Mrz? A question!

[Onceuponatimethen]

My dd is in Year R and now we are on lockdown I’m trying to carry on reading book band books using Oxford Owl as school have asked us to do.

She seems to be decoding reasonably now (on yellow band after a long time on red) and can do the sounding out in her head suddenly. However, she seems to have lost any reading fluency.

Just as an example this is how she will read aloud:

The (huge pause) dog (huge pause) lost (huge pause) its (huge pause) bone.

Is there any way I can help her to read the sentence more fluently? I feel like she is really losing the meaning of the text when she takes these huge pauses. I’m assuming it’s just taking her this long to decode in her head!

I'm not your chosen recipient but I would say that this is part of the learning journey, so much is going on to enable her to lift each of these words off the page. I often get them to reread using their 'story telling voice' once they have had the opportunity to decode it.

Oh that makes me feel a lot better! Thank you so much - really grateful for knowledgeable advice

Actually I think I’ve instinctively been doing that but saying ‘now shall we read it back properly’ which now I’ve thought about it sounds unintentionally negative

I will be copying your suggested wording from now on! Thank you

I specialise in literacy as a TA and the way I've been trained to approach this is to praise her attempts at decoding,

Sorry - posted too soon! Praise her decoding then suggest she copies the way you say it. Try to give specific praise in terms of how she worked out the word, was it phonetically, through meaning, grammatical structure or visually?

Scabby she always gets it right and can do the sounding out in her head! But the pauses are enormous! I will give more praise

The pauses denote how much work our beginner readers are doing just to lift the word. Take 'rainbow'. a beginner reader needs to recognise the r sound, they have to recognise that ai is a diagraph so not longer making a and i sounds but the new sound 'ai' , then 'n', they may have to spend some time working out if the next letter is a d or a b, then they have to recognise a digraph at the end, but make a decision about its sound (ow as in grow or as in cow). Finally they have to remember what they started with to blend and create the word rainbow. Only then can they ascribe meaning to it.

It's an extraordinarily complex process. It sounds as if she is doing brilliantly. Rereading with the storytelling voice works wonders, as does reading a page each, so she has an ongoing model of what a fluent reader sounds like.

Ah yes that’s a very good idea about reading a page - thank you. I really appreciate that. And you are so right about eg rainbow she would have to do each of those processes to get to the word!

I’m interested in why some DC could read this sentence fluently and others cannot. My DD1 was very quick to read in yr, but wasn’t taught exclusively phonics. The school also encourages reading library books and we used the library a lot and she had library books from school. She was summer born so I felt the need to expose her to as many books as possible. This now feels wrong.

Are you using Oxford owl online?

Lots of free books although you can pay for more.

You can set it to read to you child and highlight the words as they follow the book there are also games using phonics at the end.

It’s a good tool

I think early readers are very divergent! My older dd was reading fluently by the start of reception because her nursery did a lot of phonics and she was very receptive. She flew with phonics and it clicked with her so fast. My younger dd is doing fine - I don’t think yellow at this stage is behind, but she is just learning differently.

Hi @GreenTulips, yes we are using the site - it’s great isn’t it

@bubblesbuddy Children who are taught whole word recognition can appear to fly very quickly, as they only have one thing to remember when they see the shape of the whole word, but they have few strategies to tackle unfamiliar words. So whilst phonics may seem slow and laborious for some at the beginning stages, it equips them really well for ongoing reading and spelling.

I'm a huge phonics fan and luckily get to work with lots of different schools on implementing really effective phonics teaching.

School was 22 years ago now and she did phonics - just not exclusively phonics. She could “sound out” unfamiliar words (as I called it) but she could remember words as well. She definitely understood what she read and was able to answer questions about what she had read at an early age. I also realised she was quite bright! So she could read “helicopter” and other quite complex words at age 4 for example. I do understand the need to teach phonics but I was just curious about why some DC are fluent pretty quickly and others are not and do seem to need “thinking time”. I do realise children won’t all learn at the same rate. I used to read nursery rhymes to mine and stop at the easier words that they would know. Sometimes working through reading schemes is a bit dull. (In my uneducated opinion)

Do DC switch from their phonics mode to word recognition for example? Do some use phonics for a very long time because they lack confidence to just say the word?

^*"Just as an example this is how she will read aloud:

The (huge pause) dog (huge pause) lost (huge pause) its (huge pause) bone.*^ "

I wouldn't be worried she's very young, fluency comes with automaticity. After she has read the words I would praise her then model how to read the sentence "The dog lost its bone." and then ask her if she can say it like you.

Thank you mrz - I can completely see that it’s automaticity related as my other child would be able to recognise a word after only seeing it once or twice whereas dd can see a word countless times and still clearly needs to silently sound out. Eg she’s had a whole series of books with the word ‘bug’ in them but still needed to pause over it when it was in her book yesterday

I will chill and keep praising and repeating phrases. Just anxious not to let her down while she misses school