Thoughts on “little waddle” reading method?

[Golaz]

My DD has just stated reception. We had a phonics workshop today where they described this methodology for teaching children to read and showed some examples of the books they would be using. It sounded really dumb and boring and the books look shit. I didn’t get it at all. Does anyone have any insights or experiences to share? Is this likely to be helpful in actually teaching my child to read and enjoy reading? At the moment she loves books but can’t read at all.

The little wandle books are fine as far as school reading schemes go. The first set of books have always been very basic aka boring. Billy blue hat wasn’t phonetic but it wasn’t exactly enthralling either!

Phonics is a statutory requirement in the U.K. so on a practical level there’s not much you can do to prevent your child’s access to it. Unless you want to home school anyway.

Just ensure your child has good access to a range of literature and foster a love of books.

Thanks anyway @Storynanny1

@Slothmoth, when you’ve had teachers recognise that a child isn’t responding well to phonics- perhaps yourself- what have they done to help in your experience?

We read Great Fire of London last week with the highest ability group (year 2). They absolutely loved it. There's some interesting and challenging vocabulary in that book.

Which one wasn’t phonetic?

I was thinking today about billy blue hat etc, those books were boring, but at least they had characters and some sort of narrative..

I was taught to read words by sight. I could read pretty fluently before I started school*

My first thought is, have you used this method and now your DD can read pretty fluently?

I would suggest you watching some videos online about phonics and blending words and sounds etc. phonics can look so alien but you really need to be onboard and understand to support your child.

Watch a few YouTube videos, times change and in this circumstance is phonics, your grandkids might be back to the old ways, but try and get in board for now.

Sequin
It’s pronounced /ˈsiː.kwɪn/
Not phonetically like /ˈsekwɪn/

English is 100% phonetic.

Nope. About 50%

We wouldn’t have homographs if it was 100% phonetic

But it can be pronounced phonetic with the e making an ee sound as they are required to know that in Year 1..nevertheless mean word. Mostly its pretty identical year in and out.

And yes everyone learns phonetically. Joe would.youblime your child to learn?

It’s requires context or previous knowledge of how to pronounce the word in order to read it correctly. That’s not phonetic.

I’d love to know which words you thinks aren’t phonetic!

And I don’t understand your last two sentences

I don’t think you understand what you’re talking about tbh.

Victuals
Colonel

Do you really want me to list 50% of the English language or could you maybe just Google?

I have a MA in Applied Linguistics and TESOL so I think I might.

Sequin is a real word. I thought (forgive me but it's been a while since my DCs did it) the phonics test was made up words?
If the word was "bequin" I would expect a child to get a point for bee-quin or be-quin (like sequin or like begin), yes.
But it's a real word.

Other real words where "e" sounds like "ee" include he, she, we, be, me. Also hero, Egypt, even.

Did they not teach you about phoneme-grapheme correspondences in that MA?

Oh okay, I say see/quin. Do you mean you pronounce the e as an i like in sit?

It’s made up of both made up and real words 😊
The list of words are publicly available.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/phonics-screening-check-2023-materials

They did 😊

I don’t even know why you think the first one is an example.

kɜːʳnəl (had to copy and paste that because I don’t have an IPA keypad). It’s irregular, but it still uses phonetics.

You pronounce it correctly because you already know the word.
Imagine you didn’t have a pre-existing knowledge of that word, you would attempt to pronounce it with an e like in “pet”

A phonics test shouldn’t be a test of vocabulary knowledge which the word “sequin” requires.

It’s 20 real words and 20 made up words.