Children are being drilled to pass the Phonics Screening Check with the phonics first and only approach. This is because a test out of 40 is easy to measure, but it tells us very little. Phonics is being taught in isolation and 'reading' taught through decodable books only. It's killing reading for meaning and pleasure. The young people I meet, who have often been excluded from mainstream education, have told me how awful the experience has been for them. Many of them are 12years + and they have been failed by the system. They have not been encouraged to talk about stories, poems, plays, etc. They have not been exposed to language rich books that model good language structure and offer vocabulary extension. They have not had opportunities to read the kind of stories they love or had the opportunity to find out more about topics that interest them. They have been zip zopping on the zop!
Thank you for this thoughtful response and this is exactly what I am finding, it's such a shame. It's why it's so important to share the research on every child having an entitlement to a rich diet of high quality texts because the decodables only take them so far. M
Absolutely! What you do is invaluable. If you ever want to evaluate the impact of our intervention, we are currently looking at our options. We are in many Mainstream and Special Schools across the UK.
We only use whole language texts. We extract the decodable and tricky words (plenty of those in English!) out of them because we know what our pupils know and we know what they need to learn next. We nurture fluency and comprehension, from the first level books. It baffles me (and many of our pupils), that these aspects of learning to read are taught in isolation, rather than in an enjoyable, meaningful context, using the strengths of each pupil to address weaknesses and barriers.
Children are being drilled to pass the Phonics Screening Check with the phonics first and only approach. This is because a test out of 40 is easy to measure, but it tells us very little. Phonics is being taught in isolation and 'reading' taught through decodable books only. It's killing reading for meaning and pleasure. The young people I meet, who have often been excluded from mainstream education, have told me how awful the experience has been for them. Many of them are 12years + and they have been failed by the system. They have not been encouraged to talk about stories, poems, plays, etc. They have not been exposed to language rich books that model good language structure and offer vocabulary extension. They have not had opportunities to read the kind of stories they love or had the opportunity to find out more about topics that interest them. They have been zip zopping on the zop!
Thank you for this thoughtful response and this is exactly what I am finding, it's such a shame. It's why it's so important to share the research on every child having an entitlement to a rich diet of high quality texts because the decodables only take them so far. M
Absolutely! What you do is invaluable. If you ever want to evaluate the impact of our intervention, we are currently looking at our options. We are in many Mainstream and Special Schools across the UK.
We only use whole language texts. We extract the decodable and tricky words (plenty of those in English!) out of them because we know what our pupils know and we know what they need to learn next. We nurture fluency and comprehension, from the first level books. It baffles me (and many of our pupils), that these aspects of learning to read are taught in isolation, rather than in an enjoyable, meaningful context, using the strengths of each pupil to address weaknesses and barriers.
Great to hear you are working across schools, absolutely what's needed. Would be good to follow up at some point