Point of old ORT reading books?

[Teddyreddy]

Can anyone explain what I should be doing with the old ORT reading books DS's school sends home?

They teach them phonics at school using Read Write Inc, and are progressing quite slowly - they are only half way through the alphabet. They will apparently start reading RWI books in class after Christmas, they won't be sending them home. However, presumably because DS already knew most of his letters, they are sending home reading books already. They are the old Biff and Chip ones, mostly very well worn (his current book dates to 2003). He's lucky if he can sound out more than 2 or 3 words in a book, the rest are either irregular or beyond his current phonics knowledge. Each book says it is to practice a small number of words (e.g. me, you, he) but they contain lots of other words (e.g. Monday). There doesn't seem to be a lot of repetition between books - so DS isn't actually learning any of the so called keywords from them as the next book has a different set and without reinforcement he just forgets them. I'm struggling to get the point of his reading books given he doesn't seem to be learning anything from them - is there something about the ORT scheme I'm missing?

‘Unfortunately many children don't learn to read because the old ORT books rely on ineffective strategies that leave children with no way to tackle unfamiliar words once the pictures are removed.’

My DC’s school is still sending home reading diaries with a ‘helpful’ page in the front suggesting parents use all sorts of strategies, such as ‘look at the picture’, ‘guess from the first sound in the word’ etc. I have bored them senseless with my annual complaint, but they haven’t changed them in my 7 whinging years so far.
Both my children have had difficulties with learning to read. DD (10) has a dyslexia diagnosis and was not helped one bit by the mixed approach.

Pink Would your PTA not contribute? I would have thought if you explained that phonics books to support phonics reading development would be way better than 'look and say' books, but you can't afford them, then over the last 20 years they could have been persuaded to chip in.

Even £100 per year for 20 years would have been £2000 worth of books for essential reading skills development.

You can get a set of Julia Donaldson songbird books (36 books) reasonably cheaply on the book people or amazon, we found that these worked well alongside RWI - we also got the phonics flash cards for RWI from Amazon. You can also buy black and white copies of the RWI books on amazon for not much as long as you look for the levels (colours aren’t the same as ORT I don’t think from memory). I know it all adds up and you might not be able to afford to do this but I think the effort we put in at home got our youngest one reading, I think we’d still be struggling if we hadn’t done this as the school’s method just didn’t click for her. (Older one picked it up through school so not rubbishing the school at all).

"Plus, most of it had to go on teaching resources rather than just books to send home." No it didn't (although many schools wasted it on 'fluff") schools were free to use it however they chose. We used ours for training and books ...no "fluff"!

www.speld-sa.org.au/services/phonic-books.html

If you are really strapped for cash, here are some decodable books for free (a voluntary donation is appreciated by the makers, however!). Originally designed for children with reading difficulties, but they work just great for all kids. I have to teach reading to my child and friends' children (we live in a country where the school system is not in English), and I used these.

I'd love to know how (some of) the schools spent the matched funding money, if not on training and books. Like, what else is there to spend money on, in terms of phonics teaching?? Surely nobody can spent 6000 yen on flashcards?

Puppets and games

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@parrotonmyshoulder when I asked at parents evening what I was supposed to do with words like 'park' that he couldn't get decode I was told to get him to look and the first letter and the picture and then get him to guess...

I've bought the Songbirds books, but while DS isn't picking reading up very quickly he has a good memory and starts reciting rather reading if we do the same book more than a few times. They are difficult to find as they aren't clearly categorised but I've just spent an hour searching and our local library actually has a reasonable number of decodable books across a random selection of schemes. I can order children's books in for free so this may be the solution. I'm not sure I'm brave enough to go into school and say anything to the teacher!

Most of ours went on RWinc training and resourcing but came nowhere near enough to cover home reading books on top. Our school has sets of phonics books for home reading but we still have to supplement with those god awful biff and chip books.

You're not 'supplementing', you're diluting your phonics teaching to the point where you're actively confusing around one in five of your children. You're also not teaching according to the statutory NC. Your next inspection's deep dive into reading is going to be interesting, and will probably see you in RI.

There's lots of positives for ORT to be honest. It comes from a time when children were taught mixed methods for learning to read. They were taught to look at the context, the pictures, and whole words alongside phonics. Many words are still able to be read with basic phonics, some words e.g. surprised, wanted, are repeated often enough for children to remember from one book to the next and some words are able to be worked out from the context and using the initial sound as a clue. If a child can't work out a word they can just be told it so the flow and understanding isn't lost.

Any reading is better than none! Any book is better than none! Millions of children have learnt to read using these books so they aren't all that bad, if if they don't fit current practise recommendations.

I would just read them to him and run your finger underneath the words as you do so. As he listens and watches then he will pick it up.

Every now and then you could ask him to read a decodable word. After a few readings then he can probably read/remember/guess a non-decodable word.

What is going to be really counterproductive is if he gets utterly frustrated with the process and gets it into his head that reading is an unpleasant task which he wants to avoid. For that reason I would prefer slower progress but more enjoyment, if you see what I mean.

N. B. I hate the ORT books myself, and so did my kids. Crap stories. They learnt much better from books which were actually interesting, using the approach above (which I like to call the Magic Pointy Finger Technique (TM))

Freestar, the new ORT books are fine--it's the old ones that are dicey (and boring, with stupid "predictable-text" stories. "Floppy sees a rabbit. Floppy is excited. Floppy sees a sausage. Floppy is hungry" etc etc, kill me now....)

Teaching children to guess from context is NOT best-practice. Some children are lucky enough to "work out" how the sounding-out rules work and when they are supposed to stop guessing and start sounding out. Others, especially those who have dyslexic tendencies, get badly confused and get stuck in a habit of "glance at the picture and the first letter of the word and guess" and it is incredibly difficult to get them to stop later on.

In addition, if a child is guessing at words, it means that you have no way of assessing what phonics patterns they know or do not know, so you are not getting feedback about "oh, I need to teach this pattern." You think they know phonics patterns that they actually don't know, so you don't teach it to them, and then later on when the pictures starting disappearing from books, you realize with dismay that they can't actually read those words properly at all. By then they have picked up the "glance and guess" technique and it is a nightmare trying to get them to stop.

I understand that schools are really really strapped for cash right now, but that was not the case back when the matched funding was available, and as mentioned, while some schools did a great job and spent this precious money wisely, some schools decided to waste it on rubbish, probably because they thought the old ORT books were "just fine" "well, MY kids did OK with them" and so on. Personally, I wish we could find which SLT were in charge of these poor purchasing decisions and take some money from their bloody pensions to pay for proper decodable books from their schools... (growls....)

If I remember rightly, the ORT books were written for quick teaching of the most common words which are not completely decodable (was, friend, said, thought, through). Almost 150 of the most used English words have some tricky irregular spellings in them, and children's reading tends to improves enormously once they can sight-read those and don't keep getting tripped up by them any more. So it's a good idea to read other books as well, but keep teaching the nastiest gremlins englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk as quickly as possible as well. Many words are easy to decode. Quite a few are tricky.

ORT books promote the kind of mixed methods described here (learning words as whole sight words, initial letter clues, picture clues, etc) that traditionally failed one in five children and that we know now are most definitely not the best way to teach children to read.

There's no way of predicting which children will be confused - and yes, bright children who are read to regularly may well be one of the 20 or so %.

Reading chest is a kind of online lending library that you can get decodable books from and is highly recommended.

No Gran you don't remember correctly. The ORT books were written to support the flawed theory of whole language. They rely on picture clues and predictable repetitive texts

Our school did RWI and in term one all the books home were stories for parents to read with our children for fun. I’d ignore the ort books and read better stories till the rwi books come home (and beyond, the rwi don’t take them long).

Read Write Inc do Black and White Books and Book Bag books to send home so you may get them when they start with the reading books. It depends if the school have invested in them.

The school will come unstuck with Ofsted if the books they are sending home don’t match what they are being taught.

I would make some flash cards with words your DS can decode then practise some exception words together. You can read the ORT book together.