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.

Perhaps you'd like to look at the full document my woeful paragraph came from Mathanxiety ...<a class="break-all" href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130321055757/www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/0201-2006PDF-EN-01.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20130321055757/www.education.gov.uk/publications/eOrderingDownload/0201-2006PDF-EN-01.pdf

Theoretical implications and future research
The current findings are consistent with the idea that FMS play all but a limited role in the prediction of kindergarten emergent literacy skills.

And in all honesty, I think children like mine, who have no issues with processing speed, working memory, long, medium or short term memory or sequencing skills, who learnt to read very young but who nevertheless had delayed motor development (despite normal muscle strength), shine a very interesting light on what is going on in the human brain and nervous system, and on the knock on effect that different deficits can have on overall development.

https://news.stanford.edu/2015/05/28/reading-brain-phonics-052815/

The Journal of Research in Reading recently investigated the relationship between fine motor skills and reading development in 144 kindergartners in Germany. Each child was evaluated with several fine motor skills, early readings skills and cognitive measures. The results indicated the following:
• fine motor skills related less strongly than graphomotor skills to emergent literacy skills.
• when controlling for graphomotor and cognitive skills, fine motor skills did not explain the variance in emergent literacy skills.

.

The relationship between motor proficiency and reading ability in Year 1 children: a cross-sectional study
N. Milne1*, K. Cacciotti1, K. Davies2 and R. Orr1

Your Stanford reading brain study involved 16 literate adults, Mrz.

And actually, both phonics and whole word method approximations (using a new alphabet created for the purpose of the experiment) resulted in success, in that experiment. Learning happened in different ways with each method.

There is nothing there that suggests that teaching phonics to children who are four is advantageous to the children.

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'.
This is what I said wrt fine motor skills and grapho-motor skills and grapho-motor skills and reading readiness.

The Journal of Research in Reading study you speak of is the same one I linked to.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-9817.12081

Literate adults who had to learn a new writing system so comparable to beginner readers.

Beginner readers in the Stanford understanding of the term very likely means older than age 4, Mrz.

I am not sure the study is even useful as a means of suggesting similarities with beginner readers of the age of American beginner readers.

There is a heck of a lot of neural pathway development and also atrophy between early childhood and adulthood - and there is no indication of how old these adults were, what medical histories they may have had (sport related concussion?) what medications or recreational drugs they may have ever taken, what writing systems they may have been exposed to (Cyrillic, for instance, or Hebrew, Arabic or Japanese script).

"There is nothing there that suggests that teaching phonics to children who are four is advantageous to the children."
Why would there be?

Because they would be your beginner readers in the UK, Mrz, being exposed to daily phonics, and expected to produce results by the end of Receptions year.

Or maybe you would like to clarify why you posted the link to the article about the Stanford study, if not to reinforce a case for teaching phonics to children who are four.

But mathanxiety - why did you post links to research about children with SLIs in order to try and reinforce your arguments? Why was that any more appropriate than what mrz did? That research was 100% certain not to have been done on the development of NT children. And the research on other children that you linked showed very weak connections only with reading - even when giving up on the link with fine motor skills and creating a bastardised version which requires multiple skills mixed together (grapho-motor skills), the link did not appear strong with reading. So why have you not posted research which clearly demonstrates harm to 4-year old NT children from learning phonics, given that this is your firm belief? Or is there no such research available to you?

What might be useful is longitudinal research in the UK starting on very young children - not research on 6-year old German children. And there's a massive population of children here already learning phonics at a very young age to do tests on!

The younger the child, the easier it must be to establish how strong the link between the ability to learn phonics rules and having pre-existing grapho-motor skills actually is, given that the child will have had less time learning grapho-motor skills.

And what of the link with auditory perception? Surely good auditory perception is vital? The focus on grapho-motor skills is getting a bit obsessional, as they are clearly not the only thing to think about in reading development.

Mathanxiety you seem very confused

"So why have you not posted research which clearly demonstrates harm to 4-year old NT children from learning phonics, given that this is your firm belief?" Because no such research exists

why have you not posted research which clearly demonstrates harm to 4-year old NT children from learning phonics, given that this is your firm belief?

I don't have 'firm beliefs' about this matter. That is not what science /stats/ research are about.

I am ready to accept that teaching reading via SP at age 4 is the way to go as soon as someone shows me evidence that this is the best way to do things.

There are no studies that show long term benefits to this. In fact, there are studies showing that the other factors surrounding reading always come to the fore and negate whatever early gains may have been made by teaching via SP at age four.

It's a policy that was introduced for political reasons, based on research on older children. The age was chosen because this is when children start school in England and it was considered politically important to have teachers and children looking busy.

It's not enough to have clearly demonstrated harm as a result of a policy based on no research whatsoever. Successive governments have subjected teachers and children to a curriculum that has no basis in research. Effectively, this is a massive experiment.

Surely good auditory perception is vital? The focus on grapho-motor skills is getting a bit obsessional, as they are clearly not the only thing to think about in reading development.
Roundaboutthebottom

That is why I mentioned 'other factors' too. I didn't go into every single factor as some are self apparent, and also the topic of discussion was fine motor skills, to which I added the topic of grapho-motor skills. The context was a discussion of fine motor skills.

If you would like to discuss auditory factors too, happy to oblige,. Otherwise, I prefer to stay on topic.

Mrz as an aside, the ad hominem remarks are not making you look good.

You keep repeating misinformation Mathanxiety sorry if pointing that out upsets you

Phonemic awareness is primarily an auditory skill of distinguishing and recognizing the sound structure of language. Children who can not distinguish and manipulate the sounds within spoken words have difficulty recognizing and learning the necessary print=sound relationship that is critical to proficient reading and spelling success.