Fads and fashion in the teaching of reading

Books and being read to were an important (and enjoyable) thing in our family.
I could read before I went to school and can remember being bored with the lessons and getting into trouble for actually reading the whole story and getting to the end of the book (I think it was called "The House on the Hill") when we were taking it in turns round the table to read at school because I couldn't remember which page we were supposed to be on!

I remember Janet and John and some books we had at home which had some sort of flaming torch design on the covers. (One I remember was the story of Chicken Little thinking the sky was falling down and thinking how silly he was!)

I was a naturally good speller and never thought about the "rules" of spelling till I was a TA in a primary school when the "Literacy hour" came in.
(My son was at another school and I remember the blank looks on some of the other parents' faces at the meeting where the head said we would have "an eclectic compendium of strategies" to help our children read!)

I tried to make their lessons fun in addition to the prescribed material and it was so rewarding to see the "light bulb moment" when someone got it!

My son was also a good reader (and not a bad speller, although his handwriting is awful as an adult!)
I read to him from an early age as it just seemed natural to do then when he was older we'd sometimes read a page each. He still enjoyed being read to when he was a fluent reader himself.
From an early age we would read road signs, shop signs etc. and I labelled some of the furniture and doors in our home so it was a bit like flash cards - a hungover friend waking up in the morning after a heavy night said it was comforting to know where the bathroom was and that that was a table...

When I was teaching TEFL I sometimes asked the better readers/speakers to help the ones who were struggling; I found that peer help was appreciated and it boosted the helpers' self esteem too.

Do any of the schools offer literacy help for the parents who struggle with reading?
Maybe that's the place to start as if it's difficult for them they are not going to be happy reading to/with their own kids or project a positive message about reading being fun.

When I worked in schools I always thought there was a gap in the market for easy to read books with more interesting subject matter - a ten year old does not want to be reading the same things as a 6 year old even if that is his reading age. Ditto adults.

Like many people I always intended to write those books but never got round to it...

I may be good at reading and spelling but I'm not good at knowing when to shut up, sorry!

A child learns to read in the lap of someone who reads to them....often. That said some kids are audio learners, some are visual learners, and some are kinetic learners and some will pick all of it up so fast while another will struggle until it finely clicks. I have had a few at 3 reading simple words and others do not understand that those lines on pages really are words. There have been a few strange methods of teaching reading. But the best way to get a child to love to read is to read to them again often and happily...

I love to read any and everything, always have. My brother never struggled but my big sister hated reading and really struggled she had some weird method, but the school stopped using it the next year when I entered school.
Someone watched her read and write something once and asked her if she had ever been tested turns out she is dyslectic....

As much as I read, I spell terrible. The only reason you can read this is because of spell check.

Lovetopaint037

You’re talking to all those who don’t have the job of teaching children.

P.S. We teach them about how paragraphs make things easier to read too.

Learning to read is an intellectual exercise. As such various strategies are in operation. Phonics is one of those but by no means the only. I heard recently of a school appointing someone to be Head of Phonics!!!! Why not head of language?
So many cues are used as we read. These include contextual and syntactical cues. Recognition of sight words, familiarity of context. Heavy dependence on phonics can actually result in teaching children that reading is difficult. It is the job of the teacher to convince the child that reading is something that is achievable. To this end the teacher needs to adopt strategies that help the child to gain access to the content. For example looking at pictures and having an initial discussion about what they thinks is happening. Maybe take turns reading to help pick up the rhythm of the content. Playing a little game like hunt a particular word after the reading is finished. Making sure that the content of the book is likeable and fun. Focus on that and not only phonics. Phonics are really important but in isolation can cause frustration as trying to hold several elements in the mind at one time with no other help is likely to lose the sense of the content. A big and important aid to reading is story time. It connects books with pleasure and interest. It uses book language which is different from spoken. It is the key to reading and should always be central to the life of the classroom. Plenty of print should be in evidence around the classroom which can be seen to be “useful”. Perhaps label a model a child has made or give a painting or drawing a title! So many things make up the task of learning to read. Please don’t short change the children with just phonics.

I was taught to add up by putting dots on numbers and counting them. I still find myself adding up like this and have never quite grasped how to add up quickly.

My sons went to 3 different schools before the age of 13. They were both reading before they started school when they were just 4. We moved to a different part of the country for one year when they were 5 and 7 and they went to a little primary school where they were thought phonics. My 7 year old had a reading age of 9. My youngest was nearly always top in his class for reading and went on to get a 1st in English Lit.

My eldest daughter learnt through ITA, absolutely no problem at all. My second daughter is dyslexic and luckily the school swapped to Billy Blue Hat and friends. It didn’t help DD2 much!

I could already read by the time I started school. Our school used ITA but only for the lower ability children, it used to fascinate me!

My mother taught me to read English and Welsh before attending infants school at age 5. I haven't a clue how she did it, but succeeded and she wasn;t a teacher either.

I’ve worked with children for so long and looked at reading schemes for almost as long.
Reading 45 HF words sounds like your formula for success. It certainly isn’t ours.

Though unlimited HF words which in the early stages do have their place, 45 words is’nt the only target.

The aim is to develop reading confidence, and enable and encourage children to read for pleasure as well as for study and the practicalities of life.
We encourage literacy through a variety of activities, and aim to develop enjoyment and stamina through quiet reading time in school, class books for shared reading and support for those whose parents cannot/will not support reading at home.
We still have children with no books at home and no one willing to take them to the library (if there is one).
There are still children who arrive at school already reading. Some simply decoding and/or recognising familiar words, but others reading with comprehension.
They appear to have one thing in common. Parental, or often grandparental enthusiasm for books, comics and nowadays, e-books and “reading games.”
There are, as you note*MaizieD*, still children who leave KS2 with inadequate reading skills and sadly, children who leave high school still unable to read sufficiently well to get jobs which require reading.
Blame is assigned to a wider range of reasons than previously:
Cost of living -true and devices are seen as more important.
Covid-highlighted the importance of having reading material and shared reading at home.
School curriculum-certainly more crowded year on year and the focus on teaching children to read diminishes in KS3 except for those children MaizieD mentions who left KS2 as poor readers.
Closure of libraries- if they are not sufficiently used, they won’t be there for future generations.
Lack of school libraries- we have school/class libraries and activities that promote reading yet we still have a few children who leave school unable to read sufficiently well or without the desire to read for pleasure.

I love it when people including me and my children say they could read before starting school, but it’s strange that schools get the blame, but not parents, when their child is a non reader. It highlights the need for parental interest and example, which sadly doesn’t always happen.

I remember when I first started teaching in secondary school, I could always spot the children who came from the feeder primary schools who used ITA because their spelling reflected it.

My middle child was taught using flash cards whole word method no phonics. At almost 7 yrs he couldn't read at all. School put in parent volunteer to help and she taught him phonics. 4 months later he was in the top 3 for reading in his class.
They teach phonics now in local primary schools.

Who remembers flash cards? My younger cousin was supposedly taught by this method and to him every long word was aeroplane. Surely phonetics are the most sensible way to learn.

5 children and 9 grandchildren have learned to read with a variety of methods.
Breakthrough for my 2 eldest daughters was by far the best where they learned to read and spell the word in their reading tins before taking that one out and a new word going in. The words they knew went into their writing folder.
For me phonics is a waste of time. They are told not to worry about spelling from Reception to Year 2 so they spell as they hear the word. That spelling becomes entrenched. In Year 3 they start on weekly spellings and have to relearn the words they have been spelling incorrectly for years.
That's the system in my youngest 2 GD's Primary School and it makes little sense to me. The youngest (10) has been a free reader for ages and is very fluent but her spelling is weak in comparison.

Gingerrice

Yes, I was taught to read using Dick and Dora, although I rarely come across people who were. I lived in the Nottingham area when I was in infant school; maybe it wasn't a popular method elsewhere?

In Scotland late 50's early 60's ours was Janet and John. I was reading fluently by age 7 right into Enid Blyton Famous Five and Secret Seven then The Bobbsey Twins....loved them

My children's primary school (1970's-80's) had a wonderful reading scheme set up, basic on phonics with interesting graded reading books. "Letterland" and "Look and Say" also sound very familiar, though I don't know if this is from then or from my grandchildren learning to read.
My first three children learnt to read very quickly using phonics. However in the late 1980's the head teacher took a year off on sabatical to take an MA in the latest methods for teaching reading. When she returned she got rid of all the old reading system including many of the books. Apparently the idea was to be that we read to the children and they just picked up reading by osmosis, the system mentioned by Musicgirl.
This was a total disaster, children took much longer to learn, most really not reading at all until they learnt to spell out the words which they should have been doing from the start.
My youngest child was brighter than her siblings at school, but it took her twice as long to learn to read with any fluency, and that only happened because one of the teachers had saved a series of phonetic books in her cupboard. She gave them to us to take home and we taught my daughter ourselves.
My grandchildren have been taught by the various methods that others have mentioned (other than "osmosis") and have had few problems.

I found this interesting because I am sure my sister was taught to read under some new scheme possibly with phonetics. She started school in 1965, which seems earlier than the suggest time frame. I learned to read very easily and have always loved books. I am three and a half years older than my sister who always struggled and couldn't spell very well, she still can't. Of course there's no way of knowing if she would have found it difficult if she had been taught the same way that I was.

Mollygo

Most phonics schemes agree about “look and say”.
They teach “high frequency” words that can’t be sounded out, but which appear frequently in early books to make them readable; the, was, and here for example.
Reading Recovery has focused on those words for years.

Most phonics schemes don't 'agree about look and say' at all. Unless of course, phonics schemes have changed a great deal in the last decade. I knew most of the authors of the well known schemes of the early 2,000s and they every one of them would reject Look and Say. The most some of them would do was to introduce a few words which helped with reading and writing early texts and which used sound/symbol correspondences which would be introduced later in the programme.

OTOH, I worked with children in Y7 & 8. Amazing the number of them who came from primary barely able to read, with Statements (this was pre ECHPs) which year after year said that in order to improve their (non existent) reading skills they need to learn the first 45 high frequency words (a whole language concept, of course). Some of them had finally learned that in 6 years, but really couldn't read anything else..

So much nonsense about learning to read really needs to be put to sleep...

There will always be a few who need extra help. Let's be frank - the quality of the teaching is what makes the difference .

I learned to read on my mother's knee , so when I started school aged 4 I was already able to read fluently, and was put in a class where phonics were being taught, I was bored rigid and miserable. . Luckily I was eventually moved to a class of older children where I thrived.
In my case it was nothing to do with the quality of teaching., of course.

I was taught to read using ITA in the mid 1960s and didn’t have any problems at all. I have always enjoyed reading and constantly have one or two books on the go.
Not reading related, but I remember using ‘Colour Factor’ to learn maths at infant school. They were different coloured blocks, varying in length for the numbers 1-12. They helped with addition & subtraction. Maths was my favourite subject at school, so both these systems must have been good for my education 😀

I am a school reader volunteer, so my little ones get they way I was taught. I was talking to a Y2 about the "magic e" when Head of Infants overheard. He picked up on this and used it himself.
I find it really silly that we teach 5/6 year olds about split digraphs - they do not need to know the name of all the rules, just what they do.

However schools are failing the dyslexic and the hard of hearing because they need different help.

My children in the 70s were taught with a very strange METHOD of Look & and Say. They found it difficult, so I went round Jumble Sales collecting Janet&John books and taught them myself!

All my 4 could read before they started school, I think they just absorbed it from having books read to them and always being surrounded by books. I particularly remember my son when , not three years old, was sitting in his car seat and he suddenly shouted 'Expect for Aches'. When he was asked what he meant he said it was a sign on the road. Eventually we realised he'd read the sign 'Accept for Access', he was the eldest of our children and at that particular time his lack of speech was beginning to worry me. Needless to say he was too busy absorbing it all to actually repeat stuff.

I tend to think that all children learn everything differently and at different speeds so whichever system is used it won't suit every child.

I was a primary school teacher in the early seventies and taught seven year olds. They had just come up from the infants where they had been taught ITA. Out of the 39 children, only six could read conventionally.
It took me over six months to get the rest to read using look and say and phonetic methods. There were a couple who couldn’t get the hang of it at all.
It made me so angry that they would bring in this new ideas without actually realising the consequences!