Builde
Sorry if I flamed you ... I just do have real problem with look and say. I was very like your daughter learnt to read at the age of 3 via look and say. Atrocious speller - it took me until adulthood to sort it out (if i have!).
Actually I got my mum to explain the whole value of synthetic phonics on another thread (she does it much better than me being and expert!!) here is what she said:
"One barely needs to teach the children who have good visual memory and can teach themselves the phonic code. I had one of those as a daughter (me - Lisa).
There are jails full of young people who are non readers, because they were not given the skills to break words up into syllables and sounds. Children who can read analytically (like Lisa) benefit from having the code explained to them (i.e. synthetic phonics), especially for spelling. The others make steady progress with phonics, and slowly gain automaticity with reading.
Children who are taught analytically (i.e. via look and say), but do not have good visual memory resort to guessing. That is fine with lovely books full of explicit illustrations, but what happens when they are faced with a page full of text with minimal illustration? Guessing does not help, and they give up.
I am a SpLD teacher, and have helped countless children through phonics.
Some children with good visual memory make good progress with reading until they are 7. Then you get the year three dip. Why? Because those children have not worked out the phonic code, and their visual memory can only remember so many words. Their self esteem becomes very poor, and they stop trying. If they had had the phonic code explained to them from the beginning, they would be reading."
The point is that the mixed method of reading which has been used in schools over the last decade has focused on look and say, repetion and context based clues. All of these encourage guessing which is a very poor strategy for reading. Most of the reluctant readers my mum has taught are guessers with very low confidence.
A properly structured reading scheme builds confidence because you never expect a child to read a word that they haven't been taught the code for. You don't expect them to run before they can walk. Of course as parents we know that some kids learn to walk and run in the same week. They are the special ones. We can't base our reading strategies on them!
In many ways spelling is an often overlooked issue here. I do believe that if it is well taught phonics can really help all our kids become good spellers and that is also a key skill.
Lisa