My school is slowly waking up to this!

 Oh NO!  Does it matter what the national expectations are- they are our children?  Expect that they might be able to read a little bit by the time they are six, that they will have a whole source of language expereinces to draw on as they make thier way deciphering the printed world around them.  That this rich vein is not shallow and only governement phonics but is highly personal and idiosyncratic.  Expect them to be happy, talkative, playful, don't expect them to find great satisfaction in ploughing through carefully graded reading schemes like rats on a wheel.  Expect them to be scribbling, spluttering, stuttering into their onw flight of words in thesky of all the books and signs around them.  .........................

<p>Expect them to be representing life as it throbs throug their veins using the languages at their disposal of play, talk, symbols, lines, pictures, movement, let them take great gulps of life and let it out in great shouts of joy in whatever language blocks they can build.  But don't cut and slice them and compare them to national averages where suddenly half of them will have fallen 'behind' and another half will be 'ahead' and some few will be gifted and talented and some ffew will be SEN.

 <p>Let them (and us) of the hook of the expectations of the country and the soundbite and the statistic. Let's stop comapring and grading and remedying and prescribing medicine that the healthy don't need. 

<p> Lets hope that they meet the national expectation of having somebody who looks at them and tells them they are doing just fine, they will be grown up one day far away, they can be young now, it isn't all high stakes and precious achievement. That it isn'y about the having and the not, the knowing and the not, there is more to it than meeting the expectations of thers who don't know you. 

Couldn't agree more yohanalicante.

However, my LEA want 100% of Y1 to have completed Phase 5

Given I have a child who had spent all YR working on the first 5 phoneme/grapheme correspondances and had forgotten them all over the summer holidays I'm not sure that's going to happen...

 The expectations that accompany Letter & Sounds is that most children will know all phonemes and all the alternative ways of representing them by the end of Y1 (so completed Phase5 ready to begin phase 6 or Support for Spelling in Y2).

Yes but I've had children transfer to yr3 of my ks2 class, who have come from an 'outstanding' school who havent finished phases 5

 I really struggle with all the emphasis on phonics. When will people pushing this strand in reading development realise that there is no single way to pronounce words in the English language. We live in a country famous for its multitudes of dialects and accents. The word 'foot' or 'grass' or 'drawer' is NOT promounced in the same way in Glasgow, Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff and London, so why do we try to standardise the way groups of letters are taught to children in the early years. 

Grass, etc aren't pronounced the same all over the country, but then the phonics taught will take account of the local pronunciation. Or should do.

 Phonics is about written language, which is standardised, so isn't effected by accent or dialect and words have the same spelling whether you are in Aberdeen or York.

Msz

 Phonics is about written language, which is standardised, so isn't effected by accent or dialect and words have the same spelling whether you are in Aberdeen or York.

  effected? surely that should be affected.

And Sorry - but a phoneme is a unit of pronunciation. A grapheme is a unit of written language. Therefore phonics is about the pronunciation of groups of letters which is why there are several ways of saying the letter string ough or making the sound of words such as pair/pear. And close to where I live, fair is pronounces in the same way as fur. And you are telling me spelling isn't affected by the way we speak? Incorrect spelling certainly is. 

Teaching phonics primarily gives children several choices of a way to spell a word. GHOTI and chips anyone?

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound and phonics is about the relationship between spoken language and written language. However the English orthographical system isn't dependent upon accent or dialect you are confusing phonetics with phonics.

LoAsh

GHOTI and chips anyone?

If you understood phonics you would know that the letters gh at the beginning of a word never represent the phoneme <f> and that the letter "o" only represents <i> after a "w" and that "ti" never represent <sh> at the end of a word  ...

 Obviously I was taught inagequately when I was back at college and when the National Literacy Strategy was introduced...

Ghoti... Just an example of how a child might use the phonemes we teach - I doubt anyone has taught years 1 and 2 the exact rules of how and when certain letter strings are put together.

And in my original post I was not saying we should stop teaching phinics altogether, just that there is an over-emphasis on this method - in some schools to the exclusion of all others and the latest govenment targets are excluding children who would better learn to read and write using other strategies.

 Perhaps we should re-introduce the ita? That way we would have standardisation between sounds and letters (BTW that's a joke - my nephew suffered under that scheme)

Dear God, another Masha!

LoAsh

Ghoti... Just an example of how a child might use the phonemes we teach

No ghoti is a constructed word intended to demonstrate the idiosyncrasies of the English spelling system but as anyone who understands English will tell you (and I include 5 year olds in that) it is totally inconsistent with English pronunciation.

LoAsh

I doubt anyone has taught years 1 and 2 the exact rules of how and when certain letter strings are put together.

LoAsh

And in my original post I was not saying we should stop teaching phinics altogether, just that there is an over-emphasis on this method

LoAsh

Msz

 Phonics is about written language, which is standardised, so isn't effected by accent or dialect and words have the same spelling whether you are in Aberdeen or York.

 

  effected? surely that should be affected.

 

And Sorry - but a phoneme is a unit of pronunciation. A grapheme is a unit of written language. Therefore phonics is about the pronunciation of groups of letters which is why there are several ways of saying the letter string ough or making the sound of words such as pair/pear. And close to where I live, fair is pronounces in the same way as fur. And you are telling me spelling isn't affected by the way we speak? Incorrect spelling certainly is. 

Teaching phonics primarily gives children several choices of a way to spell a word. GHOTI and chips anyone?

But no child would ever attempt to read the word ghoti as fish, or write the word fish as ghoti - whether or not they have been explicitly taught pronunciation rules.  Why do you think that is? 

Spelling mistakes are often phonetic in nature, but then, phonetic spelling is a recognised phase of writing for a young child.  Some take longer to emerge from it, but it is a stepping stone to learning further rules of spelling later on.

 I find it interesting that the GPCs in phase 5 of letters and sounds are expected to have been taught by the end of year 1.  Our school spins this out forever even with children who are really pretty good readers (gold band and above for example) by the end of reception.  So they are learning to read words using more complex code without having been taught the more complex code.

Perhaps we could take a leaf from the Finnish experience because they don't have three things which we very definitely do have. They don't have (1) a government policy on the teaching of reading and they don't have (2) synthetic phonics and they don't have (3) illiteracy.