The so called “reading wars”

[mention]riotproof[/mention] I've also heard it called the magic e, the bossy e and a diagraph depending on which teacher you got...

There's a difference between what schools call sight words (e.g. magic 100, oxford list etc) and actual irregular words, which are tricky to sound out using phonics rules. If a school is using a structured synthetics program they shouldn't be sending home lists to memorize until that particular rule has been taught. After that, the words should be sitting the same rule family and the practice is to increase automaticity, not random memorization of out of context words.

Phonics programs do acknowledge irregular words need to be taught as outside the 'rules'. They should still be teaching morphology etc of these too.

@riotproof I've also heard it called the magic e, the bossy e and a diagraph depending on which teacher you got...

You’re right. It’s bossy! Lazy is something else.

Our school does use a phonics program, but it’s useless for my eldest kid, Works fine for my younger one, but he doesn’t have the literacy issues the older one has.

Instead I have the pleasure of paying a private speech therapist to teach my older kid to read, she’s using a different phonics program (sounds-write), which suits my kid much better. Bonus I discovered the other day is it’s one of the programs SPELD recommends. It doesn’t teach the bosy ‘e’, but more each sound individually, so like this week we are doing the oo sound, so you show them that it can appear in text as ‘oo’, ‘o’, ‘ue’, or u....e (I’ve missed one).

[mention]Princess Peach[/mention] yeah the bossy is too wide a rule and always confused my kid too. He needed more structured ones. Sounds-write is an awesome program, unfortunately when they started using it at our school they only use it for grades prep-yr 2 and he was in grade 4 at the time.

My kids' school uses Jolly Phonics (or at least they did when they did prep) and they also encourage using different strategies like stretchy snake, tryin' lion, and a couple of others I don't remember (I'm not sure if there's a name for that particular use of strategies). They did sight words as well in prep. Both kids are really good with reading and they love reading for pleasure, so I have been fortunate not to have too many worries about how they've been taught. But I have heard from other parents that it can be a real struggle for their kids, and I really feel for them.

I just hate that it has to be an either or situation.

Our school refers to camera words, and that’s only words that cannot be decoded using phonics.

Our school refers to camera words, and that’s only words that cannot be decoded using phonics.

I've seen these called heart words and red words in different systems, I doubt there is any synthetic phonics system that doesn't include active teaching of these words. The fact that you can't really sound out 'the' is not an argument against explicit teaching of phonics. Like others I am surprised to hear that anyone is still debating this particularly passionately, I thought it was pretty clearly understood that it works very well for most kids and far better than the more watered down whole of language inspired systems.

I just hate that it has to be an either or situation.

Which of course it doesn't have to be and in reality rarely is.

Our school refers to camera words, and that’s only words that cannot be decoded using phonics.

 

I've seen these called heart words and red words in different systems, I doubt there is any synthetic phonics system that doesn't include active teaching of these words. The fact that you can't really sound out 'the' is not an argument against explicit teaching of phonics. Like others I am surprised to hear that anyone is still debating this particularly passionately, I thought it was pretty clearly understood that it works very well for most kids and far better than the more watered down whole of language inspired systems.

Agreed. A synthetic phonics system from what I’ve seen seems to work for most. Of course there will always be outliers as with any part of education, but I find the idea that there’s a war about it all so odd.

Excuse my ignorance on this, but where do the Fitzroy readers fit into the debate

Excuse my ignorance on this, but where do the Fitzroy readers fit into the debate

SPELD stock them, so based on that they would fit into the category of decodable readers.

Excuse my ignorance on this, but where do the Fitzroy readers fit into the debate

Great for a systematic phonics-based approach, but my kids found them unbearably boring and despite loving reading, hated these books and would find ways to avoid reading them.

They did like the Oxford Learning Tree phonics readers, though. Either way, despite a strong phonics basis, each of my children saw a massive surge in their reading once they learnt the sight words. Before that, the many non-phonetic common words were holding up their fluency and then of course their comprehension.

Our school refers to camera words, and that’s only words that cannot be decoded using phonics.

The thing is there are only such a small handful, of words that don’t fit any phonics rule - one & once are 2 of those. And I know there is a program out there which claims these are the only 2 words that don’t fit a rule.

Fitzroy readers are quite good, but old! I'm pretty sure they pre-date whole language and balanced literacy approaches.

Excuse my ignorance on this, but where do the Fitzroy readers fit into the debate

Fitzroy readers are perfectly adequate decodable readers that fit a synthetic phonics approach. They also play to the heart of everyone in the whole language/balanced literacy camp who slam phonics readers because they are so fucking boring.

Definitely not the worst readers that can be sent home - at least the kids can actually read them rather than guessing at words based on what is on the page, but there are better series out there.

Excuse my ignorance on this, but where do the Fitzroy readers fit into the debate

 

Fitzroy readers are perfectly adequate decodable readers that fit a synthetic phonics approach. They also play to the heart of everyone in the whole language/balanced literacy camp who slam phonics readers because they are so fucking boring.

Definitely not the worst readers that can be sent home - at least the kids can actually read them rather than guessing at words based on what is on the page, but there are better series out there.

My kids school switched between DS1 & DS2 from PM readers (ugh) to LLLI Pip and Tim readers. I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging they are!

Fitzroy readers are perfectly adequate decodable readers that fit a synthetic phonics approach. They also play to the heart of everyone in the whole language/balanced literacy camp who slam phonics readers because they are so fucking boring.

Definitely not the worst readers that can be sent home - at least the kids can actually read them rather than guessing at words based on what is on the page, but there are better series out there.

 

My kids school switched between DS1 & DS2 from PM readers (ugh) to LLLI Pip and Tim readers. I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging they are!

The Little Learners books manage to be good decodable readers, and also reasonably pleasant to read! I am definitely a fan.