What do I do about reading books my daughter can't possibly read?

[Patchworksack]

Mr third child has just started Reception. The school have changed how they teach phonics AGAIN (3rd child through school, 3rd method= Read, Write, Inc) and I have dutifully attended the meeting to explain the method and gone out and bought the parent pack to support her at home. She is just starting to read CVC words and has been sent her first few books with words home. They are sending home ORT books which she can't possibly read with the method they are teaching - every page contains at least one word which has sounds she has not been taught, including split digraphs, y making an 'I' sound, ing endings etc. Given that these are books with 3-5 words to a page it's a significant amount of it she can't decode. I recognise they have budget constraints and maybe don't have enough RWI books for every child, is it too much to ask for books she can read with the method she is being taught, given that I'm expected to make her read it every night for a week? It is very definitely for her to read, they have another library book which is a story for the adult to read to the child.

Who did your training? Those strategies went out 12 years ago and are not what children should be using to decode the words on the page. It is a valid strategy for working out the meaning of an unknown word, but that’s about it.

Our reading lead did it and I don’t rate her at all. Will do some reading (!).

Suggest starting with Professor Dehaene Reading in the Brain, Professor Seidenberg Language at the speed of sight.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=25GI3-kiLdo

We have had some books like this, and were told the point of them is to understand how a book works and that the words refer to the picture. When dd started decoding cvc words I requested she be moved up to the next stage of books. What ort level is it?

"We have had some books like this, and were told the point of them is to understand how a book works and that the words refer to the picture" I should be shocked that some schools are still spouting this nonsense but sadly I'm not!

I would check she is being sent home with the correct book - ie. the easiest level.

My DD is also Reception and seems to be picking up sounds really well. However, she hasn’t yet been sent home with a proper reading book. A couple of the children have reading books, while the rest come home with picture books for the parents to read.

I personally don’t see the point in bringing home reading books too early - it might put a child off reading. And if you read the reading scheme books to your child you may bore them to death! A decent story from a picture book is much more fun.

They would have changed schemes because look and say is outdated and only helps about 80% of children to read whereas phonics is effective for something like 95%. It would be unfair not to change and disadvantage the 15-20% it works better for. Phonics is part of the national curriculum. (Nb figures are from memory and might not be entirely accurate).

As for changing between phonics schemes - well if you already have the wrong books it probably doesn't matter which one you're using, so you might as well change to the newest/best.

Okay perhaps not every school - but how many threads are there about this issue? I see them all the time and the OP's children can't all go to the same school - it must be a problem at lots of them.

It is a shame if funding was available that schools have not updated their stock. But I do think it would be very wasteful to simply throw out old books even though it's not the optimal way to learn.

Hi OP

Our school uses the same reading scheme. These are the books I bought to read at home when my son was in Reception - I'm currently using them for my daughter.

It’s not just not optimal, it actively disadvantages a number of pupils. It’s really difficult to unteach the guessing from initial letter/picture/context strategies once they are ingrained.

At this point I’m not sure funding has much to do with it. It must be a choice by schools. Either that or there’s an awful lot of schools whose reception reading books are at least 12 years old.

I would read the books to her. Let her read the cvc words if that's where she is. In the reading diary I would write xx read cat, hat and zip correctly.
It's rubbish that the school are not sending home books matched to her phonic level but you are obviously aware so able to use the books in a different way. Discussion of characters, situations, feelings, predictions are all useful skills too.

I would suggest that you read through the books together, dd says any words that she knows and you fill in the blanks.
After saying each sentence between you, you repeat the full sentence back to dd.

Also don't forget the importance of comprehension which often gets overlooked. I'm sure your dd has a good imagination and will give good answers to what's actually happening in the story.

Dd is in year 3 now and I remember reception when we had to fill in the reading record with both reading ability and comprehension ability.

I find it incredible that bright children are only allowed to read books which contain the words they can decode. Whatever happened to library books and having a go? My child wasn’t inconvenienced by thinking about what a word might be when she didn’t know it. Nothing was ingrained! I didn’t stress out over reading ether and neither did she. I think we were lucky in that she found it easy and had done lots of phonics at nursery so YR was a doddle. She chose The Diary of Samual Pepys as a library book in YR. The great fire interested her. We found words she could read and her general knowledge improved. It hardly ruined her school career!

Pointless and totally at odds with the RWI approach. I would go in and point this out to the school. They will probably say they don't have the money for new decodable reading books.

I have taught using RWI. The strategies it uses are very effective.

Mrz- if school are spouting this nonsense and encouraging guessing using context and picture, what can we do at home?

I used to read with the DC with each of us reading alternating words, partly so that we could make progress at the point when reading was becoming a chore to be completed before bedtime. If you did this with DD (bearing in mind that she probably wouldn't notice the odd occasion where you read two words in a row), would that leave enough words for her to read?

BubblesBuddy---but that was your individual child.

A lot of children, confronted with a whole bunch of words they can't read, will either resort to guessing/memorising their way through books, or become completely intimidated and just give up altogether.

The school is supposed to distribute books that will work with all readers.

As you yourself described, as your child was OK with books containing words she could not read, you went to the library and found your own books. There is nothing to stop parents doing this on an individual basis if this is right for their child. But when it comes to the books that the school sends home, they have to make sure that these books are right for all the children.

Basically, OP, you'll have to get your own books and do it yourself. It sucks and you should not have to do this, but I live overseas and have to take care of my child's English education myself, so think how much harder some of us have it! If there are other parents in your child's class in the same boat, you could even suggest putting your money together and buying one set of books that you can keep swapping among yourselves.

Or if you are really strapped for cash, try this downloading and printing off some decodable books from this site here www.speld-sa.org.au/services/phonic-books.html It is free, but do consider making a donation to the site. (I know the title talks about learning difficulties, but that is because the site was developed by tutors who work with children with reading difficulties---the little books worked great for my child and other kids I know).

As for the suggestion that the OP should read the decodable books TO her child---I would only bother doing this if the children were all going to be doing some sort of classroom activity/lesson which required them to be familiar with the story of the book. Otherwise I would ignore them.

The thing about poorly written "readers" that are not remotely decodable is, not only are they not very good for teaching reading, but they are also crap books for parents to read TO children because they use a very narrow vocabulary, short sentences and are really really boring (and predictable). I don't want to waste my time sitting there on the end of the bed going "What does the horse say? It says neigh, neigh neigh! What does the mouse say? It says squeak, squeak, squeak!" (etc. etc. etc.....Kokeshi slits wrists and dies screaming). When my kid was five, I was reading stuff like "The Wind in the Willows" TO her, not this kind of rubbish.

The Op said it was around one word per page!!! Not dozens of them. These books probably are not wrong and they won’t have lots of words in them either. They are not facing this DD with something she cannot possibly do so she is guessing the whole time! Of course guessing word after word is wrong, but one word on a page that needs a bit of help is very little. Fairly normal I would have thought. Anyone would think children never learnt to read before all this angst became the norm. Many of DDs friends could read before they went to school. I thought she was a bit slower than some as she wasn’t reading before YR and as a summer born I thought that was normal. After three weeks she had her first books. I really didn’t agonise over these books, and thank God, we didn’t have rules drummed in by teachers! It was fun.

I bought the read write Inc reading sets for dd from Amazon. They taught her to read pretty fluently in about 3 months. She'd managed to get to year 2 without learning many of her letter sounds. I thought the approach was excellent.. The sets of books were pretty cheap - about £8 for a set of 10 books. I think there were about 10 sets, getting progressively harder. A good investment and my other dcs both enjoyed them too.

"if school are spouting this nonsense and encouraging guessing using context and picture, what can we do at home?" It's very difficult for parents if schools continue to send home books based on the flawed three cueing system (Look and Say, Reading Recovery etc such as ORT and PM readers) but I'd encourage your child to read the words they have the knowledge and skills to accurately decode and show them how to decode the other words but don't expect them to do it alone and discourage them from guessing using picture clues or context.
There are free decodable ebooks on the Oxford Owl site but again it requires you to know what they've covered in school.
I recommend https://www.udemy.com/help-your-child-to-read-and-write/e/*^ a free course for parents if your child is just beginning to learn to read.

"The Op said it was around one word per page!!! Not dozens of them. These books probably are not wrong and they won’t have lots of words in them either." They are Look and Say books that require children to guess and actively encourage children to develop ineffective reading strategies. They also fail to meet the statutory duty of schools to provide books matched to the child's current phonics knowledge and skills so they are most certainly the wrong books.

"I find it incredible that bright children are only allowed to read books which contain the words they can decode." If they can't accurately decode the words they aren't reading the book ...it's that simple. The books should match the child's phonic knowledge and skills and a "bright" child (a child who has been taught or intuited how the sounds in our spoken language are represented in print ) will be able to accurately decode any word they encounter so won't need to resort to guessing from pictures or context.
Personally I find it unacceptable given the decades of knowledge that schools still ignore the evidence.

"Of course guessing word after word is wrong, but one word on a page that needs a bit of help is very little. Fairly normal I would have thought." Fairly normal for poor readers.