Differentiation in phonics

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My daughter has just started reception and is loving it so far. She was at quite a pushy preschool last year and was taught all the individual letter sounds and some digraphs, and I’ve taught her most of the other digraphs to the end of phase 3. She is reading books containing these sounds and common tricky words (the, to, go) fairly fluently, and has been since Christmas. She’s also writing words using phonetically plausible attempts, eg ‘macarony’ for macaroni and ‘pancacs’ for pancakes. I’m not saying she’s exceptional or gifted and talented, but she is a little ahead of the expected level entering reception.

They’ve started phonics at school but are only covering 2 sounds a week it seems. So far she has had wordless books for home reading. I spoke to the teacher this week and she said they’ll get books with words from next week but only using sounds she’s been taught in school. I said she could read already, so could we have books containing sounds I know she knows, but she said she can’t send home books containing sounds she hasn’t been taught in school.

So, it seems all reception phonics lessons and books being sent home will be a waste of time for her? I don’t understand why there’s no differentiation in this subject? For context I am also a teacher but not of this age, and would never just teach lessons to the lowest level and not extend pupils who can already do what I’m teaching, so this seems really odd!

School seems excellent generally, and from what friends have said to me this is universal across all schools with all phonics schemes, so I don’t think it’s just that the school is crap!

Any other parents with slightly older kids who entered reception got any advice on this or can tell me how their school handled it? obviously, we will continue to read our own books at home, but I had hoped to get some at the appropriate level from school.

Just borrow reading books from your own school. That’s what most teachers I know in your situation would do.

DfE guidance is here. This is how we are told to teach reading.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-reading-framework-teaching-the-foundations-of-literacy

We have had the same issue. We now (y2) just read books at home and maybe quickly go through the school books once. The school knows that the books that are providing are inadequate, but either through choice or coercion with Ofsted went give anything at an appropriate level.

In maths my daughter actually lost knowledge for the first 2 years of school because her school with was so much easier than what she had learned before starting school. She actually went backwards.

Thankfully she's moving forwards again now, but we've lost 2 years of opportunity for her, just so she can stay in the pack.

There seems to be very little provision for kids that are either doing very well or struggling (they are moving on in areas she is struggling)

Ds could read before starting school, I just used to sign the reading record & we read our own books. If you want to get something that will stretch but still involve phonics, I used to buy the early reader comics that had the phonics symbol on the front. Ds enjoyed them & they had things like writing & colouring as well as reading & stories you had to add stickers to.

Thanks @nat6999 what are those comics called?

From what I can remember there was Cbeebies, Octanauts, Bob the Builder, ds is 19 now so I don't know what the current ones are, look in somewhere like the supermarket or WH Smiths.

When ds1 was at primary he was given books that were too hard (he was in year 3 and not allowed to access the ks1 books) at the same time ds2 had made a huge leap in reading but was still being given books at his previous level. We started to use this service. www.readingchest.co.uk. Both boys loved having books arrive through the post.

Yes.

Had exactly this situation with my dc. I used reading chest http://www.readingchest.co.uk/

I’m almost surprised the company is still around, as the boys are now in sixth form, (both having got 9 or more GCSEs at grade 9.) I didn’t want my dc to be bored with school literacy and didn’t want to see them tread water for a year or two, as early literacy is so strongly correlated with successful educational outcomes.

I just pity any children on the Jazz and Jet books. Awful.

I'm on my third child and honestly just nod and smile, sign the reading record and then read whatever books you like together. It gets better as they go up the school with differentiation, and I found even in reception they did differentiate with maths, but the way phonics is taught now just seems to have no flexibility.

At some point they'll probably be split into groups and at that stage things might move faster...

Sorry just read your update that they'll never be grouped for phonics. That's properly bonkers and I can't see how it benefits any of the children (as surely many of them will get bored?) You have my sympathy.

Hello OP. Former primary teacher here (I was teaching Year 1 around the same time as you by the sounds of things) and we’re having similar issues with our now Year One DD.

DD’s school doesn’t group by ability for phonics either, and she is now reporting being very bored in her daily phonics lessons. She is a fluent and confident reader with strong comprehension and higher order reading skills, but despite happily reading Purple and Gold band books with us over the summer has only been given Orange band books as her school home reader - the class teacher says she ‘isn’t allowed’ to progress DD any further than that due to the whole fidelity to the scheme thing. DD said that the TA who read her group’s guided reading book with her last week commented that DD ‘wasn’t supposed to be on that (Orange) level until the end of the year’, which I think gives a clue to the general mindset of the school around phonics/reading.

To be honest we’ve largely given up on the school books (I read it once with her, DP reads it a second time to consolidate and then we move on). Any more than twice and she memorises the text anyway, so she isn’t putting her phonics knowledge to the test. We’re just making sure she reads a varied range of other texts outside of school.

As a teacher the dismissive, complacent approach to more able pupils used to depress me (I got into trouble more than once with my SLT for ‘overstretching’ my higher attaining pupils by giving them extension work that was regarded as treading on the next teacher’s toes). With all the current funding issues and government meddling I think the situation is even worse now - no such thing as ‘G&T’ any more; parents given very little idea from levels/reporting of what their child’s genuine abilities actually are, and faddy ideas like the phonics one of fidelity to the scheme that mean that no one is allowing the be seen to be significantly ahead of anyone else.

As a governor at DD’s school I frequently come across the concept of ‘closing the gap’ at the moment, but I’m honestly slightly flummoxed by how this noble aim is actually supposed to be realised - in practice it seems to be mostly about holding the higher attaining pupils back and not allowing them to fulfil their potential in order to demonstrate that the lower attaining pupils have ‘caught up’.

I'm a P1 teacher and we differentiate phonics right from the start. I have some
kids in my class who are already grouped with kids two years older for literacy. Most P1s stay with their class for the first term and then we group them but if anyone stands out then we don't hold them back. The only issue is that their writing doesn't tend to be of the same standard.

I'm a bit divided on this.

Gifted children, self taught readers, I think the school should differentiate. Though many of these children are sight readers who crack the code from the patterns in the words they already know, I think this is analytical phonics? It's how I learnt to read, and also my nephew before school. They are likely to benefit from phonics instruction as their phonics ability is going to be behind their general reading ability. Going at a standard reception pace may or may not work though. Some may disengage.

I'm not sure about the average or bright children from pushy nurseries or with 'motivated' parents. I don't think it's beneficial to make a child different if they needn't be. It's not easy being different. If they are only slightly ahead then they may be better off fitting in with the rest of the class.

I had this with my second child. I knew what it would be like from my first, so before school I was not holding him back exactly, but purposefully not teaching him. Year 1 was the same. He's in year 2 now and we finally have a teacher who has started to slip him extra books to get him through the phonics scheme books onto the 'accelerated reader' scheme books they normally start in yr3. Ds does plenty of his own reading anyway.

Interestingly my first child is dyslexic and slightly behind on reading, we've not found a great deal of help there either! Maybe it's only pitched right for the middle ground kids!

I think our primary did it right.

There was a whole class approach to the sounds/graphemes - some were learning from scratch, other knew them a bit, and there was one very clever, very precocious reader (that I knew of, she was DD's friend, obvs don't know detail about other DC).

This was to make sure no pupil had weird gaps in the knowledge of the phonics code.

But then they used the "sounds of the week" in quite different ways. It might be to practice just the sounds and how to write them, it might be a CVC book, it might be a more advanced book, it might be a much more advanced book. Plus everyone could pick a book from the library shelf - free choice, whether they could read it themselves or they wanted to take it home for someone to read to them.

So a mix of deliberate whole class, and then differentiated building blocks, plus just getting a book for fun.

@AvengedQuince Ah, analytical phonics - thanks for describing this as I think that’s how DD has taught herself to read but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what she was doing! She seems to do it instinctively and I can tell she’s not systematically applying the synthetic phonics stuff she learns at school, but rather finding her own patterns within the text. She is flying with her reading - pretty fluent with with chapter books, reads all of the texts that are sent home first time on sight - but it’s a struggle to get her to partition/sound out words when specific school-related tasks call for it.

I’m wanting to learn people’s thoughts on Phonics Schemes as I am currently at a loss with my LO. Having studied a Post Grad in Education and having written many an assignment on Pedagogy; often analysing theory’s on Learning Styles and Differentiation I was shocked when my LO started school and was introduced to Little Wandle. From what I can see, this is a ridged ‘one size fits all’ regime that does not bend or adapt for any form of differentiation. For experiential Learners or those who need stimulation and/or need to understand the meaning behind what they are learning - these Schemes totally exclude them. Having worked with older children and adults for many years I feel I am starting to understand why there are so many who are illiterate. I would not be surprised if it is because they got left behind while all their obedient / neurotypical class mates or those with proactive parents rode off into the distance on the phonics scheme train. It does not take a qualification to realise that after Reception this scheme is just boring and feels meaningless. It dissects the English language into something both bland and confusing. I am a good reader and although I didn’t pay much attention at school, I learned to read through reading and I loved reading! my Mother (a primary school teacher) simply just encouraged me to read! Now fast forward a few years (okay maybe decades) and I had to work out what some of these phonemes were actually for. I found myself googling them so I could show my son the actual words and teach him those as he refused to engage with the phonemes alone. Meanwhile school are sending him home with books that provide no challenge and rarely include any of this term’s phonemes. I’ve heard of some teachers (including Heads) who have to secretly deviate from the scheme in order to teach the stragglers or the ones struggling for fear they will end up a statistic and then hide the evidence from OFSTED! How crazy is that? Can someone please explain what is so good about these schemes - has anyone experienced similar with Little Wandle? I guess for regular kids who just tow the line it would set them up for when they start learning to spell?? Or does someone in government have shares in these schemes? I just don’t get it. Please tell me something positive as it is just so worrying as a parent and genuinely it is just so depressing!

I've got one child who is 'behind' and one who is 'ahead'. My experience of school phonics schemes is no good for either.