Tips to help blending in sight readers?

[OutsidebutnotAlone]

DD is 6, year 2.

She can read her common exception words 50% of the time, and can recognise these in books or on signs etc. but can't read much more than that.

She refuses to blend and instead remembers the story, so when she comes across a word she can't read/doesn't know by sight she just remembers whats been read to her rather than the actual word. If it's an unfamiliar book then she just guesses the word. She won't even attempt to blend.

Teacher says she's a sight reader so commits words to memory so she knows them when she comes across them again but that makes teaching her to read difficult as her brain doesn't recognise the sounds to blend.

She is also suspected dyslexic. Writing is ok but she struggles with spelling even when told the spelling she still can't always write it down correctly even if we do a letter at a time it can still be written wrong, she only learnt to sing the alphabet last year in year 1 and still struggles with digraphs, school haven't even introduced her to trigraphs yet.

We're going through EHCP process to get an assessment for the dyslexia but school are trying some small group work with her, however it's only once a week due to the way the staffing works due to covid, also apparently sight reading is unusual (not sure how true this is I'm not a teacher) so it can be hard to group children up when they read like this. She's in the covid catch up groups but these stop at May Half Term apparently and there's no TA support in KS2 and therefore no reading support unless she gets 1-1 which is unlikely as although she struggles and is behind in all subjects her understanding is there.

She's still on pink level 1 books with 1-2 words in.

School have said covid has not helped her as they could have done targetted support at the end of year 1 with an external tutor (former teacher from the school whose now retired but does targetted English and Maths work on a supply basis for this and another school in the area) if it wasn't for covid, they can't have external visitors at all at the moment so no chance of that help.

Any ideas of how I can help her at home? It feels like it's now or never to get her reading as if I leave it any longer and she goes into KS2 she will never get the opportunity to catch up or be able to read again.

Easyread isnt sight reading, its a phonics programme

Yes it calls itself visual phonics and has a character for each sound supposedly as a reminder but it actually adds an extra demand on memory. My worry would be what happens once the characters are removed because the child is paying attention to them rather than the letters representing the sounds.

@Norestformrz I worried about that too but the way it was described to me is that it's like the training wheels/stabilisers on a bike and they get gradually removed. DS doesn't rely on the characters anymore, but when he comes across a new word (yesterday he was trying to read Niagara Falls) it gives him a way of working it out instead of guessing. He used to just guess guess guess. Normally he'd see it started with N and guess November or Nocturnal or something haha.

I'm an ex home educator or three children. They way I see it is that you have a bright child who has figured out an effective strategy for her reading. She's six! If she's encouraged to enjoy reading instead of having it made into a chore, she will pick it up. My children love reading but by school standards they picked it up late. They are all adults now, and are fully functioning, gainfully employed all round capable humans.
Please don't push her to the point where she doesn't want to read.

I've just read @EddieVeddersfoxymop's post. That's interesting, because 2 of mine have moved abroad and picked up the languages easily. One is now fluent in 3 languages and has a smattering of a couple more. I imagine they were what you'd call sight readers too.

Regardless of the pros and cons of phonics, one thing you can do is encourage your DD to sing and chant rhymes and songs. The listening and hearing the sounds comes before the reading. Make up silly poems or songs with nonsense rhymes, learn fun songs with actions. A pp has already mentioned labels on everything you can think of. You can also play games matching a word to a picture. Or pay games with word cards eg find words that belong together (same beginning or ending). So you are not asking her to " decode this word", but she will be learning while having a bit of fun hopefully. I think we start hammering the phonics before some children are ready, and this leads to a sense of failure and children becoming reading refusers.

I can see how it can be sold that way anna114young but it adds to cognitive load and many will have to relearn once the training wheels are gone.

@Norestformrz Sold that way or not, DS is reading, and that is reading normal books without the characters. That's all I care about after years of phonics interventions in school that didn't cater to his needs. But happy to agree to disagree.

I'm pleased for him

Op my dd struggled and now I realise phonics was holding her back.
I had to go back to Peter and Jane books and hfw flash cards which I may say I was put off doing by her reception teacher.
So we wasted that time with phonics and she failed her test and is not getting it.

Millons of people managed to learn to read without phonics, it's become evangelical and now I'm on loads of sen networks many dp of sen dc feel the same.

So for us what worked was going back to basics in year 2 Peter, Jane.. Peter and Jane. Hfw flash cards and once she got those basics... She started to take off...

Then we added more school ort reading books
From a private subscription and moved her on.
For spelling we were told to get a rainbow spelling board, so she had to lay out the alphabet and pull letters down to spell...
Then she would write the on a white board.. And what's nice is being able to quickly change words, manipulate them and also look at prefixes and suffices etc which helped her understanding massively.. Seeing words in different formats..

Now she's got a really good grasp of reading and words and what it's all about... She's actually understanding phonics a little more but she was utterly clueless before!!

• by year two and with phonics failure my dd could barely read and certainly non of the worksheets or work given in class, so she would be totally stuck and locked out of learning until someone came along and helped her. She was not exposed to new words, got 0/10 for spelling... And failed nealry everything... Only learning by remembering what the teacher had said on stuff like history or science..

Thankfully... Sen groups educated me.. So we did the sight reading approach and in a short space of time this.. Re launched her and got her reading very quickly...with reading of course then comes exposure to words.. New words.. Increased understanding of everything, access to reading when out and about.. Computer games even and this fed into spelling and being able to access school learning and keeping up more.
Now she's usually 8- 10 each week on her spellings.. Doing much better in tests (still a way to go).. And as I said.. Understands phonics more..

It's heartbreaking that the school and in general schools are just not up to date on sen and strategies to help. Imagine if we had this from reception... I doubt she would have been behind...
It's such a shame.
Luckily our dd has me to research and take action but even from her peers mums I know so many trust schools implicitly and dc simply get left behind.

Millons of people managed to learn to read without phonics,
And far more were failed by not being taught phonics. Many who were taught sight reading were either functionally illiterate and never got the skills to learn new words or like my dh didnt learn to read all until he was 10 and sent to a remedial phonics class. This was back in the 60s and using Look and Say

"It's heartbreaking that the school and in general schools are just not up to date on sen and strategies to help." It's heartbreaking that tutors and groups sell parents SEN strategies that have no basis in science and pretend they are the ones with up to date knowledge. I'm pleased your child has caught up many don't when taught these strategies.

[[https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading a good article on how sight reading , guessing etc fails children

article on reading

"Remarkably, the researchers said, these very rapid brain responses to the newly learned words were influenced by how they were learned.
Words learned through the letter-sound instruction elicited neural activity biased toward the left side of the brain, which encompasses visual and language regions. In contrast, words learned via whole-word association showed activity biased toward right hemisphere processing.
McCandliss noted that this strong left hemisphere engagement during early word recognition is a hallmark of skilled readers, and is characteristically lacking in children and adults who are struggling with reading."

He added “If children are struggling, even if they’re receiving phonics instruction, perhaps it’s because of the way they are being asked to focus their attention on the sounds within spoken words and links between those sounds and the letters within visual words,”