Friday, 6 April 2012
Learning to read: Story 4
" My son learnt off the To Let and Food and Wine signs on the Blackstock Road. We did have books too, but for him it was realising that there were words everywhere. "
Learning to read: Story 3
" Both my kids learnt to read after nightly sharing of Letterland stories at bedtime - Annie Apple, etc. they loved it and knew them all after no time at all. It developed a healthy curiosity in letters and we would search the picture for anything else that began with the same letter. "
[from facebook]
[from facebook]
Learning to read: Story 2
" My 7year old Yorkshre child is enjoying old The Broons comicstrip books. Scottish dialect - worked it out himself. No phonics..."
(from Twitter)
(Story 1 was from facebook)
(from Twitter)
(Story 1 was from facebook)
Learning to read: Story 1
" I used to read Eric Carle to my 2yr old as part of her bedtime routine - 'polar bear polar bear what do you hear? I hear a lion roaring in my ear' - only I would pause so she could guess what came next. One night when I praised her excellent guesses she said rather sheepishly 'actually I was cheating, i was looking at the words'. Shame on me for exposing a 2 year old to words!"
Readers of this blog - more stories like this please. Phonics one too. Yes! There are many types of people, many types of brain, many types of parents...If it works, it works.
Readers of this blog - more stories like this please. Phonics one too. Yes! There are many types of people, many types of brain, many types of parents...If it works, it works.
False logic of decoding vs reading for meaning
At this blog:
http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/phonics-screening-sense-and-sensibility.html
you can find this statement:
"You can’t read for meaning if you can’t decode the words."
How logical! But how false...
The problem with it as a statement is that it would suggest that there are two separate activities and that the brain is a like a piece of machinery. That's to say, the machine is programmed to do something and then, and only then, it can do it. Luckily and wonderfully, the human brain isn't a machine. Amongst many things it's a reflecting, contemplative, reasoning organ. It looks, thinks, adapts, changes, asks questions, alters what it's learned and of course enables 'performance' ie speaking, writing, moving, dancing, facial expression etc etc.
So what anyone does when they're learning is do several things at the same time, learning, adapting, 'accommodating' what's new with what's old in their minds, reflecting on what they've learned and so on. When children learn how to speak, most of the time to start off with they are hearing things they do not understand. Between the ages of 0 and 5 they move from not understanding anything bar tone of voice perhaps, to understanding an enormous amount and,indeed to have internalised pretty well all the grammatical processes of the language going on around them.
Because this spoken language is bedded down in children's heads by the time we are asking them to learn how to read, it is complete nonsense to suggest that there is no reading for meaning,unless you can decode.
The point is we have all seen very young children do both at the same time!
To take an example, many parents have read and re-read books with their very young children. Most such children, at any age between, say, 3 and 5 will start to ask what this or that 'says'. They will point at words and letters and try to say them. As you're reading with them, they may ask you, or you may run your finger over the words. If you leave gaps, they will say the word that you're not saying because they have heard you say it before. If you substitute another word, they will tell you. If you leave them with that book and many more, you will hear them saying the book outloud, some of the time because they remember you saying it, some of the time, because they find the word on the page. Sometimes you hear them 'take' that reading of the word to another text and find that word in another text. In other words, they 'read' that word (or words) somewhere else.
Meaning and decoding and listening are in this way interrelated. Of course this kind of thing doesn't go on in all homes. However, because it does, that is why some children are learning to read by other methods, other than synthetic phonics, or in addition to, or, alongside, or as part of that process. To ignore this or to pretend it isn't happening or indeed as the Woman's Hour Head (as I'm calling him) is suggesting should happen, is in essence to declare war on the use of picture books with young children.
It's yet another example of how education invents ways in which children should be deprived of art's way of thinking about us as human beings, reflectively, contemplatively, speculatively, imaginatively, symbolically and, above all, through narrative or 'story'.
http://deevybee.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/phonics-screening-sense-and-sensibility.html
you can find this statement:
"You can’t read for meaning if you can’t decode the words."
How logical! But how false...
The problem with it as a statement is that it would suggest that there are two separate activities and that the brain is a like a piece of machinery. That's to say, the machine is programmed to do something and then, and only then, it can do it. Luckily and wonderfully, the human brain isn't a machine. Amongst many things it's a reflecting, contemplative, reasoning organ. It looks, thinks, adapts, changes, asks questions, alters what it's learned and of course enables 'performance' ie speaking, writing, moving, dancing, facial expression etc etc.
So what anyone does when they're learning is do several things at the same time, learning, adapting, 'accommodating' what's new with what's old in their minds, reflecting on what they've learned and so on. When children learn how to speak, most of the time to start off with they are hearing things they do not understand. Between the ages of 0 and 5 they move from not understanding anything bar tone of voice perhaps, to understanding an enormous amount and,indeed to have internalised pretty well all the grammatical processes of the language going on around them.
Because this spoken language is bedded down in children's heads by the time we are asking them to learn how to read, it is complete nonsense to suggest that there is no reading for meaning,unless you can decode.
The point is we have all seen very young children do both at the same time!
To take an example, many parents have read and re-read books with their very young children. Most such children, at any age between, say, 3 and 5 will start to ask what this or that 'says'. They will point at words and letters and try to say them. As you're reading with them, they may ask you, or you may run your finger over the words. If you leave gaps, they will say the word that you're not saying because they have heard you say it before. If you substitute another word, they will tell you. If you leave them with that book and many more, you will hear them saying the book outloud, some of the time because they remember you saying it, some of the time, because they find the word on the page. Sometimes you hear them 'take' that reading of the word to another text and find that word in another text. In other words, they 'read' that word (or words) somewhere else.
Meaning and decoding and listening are in this way interrelated. Of course this kind of thing doesn't go on in all homes. However, because it does, that is why some children are learning to read by other methods, other than synthetic phonics, or in addition to, or, alongside, or as part of that process. To ignore this or to pretend it isn't happening or indeed as the Woman's Hour Head (as I'm calling him) is suggesting should happen, is in essence to declare war on the use of picture books with young children.
It's yet another example of how education invents ways in which children should be deprived of art's way of thinking about us as human beings, reflectively, contemplatively, speculatively, imaginatively, symbolically and, above all, through narrative or 'story'.
Letter from teacher re poetry teaching
Dear Michael
I follow you on Twitter and ....
I teach a primary 6 class, in a Belfast school, in a large council estate. Every morning I start the day with a poem taken a "poem for every day of the year" type of anthology. I read it aloud and then ask the children for a show of hands as to how many points out of 10 they would give it. Every class I have taught love this. They love poems that rhyme or those that make them laugh but many have also voted for poems they haven't understood but which they "just like the sound of". Throughout the year we cover a wide variety of poetry, some of which would sometimes be considered to be adult fayre, such as Shakespeare or Tennyson or Wordsworth. The children carefully listen and are really keen to offer their opinion on the poem of that day. On Friday I remind them of the week's poems and we vote again, this time for poem of the week. The winning poem is photocopied and is put on a small display area on the classroom wall. When the previous winning poem is taken down the children all argue about who can take and keep the previous week's poem.
It is such a small thing to do each day but I have found that it has triggered a love for poetry in many of the children. They very often get poetry books of their own from the class library and bring me their favourites to add to the Friday poem of the week.
I just thought I would share this small thing with you to let you know that many times in school we do things which cannot be measured and which might seem inconsequential, but which might enrich the lives of another generation of children.
Headteacher on 'damaging' books
It seems as is on today's BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour on a discussion about the Year 1 Phonics Screening check, a headteacher said: "It's actually very damaging to give children texts that they can't read because they can't decode the words."
Let's get into the thinking here:
There are people now who believe that the phrase 'first, fast and only' which has circulated around education in relation to the teaching of 'Synthetic phonics' (SP) through government approved SP schemes means that this is the only kind of reading material that should be put in front of young readers - 4, 5 and even 6 year olds.
If you're not in education and are wondering what this is all about you can google 'synthetic phonics' and see what this is all about. SP is a system of teaching children how to 'decode' the language according to the correspondences between letters and sounds. So children look at letters and letter combination ('th' or 'ea' and the like) and learn how to say them. It's 'synthetic' because they learn how to combine these sounds into words or invented words. So anyone reading this blog will be able to come up with a 'plausible' pronunciation for 'glurg' or 'slib' and the like.
SP advocates believe (and have vast bodies of tests and research to prove it) that SP teaching is a highly effective way to...er....teach children how to 'decode'. There is an argument, though, over whether it's a highly effective way to teach children to 'read' - that is, do what you're doing now, reading what I've written and trying to understand it (!).
Some of us are keen to point out that 'decoding' is not the same as 'reading'. As evidence for that, some people learn to read without doing very much explicit, repeated 'decoding'. That's how I was taught 60 years ago. Similarly, some children are coming through who have learned to 'decode' but are 'barking at print' - that's to say, not finding 'reading for meaning' easy.
As I've blogged about before, we have in June the Year 1 'Phonics Screening' test. Children will be given 40 words and asked to read them outloud. Some of them will be 'nonsense' words ie words that don't exist in English. The child will have 'failed' if he or she gets less that 32 right. The 'nonsense' words have to be read with 'plausible' pronunciations' so, let's say, the letters 'ee' have to be pronounced as one would pronounce 'ee' in 'meet' and not, say, as 'oo', as in 'root', or something. The parents of children who have failed will be informed.
I have met the person who is quoted at the top here (from 'Woman's Hour') and I would want to make clear that what goes on in his school as a whole is not at all represented by what he is saying here. As he himself points out in his presentations, the first years at the school are full of reading aloud, children learning nursery rhymes and poems, the later years full of children writing, authors' visits (eg Beverley Naidoo), and a very rich literacy curriculum. However, in his philosophy, none of this is 'teaching the children to read'. Only the SP work is doing this.
He has expressed this as avoiding putting texts that children can't decode in front of them. Those of us who read with our children every day are puzzled by this because this is precisely what we do every day. We share books that the children 'can't read'. In fact, they understand them (aurally ie through their ears) and they pick up the 'wording' of the written language ie how words hang together to make the sound, rhythm and grammar of our written language. Again, we find our children 'decoding' bits of these, passages of these, in all kinds of exploratory, patchy sorts of ways. They might be sitting on our laps, looking at the book as we're reading it. Or they might pick up books, comics and magazines in their bedrooms or that older siblings leave lying about (!) and 'struggle to read them' - voluntarily. Sometimes they get stuck. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they ask for help. Sometimes they don't. The point is that they are putting 'reading' together as an investigative, discovering, exploratory process.
Not all children will be doing this at home. To a greater or lesser extent though, many are. What the headteacher is saying is that we shouldn't do this sort of thing in schools. We shouldn't be letting children do (what all my children did) which is sit on cushions at the corner of the nursery or reception class with a pile of books and look at them.
As an aside, it's worth pausing a moment and thinking how it is, in a print-rich culture, we might feasibly stop children of 4 and 5 looking at written language which they can't 'decode'. I mean things like street signs, parents' newspapers, menus, leaflets, older siblings comics, books and magazines, holiday brochures and so on?
The head who was on Woman's Hour runs a literature-rich school. Some headteachers, as I've reported here, are saying what he is saying but not running a literature-rich school. The 'real books' are banned from Reception and Year 1 classrooms, and the children move on from their to 'passages' and 'excerpts' and highly controlled 'genre' writing, highly controlled methods of constructing sentences, paragraphs and continuous prose. Meanwhile, there is no school policy on 'reading for pleasure' - even though this is recommended on the two Rose Reports, in the PISA and PIRLs reports and now in the latest Ofsted English report 'Moving English Forward'.
Let's get into the thinking here:
There are people now who believe that the phrase 'first, fast and only' which has circulated around education in relation to the teaching of 'Synthetic phonics' (SP) through government approved SP schemes means that this is the only kind of reading material that should be put in front of young readers - 4, 5 and even 6 year olds.
If you're not in education and are wondering what this is all about you can google 'synthetic phonics' and see what this is all about. SP is a system of teaching children how to 'decode' the language according to the correspondences between letters and sounds. So children look at letters and letter combination ('th' or 'ea' and the like) and learn how to say them. It's 'synthetic' because they learn how to combine these sounds into words or invented words. So anyone reading this blog will be able to come up with a 'plausible' pronunciation for 'glurg' or 'slib' and the like.
SP advocates believe (and have vast bodies of tests and research to prove it) that SP teaching is a highly effective way to...er....teach children how to 'decode'. There is an argument, though, over whether it's a highly effective way to teach children to 'read' - that is, do what you're doing now, reading what I've written and trying to understand it (!).
Some of us are keen to point out that 'decoding' is not the same as 'reading'. As evidence for that, some people learn to read without doing very much explicit, repeated 'decoding'. That's how I was taught 60 years ago. Similarly, some children are coming through who have learned to 'decode' but are 'barking at print' - that's to say, not finding 'reading for meaning' easy.
As I've blogged about before, we have in June the Year 1 'Phonics Screening' test. Children will be given 40 words and asked to read them outloud. Some of them will be 'nonsense' words ie words that don't exist in English. The child will have 'failed' if he or she gets less that 32 right. The 'nonsense' words have to be read with 'plausible' pronunciations' so, let's say, the letters 'ee' have to be pronounced as one would pronounce 'ee' in 'meet' and not, say, as 'oo', as in 'root', or something. The parents of children who have failed will be informed.
I have met the person who is quoted at the top here (from 'Woman's Hour') and I would want to make clear that what goes on in his school as a whole is not at all represented by what he is saying here. As he himself points out in his presentations, the first years at the school are full of reading aloud, children learning nursery rhymes and poems, the later years full of children writing, authors' visits (eg Beverley Naidoo), and a very rich literacy curriculum. However, in his philosophy, none of this is 'teaching the children to read'. Only the SP work is doing this.
He has expressed this as avoiding putting texts that children can't decode in front of them. Those of us who read with our children every day are puzzled by this because this is precisely what we do every day. We share books that the children 'can't read'. In fact, they understand them (aurally ie through their ears) and they pick up the 'wording' of the written language ie how words hang together to make the sound, rhythm and grammar of our written language. Again, we find our children 'decoding' bits of these, passages of these, in all kinds of exploratory, patchy sorts of ways. They might be sitting on our laps, looking at the book as we're reading it. Or they might pick up books, comics and magazines in their bedrooms or that older siblings leave lying about (!) and 'struggle to read them' - voluntarily. Sometimes they get stuck. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they ask for help. Sometimes they don't. The point is that they are putting 'reading' together as an investigative, discovering, exploratory process.
Not all children will be doing this at home. To a greater or lesser extent though, many are. What the headteacher is saying is that we shouldn't do this sort of thing in schools. We shouldn't be letting children do (what all my children did) which is sit on cushions at the corner of the nursery or reception class with a pile of books and look at them.
As an aside, it's worth pausing a moment and thinking how it is, in a print-rich culture, we might feasibly stop children of 4 and 5 looking at written language which they can't 'decode'. I mean things like street signs, parents' newspapers, menus, leaflets, older siblings comics, books and magazines, holiday brochures and so on?
The head who was on Woman's Hour runs a literature-rich school. Some headteachers, as I've reported here, are saying what he is saying but not running a literature-rich school. The 'real books' are banned from Reception and Year 1 classrooms, and the children move on from their to 'passages' and 'excerpts' and highly controlled 'genre' writing, highly controlled methods of constructing sentences, paragraphs and continuous prose. Meanwhile, there is no school policy on 'reading for pleasure' - even though this is recommended on the two Rose Reports, in the PISA and PIRLs reports and now in the latest Ofsted English report 'Moving English Forward'.
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