Mrz, anyone, please! GPC and book band chart?

[drspouse]

Probably asking for the moon on a stick but @mrz or anyone does such a thing exist?
After the comment about "good guessing" in DS reading diary we've had:
School telling me they can't afford phonics based books.
The EP telling me DS (who can decode happily and passed his Y1 screening but has gone a bit backwards) needs to move onto a whole word scheme (afraid I told one of the SEND people I was deeply unhappy with that)
And now DD who is on Pink band has come home with books with "nose" "tongue" "dizzy" "round" "going" etc etc.
I'm now implementing a strict policy of sending them back (DD) and ignoring them (DS). We've subscribed to Reading Chest (though it also has reams of Look and Say books).

Reading chest stock phonic bug books. You could use this chart and select books for your favourites to target particular GPCs.

www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/AssetsLibrary/SECTORS/PRIMARYASSETSNEW/Literacy/BugClub/CompCharts/U109-Bug-Club-iPDF---Comp-chart.pdf

Having said that - I’m not actually sure what GPC stands for so that may be nonsense!

A very rough guide •pink book band s, a, t, p.i, n, m, d.g, o, c, k. ck, e, u, r. h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss.
Red band j, v, w, x. y, z, zz, qu. ch, sh, th, ng. ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er. In cvc words
Yellow band all the above but with adjacent consonant words such as stop, jump, train, bright etc
Blue /green/ orange bands - alternative spellings for the sounds

The thing to remember is the criteria used to band books is based on whole language /Reading Recovery so isn't a good match.

If you have an iPad /phone https://www.phonicbooks.co.uk/advice-and-resources/interactive-ibooks/ the first unit (4books) is free
Or these on kindle

@lemonFritz it means grapheme phoneme correspondence. So which letters, digraphs etc are being worked on.
@Norestformrz thanks, I shall print it out and stick it near the school back deposit spot to quickly refer to.
Had a "discussion" with someone else saying they are a specialist teacher, this doesn't work for ASD, I didn't learn to read like that blah blah blah.

*bag not back

We used the Reading Chest and you can exclude certain sets of books via your book list page, so you can exclude most of the look and say books.

Yep that's what we've done!

Thank you @drspouse. That was what I thought it meant, the page I linked should be helpful.

OP, our school has phonics books but when a child has read all of them in one stage, they are put on non-phonics books.

I wrote a comment saying could we please have phonics books, the others are causing DD to develop bad habits (e.g. guessing) and are not giving her enough words to actually practise her phonics on. The reply was 'unfortunately our book scheme doesn't match our phonics teaching programme' to which I replied 'do we need to do some fundraising for the school?'

But the reality is, the school (in our case at least) does have the funds to buy more phonics books. They just don't believe in them. They taught the whole class the GPC such as ay, oo, igh, ... but rather than giving a child a book that contains these, and other GPC they know, so they could actually practise what they have been taught, they are given 'easier' red-band non-phonics books...

We are doing similarly, sending non-phonics books back, providing our own phonics books.

From DD being on red and yellow books at the moment, I can tell you that it depends a bit on the particular scheme. So what Mrz says:
A very rough guide •pink book band s, a, t, p.i, n, m, d.g, o, c, k. ck, e, u, r. h, b, f, ff, l, ll, ss.
Red band j, v, w, x. y, z, zz, qu. ch, sh, th, ng. ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er. In cvc words
We haven't encountered ai, ee, igh, oa, oo, ar, or, ur, ow, oi, ear, air, ure, er in red band, CVC or not. In Floppy's phonics, Big Cat phonics, Songbirds, and Jelly and Bean, these seem to first appear in yellow. IIRC!

Yellow band all the above but with adjacent consonant words such as stop, jump, train, bright etc
Songbirds in Yellow starts with adjacent consonants (6 books) and only then moves on to oo, ai, ow, etc (next 6 books). Other schemes don't seem to particularly bother with the adjacent consonants.

Blue /green/ orange bands - alternative spellings for the sounds
Yep, in blue especially the split digraphs. But blue and above there are very few phonics books around, I find.

The new Ofsted framework has phonics extremely high on its agenda - I've seen the briefing for inspectors who will want to know (amongst other things) what phonics scheme is being used, whether it is used rigorously and with accuracy and whether children's phonic knowledge is closely matched to their decodable reading book.

Some of the schools' excuses that we keep seeing on MN are going to send them straight into RI, if not special measures, and rightfully so.

Ooh I wonder if their current school will be inspected in the near future... will be making my views VERY firmly felt.

Some of the schools' excuses that we keep seeing on MN are going to send them straight into RI, if not special measures, and rightfully so.

About time. I don’t believe for a second that there are more than a handful of schools that haven’t been able to afford to replace their R/Yr 1 reading books over the past 13 years. Especially when the government gave them up to £3000 to do so.

We are still being given books from the 90s.

You’d think that about Ofsted wouldn’t you? In reality you’re likely to get Reading Recovery trained inspectors and the school gets an Outstanding.

Bitter.

Moi?

Sadly it's a fact that many Ofsted inspectors don't understand phonics either

I remain hopeful having seen the new training and the questions they will have to ask! Keeping everything crossed, anyway.

How new are the new guidelines Feenie? They might be more recent than DDs school Ofsted, which was maybe two years ago?

Sadly it's a fact that many Ofsted inspectors don't understand phonics either
Given the, er, discussion I had with the EP who suggested DS needed to learn by a whole word method (er, he can decode, he's just forgotten some of the GPCs) this does NOT surprise me.

They start in September, MoverofPaper.

Well, that is certainly exiting news Feenie!

Hi again drspouse,
I've just had a delivery of Dandelion Reader books, and with it came their catalogue which actually lists the phonemes by book band! There is a 'chart' of sorts. But it only covers their own books.

For what it's worth:

Pink:
satim nop bcgh defv klru jwz x y ff ll ss zz
(single letter sounds, introducing consonant digraphs)

Red:
x y ff ll ss zz
vcc cvcc ccvc ccvcc (adjacent consonants)

Yellow:
ch sh th ck wh ng qu ve wh -le (consonant digraphs)
-ed -ing (suffixes)
2 syllables
ai, ee, oa, ur, ea ('e' as in bread), ow (as in brown), oo (moon), igh, oo (book), or, oi, ar, air, ear ('long' vowels, one spelling each)

Blue:
split digraph vowel spellings
alternative vowel spellings
alternative consonant spellings
alternative sounds for spellings c and g
common Latin suffixes (-ture, -tion, -ssion, -cian, -sure, -sion)

I think most schemes would have what Dandelion Readers chucks into Blue split up between Blue, Green and Orange. Also, some schemes have consonant digraphs in red, but adjacent consonants in yellow. So it really depends on the scheme!

That looks really helpful actually, thanks.
Got yet another look and say book for DD. Do they not actually know how to tell the difference or do they hope I can't?