Reading books are a tricky subject. If your child is at school, the books sent home may baffle you and confuse your child. This is not unique to your school, or your child. Help is at hand! Many parents ask: If the school is teaching my child to sound out words, then how comes s/he can not sound out the words in the books sent home? The answer, simply put, is that ideally each phonic scheme (e.g. Letters and Sounds) should have its own unique set of reading books, which match the order in which the sounds are introduced. Some do - but as far as I am aware, Letters and Sounds, used by many schools, does not. Therefore the schools often use a hotch potch of books from several schemes and group them into colour coded 'bands'. Most usually your child is given free choice from the colour band s/he is assigned to, depending on current ability. This is, from my point of view, not helpful to the child learning to read with phonics who needs a book that has words that can be sounded out - at the child's level. Why are schools satisfied with this? Well that is another story, but in short - many teachers still believe that phonics stilts reading and they hope that by using 'whole word' reading books that the child will have the best of both worlds. It doesnt work like that - it just leaves many children bewildered. No real need for reading books to start withHistorically, schools used graded reading books in conjunction with a look and say approach. These books at least had a controlled vocabulary and the child learnt words by memory, then learning enough to put into sentences and eventually in to paragraphs and more. Ladybird still sell a scheme that is popular. They gave children confidence, but children with any difficulty learning to read hit memory burn out at some point and their reading skills top-out. Phonics is by far a better method by which to learn, but each scheme must then have its own unique set of reading books. Reading Made Simple has its own set of FREE to download and print reading books. If you have a struggling reader who has so far failed to learn to read with phonics, then I can only suggest that you use my programme and reading books. It is proven to work where others have failed. How to use the school's reading books to best advantageIf the school has given your child books like Biff, Chip and Kipper of the Oxford Reading Tree, and they have learnt pretty much to look at the pictures and memorise the text, then gently start to draw the child's attention to words that can be read properly. The names themselves are a good place to start. If you think the book is beyond your child's ability, then simply read it to him/her and spend the rest of the time practising phonic skills. Don't let your child memorise the text! Remember, reading is taught by means of a systematic phonic programme, which eliminates guesswork and not by 'look and say'. Guessing is not the reading strategy you are taught it is: rather it is the road to illiteracy, Do not be fooled. A scheme at the end of the day is a means to an end. It builds up gradually until the child is a fluent reader. Modern schemes these days tend to put great emphasis on understanding the story. Alright, if you haven't got a clue what you are reading about there is not much point reading it! But to be honest - if you read books to your child and do things together, then you will have no need to worry about comprehension too much at this stage. It will come naturally. Often schools focus on the comprehension as they are making such a mess of actually getting the children decoding. Children need a strategy for working out what words say. Guessing doesn't work! Think of learning to drive - or any other new skill. At first you have to learn the skills and all your attention is taken up with them. Clutch down, change gear, lift clutch as accelerator is gently pressed down... phew that was a job thinking about it! Only when you have had a lot of practice does driving a car become gradually, more and more second nature so that you do it without thinking and concentrate on reading the road. So with reading. We need to understand why we want to learn - to see the end in sight so it's good to do all the things I said to give the child the idea that reading is worthwhile and good. But before s/he gets there, there are the skills to slowly learn and build up. Yes, do talk about what the child is reading to you, but make the actual 'sounding out' the main focus, until reading becomes automatic, when the child will really start to enjoy reading. To that end, phonics for reading needs to take as little as time as possible. You can have a child with a reading age of 12 by age 6 Schemes can be dull to some, but a life-line to othersMost children at this begining to read stage like to feel they are reading a book, but as this early stage passes quite quickly you don't want to spend lots of money buying special books. Some children will find a scheme helpful, others will find it dull - you know your child best. Find books with simple print and see what happens - get the child to read the words they can and you read the words they can't and gradually they will be able to decode more and more. If you would feel happier with a scheme then I highly recommend my own decodable phonic reading books on Reading Made Simple, which start with books with just CVC words, (like cat and dog,) building up through the basic sounds. Sight words that cannot be sounded out are introduced slowly. Reading Made Simple has its own reading booksOur books are all phonetic and can be sounded out using the phonic knowledge that has been introduced prior to the book being recommended. They will not work with other Phonic programmes unless you have carefully checked to make sure that your child knows all of the sounds needed to read each book. You can easily check this information. They are short booklets that can be printed in either colour or black and white. They can be found here. Have you see our FREE phonic reading scheme?Give your child a head start in reading today! Comments are closed.
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WelcomeHello, I'm Lilibette, qualified teacher (B.Ed Hons). I have taught phonics in mainstream education, followed by have home-educated my two sons to 18, and am now a private tutor. Categories
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