Reading Schemes

[Elizabeth]

I visited a school with a large staff where they have had training in a good synthetic phonics programme. Only one person there, who is responsible for phonics, already understood what was involved. That person is newer and younger than most of the staff.

They have numerous books to practise reading, from around fifty years old to a couple of modern schemes. One of the modern ones is Project X and the other is good synthetic phonics, but from a different programme from the one they have had training in. The rest are whole language, mixed strategies or an old form of phonics. The budget is limited.

There is strong resistance to getting rid of any books, because of the notion that the more choice the better. The person who understands had begun to sort the books according to level and found it an overwhelming task. I am not surprised!

Many of the books are at a very low level of content, but include words that cannot be decoded for months according to the synthetic phonics programme to be used.

What would you advise?

[chew8]

The Project X books need to be distinguished fro the Project X Phonics books. The latter introduce grapheme-phoneme correspondences in the same order as Letters and Sounds. There is some text for an adult to read, which means that the story can be more complex than a story which has to e read entirely by the child. The text for the child is in larger print and uses a synthetic phonics approach. I was consulted on these books, have used them with young children, and have found them working well.

I've also used the other Project X books with Y3 children who are past the beginner stage. They, too, work well.

Jenny C.

[Elizabeth]

Thank you for that explanation, Jenny.