Bright child getting bored at reception

[zansi]

Hi this is my first post and really need some advice from experienced mums. My 5 year old daughter recently started reception at a local small state comununity school. She has really enjoyed it so far but is now getting bored.She is already a fluent reader and is good at basic Maths too. However, even though the teacher knows this, as a class they are learning beginner phonics which she finds very boring as she knows this already. She told me she asked the teacher to give her something new to do and her teacher says no, she has to do what the class are doing. I feel my daughter is just being ignored without being stretched further in Maths and English. I have already spoken to the teacher about this but don't want to be seen as a pushy parent.I am doing stuff at home with her but don't have much time and feel the school should be addressing my concerns. any advice on what to do please

Bruffin- Do you read phonically now , do you sound out every word or do you recognise whole words ? Whole word recognition only works for afew children ? really ? could only a couple of kids in your class read ? (assuming you went to school in the 70s)
Did you watch those Ruth Miskin programmes.Phonics teaching is enough to put anyone off reading for life.

I learned through phonics in the 70s. (My teachers must have been rebels LOL).

And yes, princessparty, I do still use them if I come across a new word. Have a go at reading out loud the ingredients on the back of a shampoo bottle and your word recognition tools will fail you pretty fast!

DD1 (age 7) is a very good reader. I think she uses a mixture of techniques. Which is as it should be, IMO.

And she is the youngest girl in the class, incidentally. So none of this "the youngest ones will need a little of help, poor dears"

In reception there should be so much going on in addition to maths and english that it shouldn't be possible to get bored.

My dds never get bored of playing (especially just before bedtime!)

Most schools differentiate the work, group the children and don't give the children the same reading books so not being challenged shouldn't be a problem.

So, they may be doing beginner phonics as a group, but this is a) quite fun and b) won't last long (10 mins a day?)before they go on to more differentiated work.

(However, I'm pretty laizzez-faire and never felt that not being challened aged 4/5 lead to underachievement later on.)

Alternatively, you can panic now and find a small, dull prep school that only does 'work'.

My dd can add and subtract using negative numbers and yet I don't worry about the fact they don't do this in year 1 because a) I don't think she really understands the concept behing this and b) if she can do it now, she will still be able to do it at secondary school when it will be taught.

Synthetic phonics is what is taught now but I learned to read through a combination of analytic phonics and whole word recognition. Apparently boys quite like the 'rules' of synthetic phonics but ds definitely began with whole word and now uses phonics for 'new' decoding. An educational system that adapts to children's learning will get better results than a one size fits all approach which I feel synthetic phonics does.

Research shows that teaching phonics is the best system. Not wishy washy theory but proper empirical research. No one is interested in what was best for me, my dad and my dog. I do hope none of you 'whole language' proponents work in education.

You're hilarious pointysaysrelax. Please go and take some valium or something.

Pointy - Phonics is the flavour of the month at the moment but fashions come and go.You can find research to support any viewpoint.

This happened to a friend of mine. Her dc was very good at maths and reading and ahead of the rest of the class. The teacher refused to differentiate. My friend had two meetings with her and one with the head. Her dc had started acting up because of being bored in class. She ended up moving to another state school where they did differentiate and her dc is thriving (and not playing up).

Prtincess it is not a fashion, scientist now know we don't look at the shape of the word we look at each letter in a word simultaniously and our brain filters all the words it knows until it finds a match,we are decoding all the time, we are also looking around the rest of the sentence to look for context which helps with finding the right word.

With word recognition some people will memorise a few thousand words but there is a limit to how many words the brain can remember, some people will learn to decode from that but a large number won't. They will appear to be able to read but they can't read new words as they have never learnt to decode, it is called functioning illiteracy.

I used to come across the 'whole word' ceiling often when I listened to children read in school - children in Y2 or 3 who recognised lots of words but couldn't sound out a new word, even a simple one like 'fetched', because they hadn't seen it before.

The thing about phonics teaching is that children who are natural 'whole word' readers pick up the whole words alongside the phonics every time they read a book. I taught DS2 with synthetic phonics and there is a period where they laboriously sound everything out.

Incidentally he also was a very fluent reader in Reception (and a boy and born on 31st August) but he enjoyed the whole class phonics - he knew it, which was confidence building and they did actions, which was fun.

IME Y1 is the boring year for very able children. Reception is loads of fun and in Y2 the curriculum broadens a bit.

This reading wars topic is fascinating and princessparty and pofarced are right that it does go in cycles, with phonic based schemes and whole language schemes moving in and out of fashion. An interesting 1963 US thesis which discusses these fahion changes is at the folowing link
www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/student/honorstheses/pdfs/R44_1963ReesIla.pdf

What is also very interesting is that these fashion changes are very often politically driven. The whole language approach is generally a left-wing type approach which fits in with the child-centred, progressive, play-centred, fun type of approach, and the phonics based approaches are more right-wing thinking, more rule-based and didactic.
www.nrrf.org/article_anderson6-18-00.htm
and
www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/readytoread.pdf

It is interesting that it was the Labour Government that eventually brought phonics back into fashion, as they moved to a more right-wing standards based belief which fits in with their championing of SATs testing.

It seems that elements of both phonics and whole language comprehension need to exist for young children to learn how to read. The danger in some of these fashion shifts is that sometimes, as one method becomes predominant, the baby gets thrown out with the bath water.

There seems to be an interesting difference between young children learning to read for the first time and older children and adults, as to whether they need phonics. From my own experience of learning four foreign languages, I agree with princessparty that this was achieved via a pattern recognition whole language style approach. If I had had to learn these via explicit phonic instruction, it would have been so laborious that it would have put me off languages for life.

I think that spelling is largely based on pattern recognition, which is why I think teachers should generally correct spelling at the earliest opportunity without worrying about self-esteem issues. The correct pattern needs to be embedded in the child's mind. If the child gets used to using the wrong pattern then it will be more difficult to shift this incorrect embedded pattern from the child's mind. This is why I also think that rote learning and spelling tests are vital since they help embed the correct pattern in the child's mind.

On MN I constantly see the word definately. At the moment I know that there is something wrong with this pattern, since it doesn't match the pattern that I have internalised. But if I were to read nothing but MN forums, I fear that I would soon be writing definately myself, as the constant viewing of this incorrect pattern would eventually displace the correct pattern from my mind.

But claig even if know the shape is wrong you are still working out the what the word is, if you were just relying on the shape you wouldn't be able to read it at all.
If we were just relying on the shape, nobody would be able to read mispelt words.

yes but am I using phonemes or whatever they are to recognise the whole word? I don't think so. When I see the word "something" I don't explicitly break it down, I see it and make a leap to seeing the whole word

I think this is similar to what princessparty said about a child recognising a dog's face. In order to understand our minds make leaps and see patterns which are not just a sequence of algorithmic instructions.

but we now know we are not using shapes to recognise words. You know it's wrong because you are looking at each letter individually in the word and realising it is in the wrong order or something is missing or is added.

in order to recognise that definately is wrong, I first realised that I didn't recognise the pattern, then I had to make the leap, guess that what was really meant was definitely. I had to do this via a sort of pattern based whole language comprehension style approach.

You may be right, it is difficult to know how we really process these things. However, I don't think that I am actually looking at every letter individually. I think that I am seeing a whole via some mysterious human leap, which cannot be replicated by a machine which follows only logical instructions. I think that I then see that the whole is not something already in my memory and then look at the individual letters to see why this is. Then using whole language comprehension I guess that what was really meant was definitely and that the particular letter 'a' was wrong.

Bruffin: 'Prisons are full of people who never learnt to read because of such schemes.'

Is there empirical research to back up that comment?

very interesting posts claig.

Word shape recognition theory is over a 100 years old. The fact we take in every letter simultaneously has been discovered by eye tracking and use of computers and MRI scans can show the area of the brains we use to read.

This explains why phonics are so important

I think that study is interesting bruffin and shows that readers who need more help can certainly benefit from phonics to get them started.

bruffin, that is interesting research. What struck me was
"the brains of the 37 formerly poor readers began functioning like the brains of good readers. Specifically, the poor readers showed increased activity in an area of the brain that recognizes words instantly without first having to decipher them."
which led me to think that good readers don't phonically break down words but rather recognise them instantly as a whole from memory.
This is again re-emphasized later as
"another brain area serves as a kind of long-term storage system. Once a word is learned, this brain region recognizes it automatically, without first having to decipher it phonetically.
Poor readers, the researchers had learned in the earlier studies, have difficulty accessing this automatic recognition center. Instead, they rely almost exclusively on the phoneme center and the mapping center. Each time poor readers see a word, they must puzzle over it, as if they were seeing it for the first time."

The same researchers did another study where they conclude that dyslexic children have a brain impairment that is causing their reading difficulties
www.nichd.nih.gov/news/releases/dyslexianews.cfm
and they say
"In summary, for dyslexic readers, these brain activation patterns provide evidence of an imperfectly functioning system for segmenting words into their phonologic constituents; accordingly, this disruption is evident when dyslexic readers are asked to respond to increasing demands on phonologic analysis,"

If this is true it made me wonder whether the emphasis on phonics for poor readers and dyslexics is in fact wrong. Could it be that their brains are not geared up for this approach to reading and that a more memory based approach (which is how they say good readers operate) is maybe more appropriate for dyslexics and poor readers, rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole?

It led me to do a quick search and find a "maverick" headmaster, who has quite good credentials since he was warded the "ITV Teacher of the Year award for the Midlands"
who thinks that phonics is not the way to teach dyslexics to read.
www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6002967
and
www.birminghampost.net/life-leisure-birmingham-guide/postfeatures/2009/01/21/understanding-dyslexia- 65233-22746472/

He is obviously not in the mainstream, but it does give food for thought.

'It led me to do a quick search and find a "maverick" headmaster, who has quite good credentials since he was warded the "ITV Teacher of the Year award for the Midlands"'

So what - Daniel Kinge, the paedophile behind Sparklebox, won The Teacher Training Agency for Outstanding New Teacher in 2004.

"If this is true it made me wonder whether the emphasis on phonics for poor readers and dyslexics is in fact wrong"
If this was true, why would [[http://www.dyslexiaaction.org.uk/ Dyslexia Action, a national charity and a leading provider of services and support for people with dyslexia and literacy difficulties, recommend and deliver programmes made up of careful, systematic phonic teaching?

Rats, knackered up link Dyslexia Action.

I wouldn't like to compare Dr. Neville Brown to Daniel Kinge. Dr. Neville Brown seems like a very great man who has served the country and children very well throughout his lifetime in education.

A former head of education at the British Dyslexia Association said of him
"Dr Lindsay Peer, a lecturer, educational psychologist and former head of education at the British Dyslexia Association, said: ?Maple Hayes is the only school in the country that does it, and it works, especially for children with problems with auditory processing, or poor memories for letters and letter combinations.

?I?ve sent children there who have been regarded as failures, and they?ve come out reading. Neville?s work is remarkable.?

I had previously looked at Dyslexia Action, but did not want to link to them as I was probably including too many links, but they replied to the TES article about Dr. Neville Brown with the following :
"The teaching of synthetic phonics has been proven to be a very important part of teaching reading. Those who are dyslexic lack phonological awareness and indeed often struggle to learn to read when taught using conventional methods. However, the headline for this article is very misleading and in Dyslexia Action?s experience we know that a letter-sound method, when properly taught by appropriately qualified people, can be extremely successful when teaching dyslexic learners.

Dr Neville Brown?s methodology is clearly effective and Dyslexia Action acknowledges the real value of morphology and indeed we use it within our teaching to give an understanding of the way words work, which does make a difference to our dyslexic learners. However, the majority of dyslexic children learn quite happily with letters and sounds. We know that most dyslexic learners will respond to phonics, if delivered at the right pace with the right amount of repetition, rehearsal and, for example, an understanding of how to use syllable division and suffixing rules.

It is important to stress that while morphology is effective, the use of phonics with dyslexic learners should not be dismissed. In Dyslexia Action?s experience the two should not be mutually exclusive . Both ways of understanding how words work are important for good, confident literacy skills."

Reading this, and being aware that politics may possibly play a factor, I don't feel that they are dismissing Dr. Neville Brown's work.