"DS was able to guess some of the words from the pictures"

[drspouse]

Comment back on DS reading record.
He is massively struggling with GPCs that school say he knows but all the books he comes home with have maybe 1 or 2 of the things he can't do plus loads of much harder words (e.g. adventure, science).
I decided not to bother reading school books with him and have got one of the ORT book packs.
I will tell them I'm doing this but given that we forbid him from guessing what do I say to this comment?
He's in Y2 and on band 5, he can decode but struggles with any alternative spellings or split digraphs.

I have a feeling that DNiece1 would not be as good a reader as she turned out to be if we’d listened to the advice that children with autism don’t get phonics and need another method to learn to read. It took her longer than most to learn to blend, but she got there with good teaching and practice.

And the OP’s child can learn through phonics. He can blend fine. Even if he did need another method, suggesting that a child that potentially has memory and retention should learn by memorising soht words makes no sense.

I guess I’m just a well meaning MNetter. I know nothing I tell you.

Wow. Any need for the fucking attitude?

Papermover.

BTW how on earth is your DD in year 5 now?

Time shift Rafa.

That was quick.

But just!

This thread should come with a warning - beware before you post....

DrSpouse it wasnt that it took until year 3 to spot her issues with reading, she has a complex array of SEN and school were dealing with a lot of other issues alongside her education, which I wont go into. I just wanted to highlight that for some children sight reading is a valid approach. Not saying you need to take that approach with your DC, just trying to add a diff perspective as this thread is very "phonics is always the only valid route for all children" heavy.

I once taught a child who sight read every word we showed him, literally when he looked at a word and you told him the word he would remember it...honestly phonics made him bored 😐 we came to the conclusion that he must have eiditic memory or something...And he was an August baby... 🤷‍♀️😂 so it happens

Gosh, you go off and, you know, make tea, pick the DCs up, read FOUR PAGES with DS (go DS!) and come back to find someone's been rude (I assume!) and you missed it. Bother.
Shadows that's hard, DS is kind of the opposite in that he got off to a good start and then the school said "oh er yes, maybe he does have problems oops".

How do deaf children learn to read with phonics? How do children in countries with non-phonic script learn to read? While I am quite happy to accept most children in the UK benefit from a phonics based approach it really doesn't take much imagination to think of some situations where phonics won't work and alternative approaches have to be used. Is it that much of a leap to then realise for the small percent of kids that struggle with phonics (particularly those with SEN) there might be alternative methods that help get them reading.

And lets not get into accents. Should I dare ask how you decode scone, loch, murder or Milngavie ? Or my friend St. John at Magdalen College?

Deaf children learn to read using a form of phonics known as cued articulation.

It probably needs to be pointed out that phonics isn’t a method of learning to read. It’s the core knowledge that every reader needs to be able to decode new words independently. You either have children with a sight Vocab that’s limted by the number of words they can retain in their Vocab or children that can read every word out in front of them regardless of whether they’ve seen it before or if it’s already in their oral vocabulary.

Those children with SEN who can’t learn using phonics (and it is a miniscule proportion) and con only read words by sight have a reading disability.

I think the analysis of the ''interested but non-expert observer' (and tbh, many not well phonics trained teachers) can be affected, though, by the fact that children can APPARENTLY learn to read by learning words as wholes while what they are ACTUALLY doing is creating their own 'inferred phonics system'.

DS learned to read before he started school, primarily by himself. He has a very retentive memory, and would recite the books he had had read to him to himself, turniing over the pages and 'following' thee words. From that recitation, he matched words to their written representations, which allowed him to recognise those words in other contexts but also recognise 'bits of words' - graphemes - in other words.

I observed this - partly because i thought he seemed keen to learn to read, bought the Phonics handbooks... and discovered he could already read. However, from really minute observation, it wasn't that he could only read words that he knew 'as wholes', he could use inferred phonics knowledge to decode new words too.

Obviously it is much more efficient and direct to teach the pghonic code directly, rather than ask all learners to infer it. But I do wonder how many 'my child learned to read through whole words' parents / teachers actually had children who worked out the phonic code and really used phonics to read.

I once taught a child who sight read every word we showed him, literally when he looked at a word and you told him the word he would remember it

How did he manage when he came across a new word and there was no one to tell him what it was/how to read it?

Hi Countfosco

All really interesting points. I’ve lent out my copy of this book, and don’t want to misquote from poor memory, but I do think it explains all the issues you’ve raised.

It’s a interesting and accessible read.

Diane Mcguinness
Why Our Children Can't Read and What We Can Do About It: A Scientific Revolution in Reading
1st Touchstone Ed Edition
ISBN-13: 978-0684853567, ISBN-10: 9780684853567

@MartaHallard we had this conversation with his Mum, he usually would decipher it somehow (possibly with phonics in his head) but honestly by age 4 he was a free reader so i don’t know 🤷‍♀️ He was a seriously gifted little boy 😊

". Is it that much of a leap to then realise for the small percent of kids that struggle with phonics (particularly those with SEN) there might be alternative methods that help get them reading" we know that struggling readers find phonics more difficult than good readers so we can either leave them to continue to be weak readers or we can help them to master phonics. Teaching them the strategies that ensure they continue to struggle isn't the answer.

The only possible way he could have worked out a word he hadn't seen before is because he'd taught himself the alphabetic code. Some children do! These days, we tend not to leave it to osmosis and instead teach children the code explicitly. Even for.children to have worked out the vast majority of the code themselves, it's still useful knowledge for spelling.

DS1 is 10. When he was in juniors they had a boom with a page of small writing telling the guts of the story and the next page had about one sentence, usually one that they knew off by heart. I used to get ds1 to help me with some of the easier words on the small page, then I'd go through his writing book where they had e.g. ea or ar etc and I'd chant the sound with him and we'd dance around saying them (cringing here but it worked!) Then later he'd help me read a bed time book. I don't know the technical names for any of this but the big thing was it was fun and it took time. He'll get there but you have posted about this a lot so I think you need to relax a little

@Feenie yes probably, he was a wonder and such a joy to teach. He literally took everything and understood it instantly. I remember once asking him to help me solve a maths riddle 😂😂 he got the answer before me (it was a year 6 maths problem) he was in yr 2 at the time. I left that school a year later to join another school and that was 7/8 years ago I often think about him and wonder how he is!! He’s probably in university already 😂😂😂

"And lets not get into accents. Should I dare ask how you decode scone, loch, murder" in exactly the same way as you decode all words. You listen carefully to the sounds you can hear when you say the word (accent doesn't matter) and map the sounds to the spellings. St John is a corruption of the Norman French.
When the College was refound by Lord Audley in 1542, it was dedicated to St Mary Magdalene. The choice of the name of Mary Magdalene appears to have had a touch of vanity. In many early documents, the name is clearly spelt as pronounced: 'Maudleyn', containing within it the name of Audley.

Findings from brain research found