Reception phonics

[vera16]

My 4.5yr old DS is starting reception next week. He knows all letter sounds and can read any words made up of simple letter sounds. He seems keen to move on but needs to know the two letter sounds and tricky sounds (? not sure if terminology as all new to me). Wondering if I should show him or just wait for school to do it? Looking at the syllabus it seems like he might have to wait quite a while for this to be covered.

Oh how odd, my kids would never have stood for that. Yes sounds like you have a lot more organised staged reading that goes beyond just teaching phonics.

E.g. DD picked up the first Harry Potter in reception. She could read the words and understand the sentences perfectly well but it was too grown up for her and she just put it down again. Tried again in yr1 or yr2 and gulped it down. Similarly with Series of Unfortunate Events, tried in yr2 and didn't get the humour - now she loves them.

In my experience, trying to ‘read’ books that a child can not decode yet, it is most common either where an older child but weaker reader is wanting to read the books that their peers are reading, or where a parent is wanting to believe that a child is much more capable than they are and the child wants to please them.

The ‘decoding without understanding’ is most common where a child has little exposure to books at home other than the school book, and the parent / carer focuses only enough to hear correctly pronounced words but not to probe the child about the text at all. Some parents are genuinely surprised to hear that ‘hearing their child read’ should also involve discussion and questioning.

Nothing to do with ‘not liking’ the report - the report criticised phonics teaching but also made it abundantly clear that the authors didn’t really know what phonics was, or what it was that they were criticising. But silly to say the least.

Your argument seems to be with reading schemes in general, not phonics, and with the poor way some schools use them. No child should be asked to practise their reading skills using a book that isn’t closely matched to their decoding ability when learning to decode. Too hard and it’s demoralising and too easy makes enjoyment of reading difficult. But that’s a lack of skill in matching reading books.

incidentally, I’d take a phonics scheme book over a look and say book any day. Having learnt just six sounds (SATPIN) means a child can already decode around 40 words.Contrast this with: I like the dog. Mum likes the dog. Dad likes the dog…….

No reading scheme books are works of great literature and children should absolutely be exposed to as many as possible - but not as books where they are asked to practise their decoding skills. There was an experiment that used real books to teach reading I.e. asked children to absorb phonics by osmosis instead of direct teaching. Didn’t work for a large percentage of children, surprisingly.

This has turned out to be a more interesting discussion than I anticipated. I was not aware of the background debate on the over-use of phonics. It makes sense though and, as someone has done virtually no research on the subject (!), I can see that would need both approaches in order to progress in reading. Not least because there seems to be a high percentage of context-specific words where phonics just does not work? Please correct me if I am making incorrect assumptions here. In our own case I have decided not to try and 'teach' any more phonics sounds and concentrate on sounding out words as they are supposed to sound (if he asks). My DS seems to be filling in the gaps of his own accord in any case so, as others have mentioned, this might turn out to be an important part of his learning.