I do care about the literacy levels of educators. They are teaching our children.

I care too and as I say I could kick myself for not checking what I’d written before posting. It’s a really stupid error.

Ignore - Grotto made her GF credentials clear with her first post and has nothing else to offer in terms of debate