I had a good read through phase one of L&S last night, and, to return to the origins of this thread, wondered if perhaps I might have been a bit dismissive. There is a large emphasis on teaching children to listen attentively and carefully to sounds. Surely this must be a good thing? PS I don't thin...

I would like to add my opinion about phase 1 of 'letters & sounds'. Having had the sounds-write training about 3 years ago, I have seen 1st hand in my teaching that the whole idea of phoneme awareness is unnecessary for teaching my classes to read. BUT, I too would prefer that the 12 feeder pre-scho...

Well, I teach letter sounds and not letter names. I don't give 2 hoots about the profile points. How did an assessment document become a curriculum? Some of my children will achieve this point because of teaching outside school, although I don't assess the children's knowledge of letter names, as it...

Does anyone happen to know if the key words for Reception and KS1 are to be reviewed? Well meaning parents still start to teach these to children and they don't realise how many of the words are perfectly decodable, therefore quite unnecessary to learn!

And why does their site run SOOOO slowly? It's a real time waster!

Your thread reminds me that I've 'forgotten' to teach any HFW to my class this year! Oh well, never mind...

Reading about ITT's reminded me - I have a PGCE student on 1st practise at the moment. She's lovely, enthusiastic, and doing well with the class. Sadly, she knows NOTHING about phonics! What is the college doing, sending someone into school so unequipped?

Hi Kelly, Last year I had a 'just four' year old in class, who had reasonable speech but seemed to take in nothing during our phonics work. As well as being present (at least in body!) for phonics sessions, and doing differentiated group work, I worked 1-1 with him for the last term of the year. Pro...

Thanks for the reply Maltesers, I can see how in your school, doing the work in class is a better option!

Dianne

Hello Maltesers; Read your message & was interested to note your initial use of Songbirds texts. We've bought Songbirds to go home, not as guided readers. Simple reason - it's easier to harness parent help with the appropriate type of reading book. For guided reading I use passages of decodable text...

I have an instinct that for some children a later start to formal school, and thus reading, would be a great help. Not borne out of anything except my experience of teaching reading to the 4yr 1 month kind of children that come into my class each year. However, thinking about the parents of the chil...

My experience with most children is definitely to expect them to work out words for themselves, with some help given on parts of the word they are struggling with (eg the digraph). However, with some children, especially at the beginning, they could go on sounding, sounding, sounding until the cows ...

I have been working 1-1 with a boy in my class. who will be 5 in August (Reception). He's having real trouble learning to recognise letters (he now knows 6), but when working with him today I realised that he can now blend 3 sounds to hear words. I just wanted to share this progress, because it seem...

Just back from holiday, hence the delay in replying... When I say they move too fast, I feel that they move through the initial code, and into extended code, very quickly (haven't looked at them for 10 days now so this isn't going to be a very accurate summary). Initial code is covered in, I think, ...

We received a set of the books on approval last week at school. So far my feeling is that they will fit with our SP teaching, except that they move on WAY too fast for the majority of the children. Still, as another set to use alongside the Jelly & Bean, Read Write books etc they should do fine. Did...