Chez Spud

**Disclaimer: this post will not be of any interest unless you live in the UK and have a young child…to the rest of you: move along…nothing for you to see here…**

Oxford University Press proudly boast that their reading scheme, Oxford Reading Tree is used by ‘most primary schools’. I have no reason to doubt that this is true, but the question is ‘why?’. Why do schools persist in using the ORT, an old style ‘look and say’ reading scheme when, in the wake of the Rose report of 2006, all schools now teach reading using synthetic phonics which should have made those ‘look and say’ books instantly redundant?  In fact, the Rose report specifically singled out the ORT (albeit without naming it) for criticism. The only reasonable explanation is the sheer cost involved with replacing a whole reading scheme which, I assume, must run to thousands and thousands of pounds. It always comes down to money I suppose.

The Department of Education sets out the criteria for reading schemes here. It quite clearly states that schemes should support learning to read using synthetic phonics and should;

• “ensure that as pupils move through the early stages of acquiring phonics, they are invited to practise by reading texts which are entirely decodable for them, so that they experience success and learn to rely on phonemic strategies”.

The italics are mine. So, the government wants early readers to have access to books which are ‘fully decodable’ (using phonic strategies) yet many (or most if you believe OUP) are still using ‘look and say’ schemes. It’s madness to give children the tools that they need to make a confident start with reading by teaching them phonics, and then throw non-decodable books at them. Likewise, why bother with a solid phonic grounding if you’re going to use a reading scheme which relies heavily on picture clues and repetition.

Synthetic phonics doesn’t work for every child, but it works for most children and all the research has demonstrated that it leads to a higher level of literacy than other methods. The old ‘look and say’ method often works very well in the early stages of reading since most children (a) have fantastic memories and can memorise quite a large number of words by sight and (b) most children will happily ‘guess’ the word once they’ve got the first letter and the picture is giving them a clue. But that’s not reading! As I understand it, the problems can start once their memories can no longer cope with having simply memorised words by sight…around the 150 word mark. Many children will stall at that point, or when the picture/word ratio means they can’t simply guess. And if they don’t have a solid grounding in decoding then what strategies will they use to actually ‘read’ the text?

Bertie (5yo) is reading a mix of ‘look and say’ books (sent home from school) and ‘decodable books’ (provided by us), having learnt to read at home using only decodable books before he started school. At some point all readers have to move to ‘non decodable books’ of course, so in some ways it’s not a bad thing to mix things up like this. Diggy (4yo) is in the early stages of reading too and, again, only uses decodable books.

I’m not much of a book reviewer but, for anyone interested, I used the excellent Cbeebies ‘Fun with Phonics’ books to teach both boys to read (having taught them the basic phonics). I really can’t recommend these enough, very clear and simple with absolutely minimal use of tricky words (such as ‘the’…which you can’t really get away with in any book!). Quite different than ORT which chucks in all manner of random tricky words right from the start. Why?

Neither of my boys really ‘love’ that whole Jolly Phonic actions for sounds, so I didn’t bother with that. We just learnt the sounds straight up through repetition, mostly using a poster on their bedroom wall which presents the sounds in the ‘usual’ groupings (set 1: s,a,t,i,p,n, etc etc).

From there, I moved on to the excellent Dandelion Readers. Again, really outstandingly good. They work through each phonic, digraph etc in a very methodical way. Then they work through split vowels, alternative spellings for individual sounds etc. The illustrations are interesting, but intentionally do not give clues to the reader to avoid guessing.

Other schemes we’ve used and enjoyed are Rigby Phonics, Project X (fantastic, non-fiction books aimed at boys), Floppy’s Phonics (again excellent, fiction and non-fiction…and published by OUP!), AlphaKids and Ladybird ‘Superhero Phonic Books’.

Interestingly, Bertie finds reading non-fiction books more of a challenge than fiction. I suppose it’s because there is less repetition in a non-fiction book (no names that constantly crop up, no ‘he said’, ‘she asked’ etc etc). Storybooks, and in particular those Biff & Chip ORT books, are often very formulaic and he whizzes through them because of this. Non-fiction books are a slower read, since he will stop to ask questions or discuss issues in a way that he doesn’t when reading a story. Plus, we’ve learnt about how to use a ‘contents’ and ‘index’. All good stuff.

It won’t be long before our ‘reading scheme’ days are behind us and, whilst we’ve enjoyed so many of the books we’ve done as ‘home reading’ I won’t be sad to see the back of Biff ‘n’ Chip ‘n’ Kipper ‘n’ Floppy and the gang. Though I do enjoy hunting for the ‘hidden’ glasses…:-)

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