This is a very good description indeed, in my opinion, of hearing children read in a positive way - bringing in aspects of language comprehension, technical code application and blending, modelling blending as required, talking about various aspects of the structure of words and also being very sensitive to each child's needs and personality:
https://miscellaneouswitterings.wordpress.com
Imagine my surprise and delight when I reached this bit:What I do when I listen to FS2/Y1 children read
Posted on February 20, 2015
Once again, a post prompted by a twitter conversation. This is what I do each time I read with a child. Hardly rocket science, and I’m sure unsurprising – but this is how I do it, always using sounding and blending as the way in, and pictures/context to follow up in various ways.
(NB All the children have secure English, although a number have other languages spoken at home, sometimes as the main language. Some children come from English-speaking homes where the accents are very different from mine – American, South African, Australian, Scottish, some English regional accents where vowels especially can differ in sounding out from my RP. I’m aware that there will be barriers to reading among some cohorts which I do not face with these.)
Of course I think it is important that beginners are provided with cumulative, decodable reading books - but hearing children read is a clear case for needing the 'two-pronged approach' - and even with cumulative, decodable reading material, not all children can recall all the letter/s-sound correspondences that have been introduced to date. I have provided in both phonics programmes that I am associated with lots of cumulative, decodable plain sentences and texts for children to apply their phonics knowledge and to practise their blending for reading and also spelling and handwriting. So, they are not entirely dependent on reading books to get their decoding practice beyond word level work.[Edited to add: I’m not volunteering in a school which restricts children to books containing only the phonics sounds they have formally ‘learned’ in class, but is happy for them to move on through the bands as long as books are chosen carefully with the phonics approach in mind (they have the usual squeezed budget and corresponding mix of old books and new; I look through the older books before handing them out to check the vocabulary in relation to the number of familiar ‘learned’ sounds: the further on in the book bands, the easier the cross-matching becomes, of course). This means that there is a wide spread of reading levels in a class, and also that some children need revision of sounds when reading to me (as above) but many others need explanation of sounds not yet dealt with in class activities. I’ve based my introduction of ‘new’ sounds on Debbie Hepplewhite’s ‘Two-pronged’ approach, whereby sounds are introduced ‘incidentally’ as required. This means that children can read books with an increasingly interesting vocabulary at their own pace of learning, but of course it depends on one-to-one discussion of the new sounds.]
Further, I went on to read this comment:
I am actually highly critical of the notion in 'Letters and Sounds' (DfES 2007) presenting the phonics work as phases, but following 'phase five' with 'phase six' when the content of 'phase six' needs to introduced from the outset of systematic reading instruction and not wait until AFTER 'phase five' has been completed. 'Phase five' equates to the extended alphabetic code - it is a substantial amount of code to be learnt - and the whole idea of 'phase six' following on from 'phase five' is, in my opinion, flawed and misleading - and actually causing some hardship for Year Two teachers who think they have to wait to teach their children 'phase six' content until they've mastered 'phase five' alphabetic code content. Not so.[Edited to add: although I know that bigger chunks of words – prefixes, suffixes, etc – come under ‘Phase 6′ of phonics-based teaching, I find myself needing to talk in those terms with children at points when the class teaching might be focussed on what SSP generally treats as earlier work. Again, it seems Debbie Hepplewhite has already thought a lot about this issue, as you can see from her post here. I’ve ended up treating the role of bound morphemes as a parallel strand to pick up as needed – probably because it’s what I know, so it’s the easiest way for me personally to explain some aspects of words and reading to the children.]
If you ever hear children read, or support volunteers who hear children read, this posting is well-worth a visit and recommending.
