Please don't 'baby' your children

[pineapple95]

Where do I start?

Parents of my y3/4 class routinely carry their children's bags in, take their lunch bags to the hall, hand in letters and money, put their reading diaries and spelling books in the right places on the right days, linger in the corridor chatting ... for goodness sake MAKE YOUR CHILD LOOK AFTER THEIR STUFF!

7-9 year olds can carry bags and remember books. Don't baby them. Even 3 year olds can carry their bags - don't be that parent who mollycoddles their children.

As a teacher, I'm sure you have kids whose parents don't look after them/care for them much and I imagine you'd be happier if they did?

Parents can't win. They'll never do right in some teachers eyes.

REALLY - is this something to lecture us about?

Every child/family has a different story. It's not your business to judge. Your job is to educate our children and actually what you call mollycoddling, in most cases, is giving a child a solid foundation of love and attachment that will help that child to learn and do well in life.

What you've described sounds like a loving caring parent to me. If I knew you were my child's teacher who was having thoughts like this and feelings strong enough to post on mumsnet I'd not be happy to leave my child in your care.

It's a high stakes enterprise though, Rafals. You are guaranteeing that some children will be quite significantly ahead, with some children obv quite significantly behind. It's not that it's developmentally inappropriate to teach phonics at age 4. The question is what is gained by that, and what is lost. This goes for those able to crack the code as well as for those lagging behind.

If access to the curriculum in year 1 requires literacy then the children left behind will lose even more. If the curriculum in that year does not require literacy then there is little point to the early phonics. Early reading alone has little or no bearing on future academic success or happiness. There are many other important variables, the most important of which is not addressed by early decoding - namely vocabulary size.

Vocabulary is a function of socio economic status and parental education levels. There is evidence that children learning pictograph languages and alphabet based languages actually read using the same mechanism - word shape recognition as opposed to using sound it out methods once the initial decoding is taught, and that how reading contributes to academic success later on depends on vocab size. When a student at age 4 successfully passes through the phonics course that is not necessarily a guarantee that the important element of reading (comprehension) will follow.

There is a short term advantage to phonics - it is a measurable skill and satisfying to bean counters and people all red in the face about how schools have gone to the dogs since they were chaps, the 'bring back caning' brigade.
www2.gov.scot/Publications/2005/02/20682/52383
But eventually socio-economic advantage (and with it vocabulary) is the telling factor.

^Pls excuse Christmas name change....

Roundabout, if zzzzz had read the link I supplied then she would not have posted what she posted. I neither said nor implied what she thinks I did.

As to your demands - nobody has to prove credentials here. For all anyone knows, Mrz could be a hairy handed trucker living in his mother's garage. Even if s/he is a teacher, the posts of one teacher are not gospel truth as to the state of reception year in all schools in England.

Here's a school that starts on phonics in its nursery.
www.poplarprimary.org/Learning/Reading-and-Phonics/
Note reference to 'national required standard' wrt phonics screen early in Year 1.

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/669079/Early_years_foundation_stage_profile_2018_handbook.pdf
Expectations of English children in Reception.

www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/K/
This is what children a year older are doing in the US.
www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RF/1/
This is what they do the following year, at age 6-7.

I use the example of the US as it's an English speaking country. It is also, ironically, where much of the research was done that was claimed as the basis of phonics for Reception age students in England, but on children a year older (this fact was either not understood or overlooked).

www.curriculumonline.ie/getmedia/65898a7c-c6b7-410b-9fc7-fa314ba97952/PSEC01aEnglish_Guidelines.pdf
Another English speaking country. The approach is different again, with emphasis on the relationship between oral language and the written word.

" Note reference to 'national required standard' wrt phonics screen early in Year 1." So you're basing your views on your interpretation of information on one school's website?
At the end of Y1 there is a Phonics Screening Check to identify those children who may require support in Y2 (it uses a method commonly used in dyslexia screening programmes and in assessments used by Educational Psychologists). Like all Screening tools there is a cut off point which this school refers to as a "national standard" ...poor choice of words.

Don’t you just teach both sets of skills though - phonics and vocabulary. Phonics doesn’t happen to the exclusion of vocabulary unless a school is teaching reading badly. In which case, it’s not teaching phonics itself that’s an issue.

That’s the follow up to the Clack study you’ve linked to there. I’m not sure that study is convincing evidence that Vocab is a limiting factor. If anything it shows that children with low levels of Vocab on starting school performing at or slightly above chronological age for reading comprehension. Yes it’s starting to show a gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged children at 12 but both those groups had similar Vocab levels on entry to school. So it would be difficult to conclude that’s the limiting factor.

But mathanxiety - I read the link you posted for zzzz and have no idea what you were trying to get at.

As for your links, the summer term of year 1 is the end of year 1, not early on in year 1, giving children most of the year to be be taught what is required for the test. And EYFS is not like KS1 at all - the way children are taught, the curriculum and the syllabus are completely different, hence all the complaints from schools about the difficulties caused by government expecting data from reception/nursery to translate into a measurable base from which to assess progress of children through KS1. There is no great detail in the EYFS document you linked about precise stages children must have gone through with phonics learning by the end of reception, as they don't actually have to have got anywhere specific - the actual expectations for that tiny aspect of the curriculum are left pretty open. It is at the end of year 1 that government tiresomely tests children's ability to read nonsensical words using phonic knowledge - and then again in year 2 for those children who did not jump that hurdle in year 1 and, as I say, KS1 is nothing like Reception (which imo should not be in a school environment in the first place, as the whole approach of EYFS fits badly with the rest of the school years and I do not think the supposedly acceptable ratios of qualified adults to children in school settings fit well with successful teaching of the actual EYFS curriculum, rather than your interpretation of it as someone who clearly has not been trained as an EYFS practitioner in the UK and hasn't had their children go through the experience, either). Yes, there is constant tension with government and government interference in education, which is not helpful. Also, the UK has different issues to resolve within its population to those of other English speaking countries. These two issues make your comments, as someone who is not living here and thus experiencing how the tensions actually play out in the classroom and within society, come across as distant and far too theoretical, rather than based on practical reality. This is probably also why you keep finding yourself misunderstood - because what you say doesn't match everyone's practical experiences.

Phonics in England ...

Given most schools in England are probably teaching phonics for 20mins a day at most, often through games, I’m not sure how much of a concern the rest of the curriculum getting squeezed out is.

Roundaboutthebottom -
Here was my point, wrt SLI and fine motor skills
Observation of lags in fine motor skills can contribute to a diagnosis of SLI."

From which a poster extrapolated that working on fine motor skills could ameliorate SLI.
...............

zzzzz's question wrt fine motor skills and reading was
Why do fine motor skills need to be “acquired” before reading?

They are needed for reading readiness, as there is a link between visual perceptual skills, motor planning, visual motor coordination, kinesthetic feedback and grapho-motor skills in general with the skills of shape recognition and working memory that are applied to reading. Fine motor skills contribute to grapho-motor skills, which in turn contribute to reading readiness. Grapho-motor skills also require working memory of shapes and physical ability and a complex interplay of other factors to reproduce that shape that is present in the 'mind's eye'.

Fine motor skills are not just needed as the foundation of skills related to writing, but for living life in general and for establishing a sense of their place among their peers. Children whose fine motor skills are underdeveloped tend to need more help in self care - zipping, un/buttoning, tying/untying shoelaces, buckling/unbuckling buckles, building with all types of blocks, feeding themselves with a spoon or fork, using a cup without spilling, and much more. At home and even in a school setting they may expend energy using gross motor skills and do a lot of running, jumping, wrestling with siblings, kicking balls around, in preference to activities requiring fine motor skills. As an aside, boys can get away with this preference far easier than girls can. Girls can be treated as problem children to a greater extent than boys are if they have fine motor lags and compensate with gross motor skills.

In the classroom setting they will have difficulty using scissors, using crayons or pencils or wielding a paintbrush, using a mouse for a computer, putting pegs in a pegboard, colouring in neatly, putting puzzle pieces together, lacing, and more. Wrt SLI, the tongue is a muscle that requires lots of small movements in order to be used effectively for speech and to keep control of saliva. So observation of overall lags can contribute to certain diagnoses if speech issues are present. The lack of overall lags in fine motor development can contribute to different diagnoses.

In terms of how a child experiences school and how classmates and teachers experience the child, fine motor skills can make a negative difference. Children can get frustrated when faced with tasks involving fine motor skills that are beyond them. They can feel down about themselves when they observe other children producing better results than they can with scissors or writing materials. They can compensate with gross motor skills - for example emptying a whole container of crayons onto a table so they can more easily pick up the colour they want (creates a mess and poor impression) or tip over a stack of objects like books to get at one near the bottom instead of attempting neater strategies (again, mess and poor impression). Or they can ask for help more frequently than the other children do.

Frustration can express itself in behaviour that is seen as wild or rambunctious, or aggressive, or can be put down to failure to adapt to the classroom environment. Fine motor skills and grapho-motor skills activities can make children with lags fatigued and they can act out because of that. Children can be labelled as problems. This is especially true in schools where teachers must deal with large class sizes and expectations of academic results - pressures that should not be present when dealing with four year olds but are there because of government policy failings.

It is always a negative when a child gets a label early in their school career. Someone not developmentally ready for reading at age four can feel that there is something wrong in a classroom environment where the other children seem able to grasp what is being imparted in those twenty minutes of direct phonics instruction. It can affect feelings of self worth, completely unnecessarily because not 'getting' phonics is not a problem until the child approaches 7 once all the foundation skills are in place. It can affect the level of engagement with school. It can affect the relationship with the parents. The lack of the various levels of foundation skills, or trying to accordion development of those skills into too short a time frame can lead to issues producing the end result that the curriculum demands, which in turn leads to its own set of problems.

The decision that four was the age when children should be able to produce measurable results in terms of the end product of so many foundational skills was not based on any research into optimal age. It was a political decision designed to appeal to a core group of voters.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9817.12081
The interplay of many factors involved in creating reading readiness. Mrz's brief paragraph on the context of phonics work falls woefully short of what is actually necessary for successful direct teaching.

(Again, the children who were subjects of the study into reading readiness are older than English children who are expected to produce measurable results - not reading readiness but actual decoding - in Reception).

That was not my point. It was included in what I posted but not my conclusion.

The conclusion was that lags in FMS can lead to or accompany delays in grapho-motor skills and also to classroom activity problems. Another conclusion was that grapho-motor skills are the ones directly related to writing and to reading. (That is a very brief summary).

I think you are missing a lot of what I am posting, zzzzz...

But mathanxiety - children with SLI and fine motor control issues have massive self-esteem issues and are labelled as problems early on with or without 20 minutes of phonics a day, and also you specifically left children with SEN out of your objections to the teaching of phonics earlier in the thread. Fwiw, my ds struggled massively with gross and fine motor skills in reception - this did not stop him reading fluently at the age of 3, nor from learning to write (he learnt pretty much all his motor skills by rote, from rolling over onwards...) so I think the interplay between motor skills, reading and writing is actually extremely complex and still a very long way from being adequately understood.

Ps your wiley.com article is interesting.

As a teacher, married to a teacher, and a mother of 5 I’m going to guess you haven’t been in teaching that long and you don’t have your own 9 yr old?

My dd2 has short term memory and organisational issues. If i didnt take slips and money to the office..she would likely forget or lose it. She was also super shy in primary and didnt speak much to anyone.
I think a parent knows their child better than a teacher so let the parents decide whats right for their child.
Plenty of bad parents out there that couldnt care a less about their children.

Children with SEN are of course in a difficult position wrt peer perceptions and they suffer especially when there is little or no dedicated support in the classroom. It is a horrible situation.

I am confining my remarks to what is termed on MN 'NT' children though, as the challenges of children with SEN are unique to each individual and also perhaps unique to each classroom.

You cannot extrapolate from the experience of your one child to all children. A generally recognised list of pre reading skills necessary for effective reception of formal teaching of phonics is in place and more insight added as tome goes on. More and more studies are casting light on necessary developmental milestones. General rules can be inferred.

YY to this: the interplay between motor skills, reading and writing is actually extremely complex and still a very long way from being adequately understood. But at this point we can suggest that the exceptions prove the increasingly coalescing rule.
......
I think there may just be a case of terminology variance, zzzzz.

zzzzz wrt your baffling conversation - read the paper linked, if you want to see if what I am saying is that the sky is red all the time or part of the time.

I read every link I post. I post links so that others can see what I am driving at if they so wish. It saves me time, but not if I have to go back and do all the spade work for people who can't be arsed to read the links.

The content of the links is part of the conversation...

But mathanxiety - can you not see that you are trying to use the exceptions to prove your rule - but only if the exceptions suit you? You have posted links to research on children with SLIs (a very clear SEN - and children with dyspraxia, dyslexia and asd also have similar deficits or oddities of movement). How do the peculiarities of children with SEN prove your rule about the development of NT children, especially when you then go on to exclude them from your concerns about learning in the classroom, because you say their challenges are "unique"?!