Phonics

[MummyDolly]

So my little boy can read and write really well, his memory of words is amazing. However when it comes to phonics he cannot grasp them. He cannot sound out words or blend the sounds together.

I have got the same flash cards as his teacher to try and help but I'm just worrying he's going to fall behind in some way.

He's had his ears checked as his teacher asked me if he could hear properly etc

Just don't know what else to do 😬😬

No, but it's seen my school make sure every single child is able to read fluently and outperform children in spelling nationally in eighteen out of twenty spelling words. Which is more important than bemoaning the complexities of the English language and insisting on spouting inaccuracies about something you are supposed to be teaching as well as you possibly can. Instead of being defeatist about the complexities of the alphabetic code, why not find out how schools who teach it really , really well manage it?

@Feenie
A success rate of 100% is quite a claim though. A bit different to the 95-99% quoted by a pp.
Could I ask you what percentage of your pupils have dyslexia or asd/pda and if you have to modify your protocols for them?

Or have any of your pupils started to school refuse owing to anxiety?

@stuffedforchristmas

They learn word shapes and families. Then like everyone else they look at the first and last letter.

That is absolutely not how we read. Research has thoroughly discredited that idea. As per my earlier post, brain scans show that the parts of the brain that adults use when reading are the same parts used by children when sounding out and blending. They are on the opposite side of the brain to the visual centres. If we read using word shapes, first and last letters as you suggest, most of the activity would be in the visual centres.

Teaching children to learn to read in this way is a relatively new method

No, it is not. It is the way that children have been taught to read for most of the last 3,500 years since alphabetic languages first appeared. It is the other methods that are recent - the ones that push the same kind of discredited rubbish you are spouting on this thread.

[quote LizzieAnt]@Feenie
A success rate of 100% is quite a claim though. A bit different to the 95-99% quoted by a pp.
Could I ask you what percentage of your pupils have dyslexia or asd/pda and if you have to modify your protocols for them?[/quote]
We usually have around three children in each class who are dyslexic - we use rapid phonics intervention. All reach ARE by the end of Y6 and at least one will invariably be greater depth (reading and sometimes GD writing).

@LizzieAnt

Or have any of your pupils started to school refuse owing to anxiety?

No. Can recall one in Y6 about 15 years ago, but it wasn't reading related (family issues).

Dd is dyslexic (I could tell from early on but she was nearly 9 before school agreed) phonics was a nightmare for her. I just ditched the concept and concentrated on whole word reading. She's never dropped below her expected reading age but her spelling is still poor

We have had one ASD child in Y6 for the last four years. Two were greater depth readers and writers at the end of Y6 and one this year will reach ARE. He has had a lot of inference intervention using the Leicester Inference Project which has been really successful. He was a fluent reader in Y1.

We also found all the songs and rhymes for remembering sounds and for letter formation unhelpful. It was just yet another thing to learn for her

Sounds like Jolly Phonics - okay as a starting point when there was very little else out there. There are many schemes which surpass it now but some schools seem determined to hang on to those damn songs!

Our school used JollyPhonics too. Like @midnightstar66's DD, my DS found the approach overcomplicated and a nightmare.

I may be oversimplifying things, but if he can read and decode words fine, including unfamiliar ones, is phonics just not for him and does it matter? We weren't taught phonics at school and learned to read - isn't it just a tool? It seems a bit tail wagging dog to me.

On a recent zoom call when class was isolating, my reception DC stopped participating partway through with sounding out letters - was just bored shitless as can read and forty minutes for the class to sound out four words was excruciating for him. I had to mute several times to tell him to continue and join in, whilst I tried to be enthusiastic. Your son might just be bored? It might be a bit like forcing him to watch the way he walks when he just wants to walk and is perfectly capable of walking (ok crap analogy). Some teaching methods work, some don't work for everyone. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Lizzieant "A success rate of 100% is quite a claim though. A bit different to the 95-99% quoted by a pp." you do realise that 95-99% equates to less than one child per class

Stuffedforchristmas "I'm not making a case against phonics." No but you're making an excellent case for the need for improving teacher knowledge.

Norestformrz

You're making an excellent case for why people find teachers supercilious!

From what you've said here, your phonics training is incomplete. However, you clearly think the same here and I don't think we really want to get into it here, with what's going on. My concern with your approach is how many children struggle with the times (many, many times) when phonics doesn't work - that needs to be handled carefully and the limits of the system really need to be acknowledged and understood. For children with specific difficulties, phonics training is doubly important but realistically may take them half the distance, leaving them relying on other methods. Muddling through, diversifying - call it what you will, I'm sure you've admitted to children that many words would be spelt differently, in a perfect world (and maybe we'd use the phonetic alphabet, come to that).

If you're teaching Year 6, you're not really teaching reading, with respect.

Also, where phonological awareness problems coincide with poor working and auditory memory, complicated phonics rules, while the answer to all your problems if you can process them, is a satisfying answer for the teacher, rather than the student.

I'm frankly cynical about your 100% success claims - as a highly trained phonics teacher (ironically!), and home educating parent to children who are gifted in phonics and utterly bewildered by it. Too many children fall through the cracks in our education system. You make no allowance for this or provision for it.

@Norestformrz

Lizzieant "A success rate of 100% is quite a claim though. A bit different to the 95-99% quoted by a pp." you do realise that 95-99% equates to less than one child per class

Of course I realise that. Between 1 and 5% of the school population left struggling to read is still a huge number of people, even if they're not represented in every classroom. (Thankfully class sizes aren't that big!)

@Feenie said
Many people work in very difficult circumstances but teach phonics so skilfully that every child learns to read. It's perfectly possible...

So basically she's saying that if the teacher is skilled enough everyone is teachable, and I guess that those 1 - 5% quoted earlier just had bad teachers? I don't know, I wish she'd been my child's teacher if it's true.

Ultimately though, I still disagree that explicit phonics decoding instruction would have worked in my DS's case if only his teacher had been better at her job. I do think it's a bit more complicated than that.

Between 1 and 5% of the school population left struggling to read is still a huge number of people, even if they're not represented in every classroom.
Actually it’s higher than that, 1 in 6 children leave primary school unable to read well, which is a shocking number and the reason why I think some people become so heated when discussing the best way to teach children to read.

So basically she's saying that if the teacher is skilled enough everyone is teachable, and I guess that those 1 - 5% quoted earlier just had bad teachers?
Not necessarily a bad teacher, just one who’s bad at teaching phonics in an engaging and appropriate way! As you can see on this thread, there are still teachers who don’t know how children read or how they learn to read.
It really shouldn’t be a point of contention. It is so well backed up with research that it is crazy that individual teachers and schools still stick to outdated methods.

One thing I will add is that frequently I encounter children who were taught phonics perfectly well but who developmentally weren’t in a place to be able to learn it, and because the window of opportunity to learn phonics in many schools is so small (year R, year 1 and maybe a bit of catch up in year 2) they get left behind.

Isn't the whole point of phonics learning to read? And if he can read what's the point of phonics?.
It was a waste of time for my dd.
It will not work for every child.

Mine learnt to read through flash cards hfw, going back to basics, Peter and Jane books... Site learning... Then.. Plodding through ort books.

I wish I had known earlier.

We need urgent intervention for this, some places don't even believe in it. We can't keep hacking away at it and not clear the scrub.

We should be trying every thing and see what works.

@MummyDolly your DS might like www.teachyourmonstertoread.com. It's free on the PC version. It's a phonics game and really engaging.

@Elisheva
That is interesting about children not being developmentally ready, missing the window and falling behind. In cases of developmental delay this may be even more relevant, I suppose.
I'm in Ireland, not the UK, and children start later here - they're aged around 5 typically, though up to six is allowed. I believe it's even later in other countries. I wonder does the age at which children start school equate to literacy levels by country at all? It's interesting.

You mention too that the phonics approach is so well backed up by research that it should no longer be a point of contention. I absolutely accept that it's the method of choice for the majority. Just a caveat though - research is often done at a population level and results hold true for populations, for majorities, and not at the level of the individual. The picture for small sub-populations may be less clear, nuance can get missed for a while. (I'm not a teacher, but do have a lot of experience as a researcher. None in the area of phonics regrettably, so I'm speaking in general terms.)

@Norestformrz

Stuffedforchristmas "I'm not making a case against phonics." No but you're making an excellent case for the need for improving teacher knowledge.

How do people from non English speaking countries learn then? I'm not being snarky, but if phonics is the only/main way how do they manage to fluently read,speak and write in English?

Because I know from experience in many countries they are not taught English phonics when they learn the language and even if they learn some form of phonics in their native language , the graphemes/phonemes don't match.

Stuffedforchristmas "complicated phonics rules," there aren't any "rules"