http://heatherfblog.wordpress.com/2014/ ... h-reading/
Schools shouldn’t be relying on parents to teach reading.
September 13, 2014
Most schools rely on parents to teach children to read.
No! I can already anticipate the angry response as teachers explain that they run weekly or bi weekly group reading sessions and daily discrete phonics sessions…
It will make me horribly unpopular to say it but still I stand by my original claim.
I have spent too many hours on the TES early years and primary forums where teachers discuss their practice to be entirely ignorant. I’ve also read the interminable Mumsnet discussions on which mums compare notes on how much theri children read at school. Mums with kids at all sorts of schools join in. There are voices from urban and rural schools. Some of their kids go to schools with mainly middle class intake others underprivileged. Ofsted outstanding and special measures are both frequently discussed. The standard system for reading instruction reflects my own knowledge of schools local to me. In virtually all schools (there are a few noble exceptions) all sustained reading practice is done at home.
The middle of the road average model is a Reception or Yr1 child doing two group reading sessions a week and the reading alone with the teacher maybe once a month. In group reading sessions the children take turns to read a few sentences and follow on as others in the group read. Lots of the focus is on discussing the meaning of the text (which is great) but means a child may only read a handful of sentences a week in this way.
I would like to say, however, that supporting with regular 'hearing of reading' and 'sharing plenty of books' is so very helpful as a working-in-partnership approach to benefit the children themselves.
As people who know me, or know of me, should appreciate - this is an area where I bend over backwards to encourage teachers to inform and work-in-partnership with parents, where I design resources and provide guidance to inform parents as a minimum (the paper-based resources such as the multi-skills activity sheets and cumulative texts are designed to go in the bookbag routine) - and to work-in-partnership with them as the ideal.
The bottom line is that no matter what the teaching methods, a teacher may have up to (or over) 30 children of every description to teach and this is no easy task.
It is easy enough to teach them all at the same time when a programme of work is designed that way (as my phonics programmes are) but to hear them read as individuals is not such an easy task.
That is why the ideal is to have a rigorous systematic synthetic phonics programme to support the teaching and which is designed to inform the parents routinely - but also to work in partnership with parents as much as humanly possible.