5 year old reading well but struggling with phonics

[backtothegrindstone]

Just been to parents evening and have been told that my year 1, 5 year old (late August born so very young for the year) has been moved into a booster group for kids struggling with phonics. I was shocked as his reading is decent and he's making really good progress. I've never noticed him having any issues and he sounds out words perfectly when we read at home. He's my 2nd child and if anything reads better than his older brother did at the same age- and his brother was always in the top set. I got the feeling that his teachers feel his reading is absolutely fine but that he's not reading the WAY they want him to read - he likes to read whole words rather than breaking them into bits. They want me to work with him on the phonics at home. So, should I be concerned and put a happy but rather tired little boy who's progressing well through extra work at home, or just ignore it all and assume that phonics just isn't his thing?

It sounds like this is about the phonics test rather than his reading ability. I can't see any harm in letting the extra support go ahead but the current championing of phonics over all else is crazy.

If he were reading unknown words correctly, he would pass the phonics test. It wouldn’t matter if he knew to explicitly look for digraphs etc. Same with spelling. I don’t think the teacher would be concerned under those circumstances.

Little Candle I totally agree that Phonics ... doesn't suit every child. Moreover, no child becomes a fluent reader just with phonics. Even in languages with more phonic spelling systems fluency is largely a matter of learning to reckognise words on sight, without decoding. In English more so, because several thousand quite common words have some spellings with different pronunciations (an any, food good - sound soup: literacyproblems.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/reading-problems.html ) Around 3/4 of English words are as decodable as in any language (sleep, slept, strike, struck, drive drove). But many of the most used words aren't (dream dreamt, bone done, rough through...). Many children realise quite quickly that phonics alone doesn't get you far enough and start to concentrate on learning to recognise words as wholes. They use all the phonics they have picked up as well, but not just that.

gran what are you selling?

Mashabelle (aka gran75) is the founder (and only member) of a spelling reform society that she used to hawk around, but no one was ever interested.

She doesn't engage in any research, and what she knows about phonics would fit on a postage stamp, despite many teachers inviting her into their classrooms to see what the average Y1 child can decode using phonics.

Phonics is a shit way to teach reading and categorically doesn't suit every child.

The only other way to teach decoding and encoding is using whole words, which is very limiting in terms of memory and the number of words needed to access the curriculum. Phonics does not work with a small minority of children for whom reading is very difficult due to complex SEND and who struggle with any method of reading

Feenie's claim that The only other way to teach decoding and encoding is using whole words is b- -t. Nobody denies that phonics provides a good start, but lots of kids need only a few hours to get the basic idea of how letters are used.
For centuries teachers followed the advice given by James Dun in his 1766 book The Best Method of Teaching to Read and Spell English.
Begin with words that are absolutely regular (i.e. 'phonics')
... build in exercises to revise earlier work
... give special emphasis to the pronunciation of c and g (i.e. cat, cinema; get, general) ... introduce other difficulties progressively.

But as LondonGirl83 rightly pointed out: 9 million adults in the UK are functionally illiterate so I’m not sure that it’s true that old methods still allowed everyone to read just fine.

Sadly, the imposition of synthetic phonics is turning out to make no difference to that either englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/2020/02/why-phonics-is-failing-to-help.html
because the difficulties that prevent many kids from learning to read as well as they should haven't changed (have read / gave to read)

drspouse I am not selling anything. But phonics has been a huge sales bonanza for many publishers and phonics training courses for teachers,
starting with Jollyphonics in the 1990s (chaired, btw, by Chris Jolly who ran the Simplified Spelling Society in the 1980s and 90s), OUP Reading Tree, Phonics International, etc. etc.

DS2 had a rough start in reception (3 primaries in first term - one due to a house move, and the next as soon as we discovered they were teaching letter names not phonics- not in UK, but English curriculum nominally).
Now in Y4. He can read just fine - reading age aparently above chronological age, but his spelling is poor, and he doesn't enjoy reading.
I'd work with the phonics for the spelling side of it.

Did you sell all those self published books in your garage Masha?

Anyone between the ages of 60 and 17 is unlikely to have been taught to read using phonics Masha

but lots of kids need only a few hours to get the basic idea of how letters are used.

Masha, that comment is in direct opposition to your stance that the English language is so complicated that it takes years to master, if at all!

Honestly, you'd think we'd have worked out how to teach kids to read and write by now, wouldn't you? Every couple of decades, along comes another way to do it. They are forever fiddling with maths as well.

Whichever method is used, it will suit some children better than others.

OP - smile and nod and don't bother with the extra homework.

If the child can read words fine, they won't struggle with phonics. It's one of the extra strategy they can use to read words, additional to what the child use to read words in their own way.
If they keep using guessing, whole word recognition, etc, there will be the time when they will hit he wall.
I think learning basics of reading is very important at early age. Almost every subject need good reading skills. It's either you decide to deal with it when it doesn't affect their learning so much, or wait for them to start to fail at everything just because they can't read.

We have worked out the best way to teach children to read unfortunately some people still insist that they know better. A fortunate few will learn to read regardless of how they are taught (around 5%) but for most explicit systematic phonics is best. It benefits all and harms none

Feenie, It’s well-known that the English language is one of the world’s simplest and very easy to learn. But it has an extremely complex and irregular spelling system which makes learning to read and write exceptionally difficult. Mrz’s chart shows pretty well how this affects learning to read.
Around 40% of kids learn easily, with minimal teaching of any kind (because they are clever, have exceptionally good visual memories and no learning disabilities) with parents who read to them as soon as they can sit up and will have seen words like ‘one, two, four’ 100s of times before starting to learn to read.
The next 40% have to work hard at it. They benefit even more from good preschool preparation and lots of one-to-one help in the first few years at school. They need quite a bit of phonics of the ‘cat sat, sheep slept, station carnation’ kind. They have a harder time with ‘ear early, daughter laughed, rough throughout’ than the top 40% and take several years to become fluent, even with good teaching and parenting. But they get there eventually.
Around 18% - 20% (not just 15 as in the chart), in every English-speaking country, never learn to read well enough to cope with book learning and leave school functionally illiterate. The 100s of words with irregular spellings make it simply too hard for them. Especially if they get no preparation for learning to read before school, and no help at home during their first few years at school.
Phonics was made mandatory in the UK in 2007, mainly to improve the reading of the last group, and the middle a bit too. But phonics was merely meant to help with learning to read. We now have the ludicrous situation that even kids who are clearly making very good progress with their reading must prove that they have grasped phonics (in the yr 1 test).
Worst of all, we still have around 18% of school leavers reading as badly as before.

Your invented figures do not correlate to my school, or any school that teaches phonics exclusively.

100% of children in my school are fluent readers by the end of KS1, excluding children with complex SEND or new arrivals.

English is indeed a complex language - we continue to teach phonics (mainly for spelling) until the end of Y6 for that reason and because it's part of the NC.

Which is why your claims are nonsense. Remind us again how many children you have taught to read successfully?

But phonics was merely meant to help with learning to read.

Where do you get this guff????

To pass the phonics screening check children have to sound out the word, then blend it together. If they miss the sounding out part they don't get a mark for that word. Could it be that your child isn't doing the sounding out and is recognising the word?

Another part of the phonics screening check involves them reading 'alien' words i.e. made up words like 'chorp'. To read these they can only rely on phonics rather than sight reading.

There is a lot of argument about whether this is relevant or helpful as a measure of children's success.

I wouldn't worry too much about it if your child is reading well using their own methods and understands what they have read.

To pass the phonics screening check children have to sound out the word, then blend it together. If they miss the sounding out part they don't get a mark for that word.

I'm sorry, but that is total rubbish. Children do NOT have to overtly sound out to get a mark. They have to decode accurately, and whether they do that in their head or out loud does not matter in the slightest.

What about a phonics game for a tablet? I got Teach Your Monster to Read when it was free and my DS loves it. It's a game to him rather than a learning tool so he thinks he getting a treat if he gets to play it.

My DS learnt to read by whole words. Phonics clicked for him at about age 6, before that he just couldn't blend despite knowing the sounds. When he did get it it was pretty much overnight, so he clearly wasn't ready earlier. He was one of the best readers in the class from reception, though he likely would have failed the phonics test in year one.

I teach phonics. How will your son learn new words if he can’t recognise sounds that will help him decode a new word? That’s what phonics is all about.

In a phonics screen the child has to read a mixture of real words and ‘alien’ words to demonstrate that they understand the sound. E.g ‘phape’ being read as ‘fape’ is what is required. If he read the ‘ph’ digraph as ‘p’ ‘h’ he wouldn’t get a mark.

Sorry ignore that incorrect information about needing to sound it out! I've just watched the training video and they can just read the word.