Why are people so anti ORT?

[seeker]

They are often funny, they are often anarchic, they show children lots of different ways of living, the pictures have lots of interest and detail, the vocabulary is lively - you can usually find one that has something to interest an individual child, they are proper stories - what's not to like?

When I think about the Janet and John type of books people of my generation had - ORT is in a different universe!

AllBuggiedOut,
I don't want my son to use visual clues to read. That is guessing not reading. The ease of guessing is a very good reason for avoiding early oxford reading tree (except for the Songbirds)

The governant wants children to decode when they learn to read. Look say methods of teaching reading are out of fashion. I think children need books that support the teaching methods the teachers are using.

I think we all guess when we're reading. Why not let kids do it too?

I certainly don't guess when I'm reading!

Because guessing is easy in the short term. Many children are too lazy to learn how to blend.

If a child can blend and segment letters together to make words then they find it easier to spell and easier to write. Its a skill well worth mastering. Especially for an SEN child who has a poor memory for words.

The human brain can only cope with memorisation to a certain level. Eventually the person reaches saturation point.

The child who never picks up any phonics might do well in the early stages of education, but struggle at university when the brain is over loaded with new words. Its why so many people get diagnosed as dyslexics at university.

There are loads of studies that show that using a pure synthetic phonics approach early on improves reading. Ofcourse there is more to reading than just decoding print, in the same way that there is more to a house than its foundations. Using pure synthetic phonics in the early stages of teaching a child to read is about building good foundations that last the child for life.

Once the child has 100% mastered blending and segmenting then the child can learn other aspects of reading.

Do you blend when you read? I doubt it. Almost every word an adult reads is recognition. I'm not going to try to recreate one here as you'll spot I'm no expert(!) but there are plenty of examples of sentences written with deliberate mistakes which adults don't pick up on because the brain "expects" to see a particular word and doesn't notice when it's wrong. That's guesswork.

Yes, I do 'blend' when I see a word for the first time. How else could I read it? Yes, of course when you are a fluent reader you know the words, but we aren't talking abut fluent adult readers, but children at an early stage of learning to READ not guess!

Yes we blend when its a word you see for the first time, but almost all words we don't need to because we recognise them. All I'm saying is that we should recognise guessing as part of reading in some circumstances.

Recognising words is NOT guessing though. Guessing is not reading. A reading system that relies on young children guessing is not teaching them to read properly. it is a substandard system.

I learnt to blend when I taught my son to read using Jolly Phonics. It has improved my spelling and my ablity to spot my own spelling mistakes.

My son tells me that he blends most words in his head even though he is reading stage 9 ORT books fluently. He tweaks words which are not quite phonic.

No recognising words is not guessing, of course not. And it would be a very tiresome reading scheme if it was all guessing, wouldn't it?! But I think there is (a) no harm in having a visual clues/guessing aspect for the odd word that enable a richer story to be told and (b) a good reason for introducing guessing as we do it as adults too.

Guessing is a bad habit for young children though. A lot of kids get 'stuck' on guessing, and it can be demoralising because it is hard to guess a word you simply can't read, and easy to get it wrong. It's a bad foundation to build on, especially as young children may find guessing easy at first, when their books have few words and lots of pictures. But as soon as the books have more text, many can't cope and lose confidence. Julia (Gruffalo) Donaldson has written phonic books called Songbirds, which are funny and readable. And once children can really read - not guess - they can read anything!
And I really don't think adults do 'guess'. We might guess at meaning from context, but we read a completely new word by sounding out in our heads

allbuggedout, a lot of children can't do the word recognition part, which is why Look and Say was such a disaster for many children, like my dh.

SENCO also told me that the reason my ds reads well is because he was taught phonics properly.

I'm not sure what Look and Say is, sorry christywhisty. Do some kids use ORT without phonics backup then? My experience is with DS1 who's only been at school since January, and he's doing Jolly Phonics alongside ORT. but even in the early books, he was reading words like "the" not by sounding them out but by recognition.

Maybe we should agree to disagree about the role of guessing, MsDemenor. Maybe my DS is still at the few words and lots of pictures stage, so I haven't seen the problems guessing can cause. Although I remain adamant that adults guess sometimes too .

DS has brought one of the songbirds ones home for the first time this holiday and I agree, it's great.

Look and Say was a reading system which was based on word recognition when phonics was unfashionable.
My DS is now 12 and his primary school used a variety of methods and reading schemes including ORT.
Thankfully he was taught using jolly phonics, but we also had to bring home sight words mainly based on the Roger Red Hat books (which ds hated). He really struggled with the sight words and he never wanted to do them.
His reading didn't click until he was 7. He is a very, very bright boy, but still can't spell, because he can't retrieve the words and spells phonetically.
As I said DH was taught using Look and Say and he didn't learn to read until he was introduced to phonics when he was 10.

I do think there has to be a mixture of methods of learning to read, though, particularly in English. There are words tat you just can't decode - rough, bough, though and thought for example. Don't these have to be sight, guess and context?

Dd's in Reception and the teacher uses ORT for their Guided Reading sessions in their different ability groups at school. We never bring them home though, but a variety of other schemes including Lighthouse (usually non-fiction) and Storyworlds, neither of which are particularly phonic based which is a shame but they are easier to decode than the ORT books which from what I've seen (we have a couple we read at home, donated from friends) depend largely on word recognition.

Dd does seem to like the ORT stories though, especially the Magic Key adventure ones which are far more entertaining as stories than almost all the other schemes she's brought home. It would be bloody awful, though, to have to read through every single book in each level. What a yawn for the child. Dd's definitely moved a few levels very rapidly at various points. I don't think she read anything at Level 3, just went straight onto Level 4.

At home I get her to 'help' me read whatever book I'm reading to her. I find a sentence or paragraph I think she can handle and ask her to read it as part of my reading to her. That way she doesn't feel too daunted and also gets to practise with lots of different types of writing / vocabulary.

I have to say it would be very reassuring if all schools could agree on what's an appropriate reading scheme to support the phonic-based reading they're meant to be learning.

Hi seeker by the way!

I think a lot of the words like thought do have to be learnt by sight. From what I've gathered at each stage of learning to read there are 'tricky words' which have to be learnt separately. Even simpler words like 'be' 'so' etc. don't follow a strictly phonic path or they'd be spelt 'bee' or 'soe' or whatever. It's bloody hard for kids to learn English. Dd frequently gets frustrated - 'why isn't shoe spelt shoo mummy???'

I guess all the time when I'm reading...

Message withdrawn

Words such as be & so do follow rules but the words are usually introduced early when children have only been taught the basic 44 (or so depending on your accent) sounds of the English language which is why they are taught as tricky words. Even words such as though and trough follow rules but these obviously aren't taught to 4-5 year olds.

Having said that if I'm reading a book to relax I wouldn't sit blending the sounds so that I could read every unfamiliar word... I would guess from the context.

Recognising certain words is totally different to guessing. And when you learn them, you can use the rules and apply them to working out new words - ought from thought, for example. Look, here are some words you might not have seen before:ablactate
ablaut
ablegate
ablepsia
abluent
ablution
abnegate
aboma
abomasum

When you read them for the first time, you don't guess at how to say them, you look at the sounds and put them together. You still don't know what they mean yet, and yes, if you found them in a passage of text you might well guess the meaning from context, but you don't guess how to read the word.

Sorry MsDemeanor but I really don't worry how to say the word when I'm sat with my airport "novel" relaxing in the sun and I really wouldn't make the effort to blend the sounds.

mrz, how would you work out a strange word without any context to help you.

How do you read a strangely written name in a story. Many adults are so quick and effective at blending they don't realise they are doing it.

Its not like five year old who are painfully learning to read. A profficent reader blends rapidly in their head. Or they might use analytic phonics and compare it to a word they already know.

The problem with guessing is that it can insideously change the meaning. For example the two words "house" and "home" have a similar meaning, but are sutlely different.

Expecting children to master lots of different methods at once is hard. Why not start simple.

No, of course you don't, because you are a fluent, experienced adult reader! Nobody's suggesting fluent adult readers have to learn phonics. This is about little children at the early stages of learning to read, when phonics makes a hell of a difference to their chance of success.
And my list of unfamiliar words was to show you do sound out a word (quickly, in your head) when it's totally unfamiliar - you don't just make a wild guess because of the initial letter. I sound out words quite a lot while reading Harry Potter aloud to the kids - but because I'm a quick, experienced, fluent reader it tends only when I'm reading made-up polysyllabic words that this happens.

ReallyTired why would I want to read a strange word out of context? You ask "How do you read a strangely written name in a story." in all honesty I don't read it. If it's not essential to the plot I skip it I certainly don't spend time agonising over how it is pronounced. Obviously it would be different if I was reading something out loud as I have to as a teacher but how many other people do that on a daily basis?