Is pure phonics right for every child?

[SquashedInTight]

I am a teacher, and have always followed an exclusive phonics approach in school. I just thought it was worth sharing this experience here, because there are probably other children like my daughter in the world...

My daughter has some word finding difficulties, and cannot remember abstract information. The names of things escape her, so when learning to read, the sounds of letters just became more 'names' she could not put to 'faces'. She gave up wanting to practise her sounds, or play the phonics games on the computer, because she could see she wasn't making progress. Instead, she would spend as long as she was allowed to with 'read aloud' books on the iPad that highlighted the words being read, going over and over the same words, learning them. She brought me simple books to read to her also, asking for them again and again, pointing to specific words and asking for me to read them.

So I gave in. I dug out the 'look and say' books my mother used to teach me, and figured they would at least make her happy. Well they have, because in just over a month of using them, she has unlocked that code for herself, in a way that makes sense to her. We are still reading the scheme books, but this morning we read 'The Cat in the Hat'. She worked out new words by relating them to ones she knew and read fairly fluently. Five weeks ago, she was a non-reader.

I would never say she was neurotypical (she's not), or that phonics is not the best approach for most children. I just thought it was worth mentioning that for a few children, whose brains do not work in the usual way, phonics on its own might not work.

As an experienced KS1 teacher (thankfully now in KS2 and praying I stay there after ML!) and moderator, I wholeheartedly agree. Have seen quite a few children for whom sight learning is more successful than decoding.

I work with children with reading difficulties and l have seen the look say give them a breakthrough where phonics just made them anxious and got them no where. When they got that breakthrough it's like they relax and then phonics can begin to be helpful.
After many years..nearly 40 ..and a huge amount of success in difficult situations l am a firm believer in whatever works.
And a multifaceted approach enables you to find what that is.
I'm delighted your dd had success.

You've answered your own question really. No one approach is right for every child and it makes me cross when schemes are introduced that must be taught to every single child in the school without exception. Some children will always struggle with an approach and can find our education system inflexible.

I hate phonics. My DD has only learnt to read now in year 1 after I bit the bullet and started teaching by sight as they do in DS school. Much more successful but I suppose everyone has different experiences.

I’m not an expert but did volunteer as reading support for many years and tended to find that children with dyslexia would often memorise the shape of a word rather than the letters in a word and actually couldn’t see the letters in order rendering phonics completely pointless.
The idea that one size fits all is archaic and actually (I think) damaging

I agree - not s teacher, but relevant recent academic.

But it also needs to be pointed out that no-one has ever claimed that phonics works for all. Rather that it works for far more than any other single method or combination of methods.

So I suppose it’s a case of reducing the number of those struggling in the classroom, which is held to be better for teachers, as they need plan and carry out fewer bespoke interventions,

If that’s not a good outcome for both teachers and also their pupils, what would be better?

It works for most, but as a teacher, the job is to find out how each individual learns best and go with that rather than the narrow, Procrustean bed method of government dictat.
There’s a phrase worth thinking about
‘Of course you can make a square peg fit a round hole. Problem is, you destroy the peg’
It’s one of the things written on the inside of my teaching file.

What would be better, iVampire? Remembering that teaching children is not the same as working in a sausage factory.
You don’t need to change something for everyone completely every time it doesn’t work for one child, you need to change things for that one child if you can.

DS2 is dyslexic (got diagnosis aged 7) and he really struggled with phonics. We were doing the Kumon programme with him alongside the phonics that school was doing and that was what eventually clicked for him over the Christmas holidays in Y1.

Kumon teaches DC to recognise words whole, aka 'camera words', starting with high frequency small words and quickly moving onto the bigger ones and then less frequent ones. Progress is fast once DC get the hang of it, even dyslexic DC like my DS. He'll never be a brilliant, fast reader, but phonics left him in tears of frustration.

And YY to repetitive books like the ones I learned with in the 70s/80s. He loved the Ant and Bee books, which highlight the new word in red, over and over again. I was told by the Kumon teacher that the UK is the only country in the world that teaches reading exclusively using phonics - all other countries use the 'camera words' technique. I don't know if that's true or not.

I’ve been through look and say, flash cards and sight words, reading schemes from The village with three corners and Ginn 360 to ORT, survived the ‘ only real books for reading ‘ in the 80s, synthetic phonics, PAT and now the latest mixture.
Only consistant has been the children’s need to be treated as the unique individuals they are. Including the ones who read more fluently with their shoes off, or lying on the floor with their legs wiggling.

‘ you need to change things for that one child if you can‘

That was exactly what I was intending to describe. So my apologies for being insufficiently clear.

I thought it was a good thing for there to be fewer pupils who needed individual interventions

My daughter taught herself to read by sight when she was 3. She’s now in reception and reads completely fluently. She obviously does phonics at school now but I don’t think she even really relates it to reading!

Neither of mine did well with phonics, nor did I apparently! Dd2 is dyslexic from infants school, dd1 has asd and both dd1 (adult) & I did a dyslexia test last week and are both dyslexic too apparently, we just both have great memories unlike dd2

Phonics works really well for the vast majority of children.

BUT

DS1 didn't need phonics: if he saw a whole word and I told him what it was once he remembered it for ever (also how to spell it)

DD cannot hear the sounds in words. She's very dyslexic and has had to learn whole words as attempting to write phonetically as children are encouraged to do just resulted in a jumble of letters.

But for the majority of children phonics really works, which is why it's so popular. Of course there will always be children who need a different approach. There doesn't seem. To be any popular programme for such children though, which is why the OP had to dig out the old, now unpopular "look and say" books (which totally didn't work for me - luckily phonics was just coming into fashion, although nowhere near as well implemented as it is in schools today)

Each child is uniquely different in terms of what they need and it's sometimes a tricky job to find out the most helpful approach. I teach in NZ where reading recovery techniques encourage the use of whole texts and phonics is a tiny part of reading. It's very different.