Feedback related to younger learners to the age of 11
Feedback related to younger learners to the age of 11
Please provide your feedback on this thread if you have used the PI programme with younger learners:
Last edited by debbie on Mon Oct 15, 2012 10:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
Debbie Hepplewhite
Y2 teacherJust a quick message - had to share! We started our Spring half term reading assessments today and it was such a different experience to when we initially tested in Autumn. All children looked straight at text and not at picture clues, no eyes wandering the page desperately searching for some answer as to what words might be…..but all kids really having a go at new words by blending through the whole word………………….Every child has moved up further than predicted progress!
Debbie Hepplewhite
- a message already posted on another PI forum“…I’d like to say a huge thank you to Debbie for helping my family so much……One thing I no longer have to worry about is whether they [my children] are able to learn their synthetic phonics as with your brilliant course they have been picking them up very quickly at home with just a few minutes teaching each day…..” Mother of 4
Debbie Hepplewhite
UK Y1/Y2 teacherI just read your post on TES about an online phonics training course. I'd be really interested in this. I've been using Phonics International with my class for the past half term and the results of it have been amazing. The children love doing the sounds book sheets and the making up a story sheets. In a very low ability Y1/Y2 class it has brought up reading ability so much and is beginning to have an effect on writing. I am going to suggest that my school buy it for all the other classes after Christmas as I can show them the hugely positive effects it has had on my class.
I also find that it is developing my own knowledge of phonics greatly. This is my favourite area to teach and any training to increase my skills further would be great, so please do get in touch with further details.
Thanks for producing such a brilliant phonics programme.
Debbie Hepplewhite
Comments about my personal infant teaching results from devising and trialling the original Sounds Book Activity Sheets with this cohort of children:
These results are too small and too personal to be of any significance in the 'debate' of what works best - nevertheless, they have helped me to devise and trial the PI resources and to further add to my own experience.
Teachers have to consider, for example, whether their infant children who can already read texts independently and who can already write creatively need a synthetic phonics teaching approach - or has the job to achieve good basic literacy skills already been achieved?
My response is that even the very most able, already literate, children will be extremely well-served by further structured synthetic phonics teaching for both reading and spelling. I have no doubt.
Those results are stunning!!
Your results are very impressive. It just goes to show how important it is to get a good sp foundation and continue it.
Those are a very impressive set of results which make one wonder just what using the method could achieve with older children who may or may not have been previously assessed by an EP and may or may not have had long and expensive Specialist Teacher input.
I have 'before and after records' of many such pupils where little or no improvement has occurred over a 2 ,3, 4, or even 5 year period. [from an Educational Psychologist]
Scenario: I taught the children part-time in Reception, then a year later I taught the same children part-time when they were in Year 2. What surprised me the most was that several of the most able children with already excellent reading results made a huge leap in reading out-of-context words (the Burt revised test) after the pick-up of synthetic phonics teaching for one term in Year 2 (I did pre- and post- programme assessments).These are very good results, Debbie. Your use of the Schonell spelling test allows comparisons with Clack., and your children are better at this point...
...Another interesting point is that according to my quick calculations, the children were already reading 18 months ahead of chronological age in Oct. 2008 - i.e. although they hadn't had s.p. in Year 1, the benefits of the teaching they had had from you in YR seemed to have stayed with them. This would probably fit in with the Clack. picture - the children there had only 16 weeks of s.p. in the first year of school (either right at the beginning or later in the year, depending on whether they were in the s.p. group or one of the a.p. groups during the actual experimental period), but this seemed to give them a permanent advantage - not as big an advantage as your children, but yours had a year of s.p. in YR rather than just 16 weeks.
These results are too small and too personal to be of any significance in the 'debate' of what works best - nevertheless, they have helped me to devise and trial the PI resources and to further add to my own experience.
Teachers have to consider, for example, whether their infant children who can already read texts independently and who can already write creatively need a synthetic phonics teaching approach - or has the job to achieve good basic literacy skills already been achieved?
My response is that even the very most able, already literate, children will be extremely well-served by further structured synthetic phonics teaching for both reading and spelling. I have no doubt.
Debbie Hepplewhite
Teacher/parent teaching pre-school daughter!Just want to thank you again for your amazing programme. It is so logical. Katie loves the code chart, and is very aware of what she knows and where she is up to. Occasionally we come across a phoneme she hasn't learned, and I point it out on the chart. She thinks she's really clever then, because she 'knows' something before it's been properly taught. She remembers the colour code hierachy too. Yesterday, she was reading colours on one of those colour by numbers sheets. She asked me to read the colours, but I helped her decode them (apart from 'blue' obviously!) When we got to yellow, she recognised the ll as one sounds, and the ow straight away too. I was very impressed.
Debbie Hepplewhite
Oh my goodness - how wonderful. Having received this lovely email, I sent Mena the code for the Early Years Starter Package which could now be described as a programme within a programme.Thank you so much for giving a free download to your Unit 1. I am educator and minister of the Gospel...we just started a small school in a barrio in Batangas, Philippines. We started as reading turorials to preschool kids in Summer 2006, I guessed what we used was the analytic phonics, and we are so happy to tell you that we have been known in the community that this summer we had 80 kids enrolled in summer reading....we are part of our community help...majority of our kids who belong to the poor sector of the community enroll in Grade 1 in the public schools with smiles because they passed the reading test given to grade 1 enrolees..some of the kids stay with us and continue their studies in the preschool and primary grades with very minimal fees for the materials and the teaching staff who work with me. Again, thank you so much.
Debbie Hepplewhite
'Letters and Sounds' is the free UK government guidance. There are no resources provided at all.The programme is working really well with my class. I have a GTP trainee with me this year and a full-time TA which is great so we've split the class into 3 groups for phonics. I take the HA children, GTP trainee takes MA and TA takes LA children.
I've found with the group that I work with that the programme has been fantastic. I have a mixed Y1/Y2 class and the high ability phonics group has a 50/50 split of Y1 and Y2. We do a sound one day and for a lot of the children it just clicks. I find they like the routine of the sounds book sheets and having the experience of reaading the words on the sheet is great. Some of them take a bit longer to remember the sounds but generally they get it. The stage this group are now at are where they can read pretty well in terms of decoding. I have done Unit 6 with them and now not sure where is best to take them as I feel it is spelling they need to work on as opposed to reading. Going onto the next units would introduce more sounds in terms of reading but they still aren't great spellers with the sounds covered so far so am thinking of how to move them on with their spelling.
In terms of enjoyment the children really like the programme. With this group I've only really used the sounds book sheets and the make up a story sheets as I've found that to get the children reading the sounds that is all that has been needed.
The Middle group that my GTP teacher takes is a more tricky one and from this week I've actually swapped with her so I'll be teaching this group phonics for the rest of the year as some of them haven't moved on and I really want to push them on so that they are reading before they leave my class. They've been using the sounds book sheets, I've also been giving them the word lists to take home (though I admit I'm a bit rubbish at doing this regularly enough!) and they also use the read, write and draw sheets. These children all also do ELS with my TA so this gives them further phonics practice. This week I've been working with this group and I'm trying to make it a lot more practical for them, using word cards to read. I got them making their own word cards today by reading the word on the sounds book sheet and then choosing words to put onto cards which they could then put in their own little envelope. I was pleasantly surprised how much they enjoyed this activity - I think it was the ownership of making their own resources and using felt tips to write with. I'm actually going to use this weekend to look more closely at all the Phonics International resources to work out a plan for next week. My student is now teaching most of the time so I have a lot of time to do intervention work with the children and hope to use the resources to do this.
The best feedback I've had about the programme is from my TA. Her group is 4 low ability Y1s and she was using 'Letters and Sounds' to teach them. She was getting frustrated as they were making no progress and admitted she was bored of teaching phonics as she was running out of ideas for what to do with them. So I made her a file of all the Unit 1 resources and we decided she'd start from scratch with this group. I hadn't given her the programme as I initially thought the sheets may be too formal for this group but I couldn't have been more wrong. They love them! My TA loves them as there is structure to the lesson and she can see exactly where she is going with the children. They are now on Unit 2 and it is still going well.
So overall I've had success with the programme apart from 5 year 2s in that middle group, but a couple have serious behaviour issues so I do think this plays a big factor in their lack of progress anyway. I am now really focussing on the middle group particularly the year 2s (there are also 4 year 1s in this group who are doing well)
In terms of persuading the school to use the programme I haven't done this yet unfortunately. The Head had spoken of really changing how phonics is done in school, perhaps setting the children but it seems to have taken a back burner and hasn't been mentioned for ages so I've just focussed on my class. I know that KS2 are having some phonics training after half term and I'm going to go along as I'm interested in how the LA introduce phonics to KS2. It may come up as something to look at across the school at this point so I will let you know how I get on.
If teachers properly evaluated and compared programmes, how many would really opt for using 'Letters and Sounds'.
I have found in the teaching of reading that there are many individual parents and teachers who understand what is needed - but teachers can often feel isolated in their schools - and often their good work is not properly appreciated or built upon....it's still a tragedy.
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Hmmm......................
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Debbie Hepplewhite
Feedback from an Australian parent.I started following the reading debates and researching early reading teaching a couple of years ago when I realised my daughter wasn’t ‘picking up’ reading and that I was going to have to teach her myself. After 18 months of struggling along with a couple of other very well regarded reading programs, I came across Phonics International and haven’t looked back.
We completed the EYSP in about 6 months, included a friend’s six year old boy with learning difficulties in our afterschool lessons, and then moved on to the full package. My seven year old daughter just completed Year 1 in December and came home with an almost perfect end of year report; I shudder to think of the troubles she’d have had if I hadn’t taught her to read using Phonics International.
EYSP = Early Years Starter Package
Debbie Hepplewhite