The New Reading: All Together Now
There’s been quite a bit of talk this week, both in the media and on some home-ed email lists, about the “new” teaching-reading strategy. I have a child who was naturally oriented towards phonics and learned to read quickly and easily with a very phonics-based approach - but when it came to his brother, phonics didn’t hit the spot at all. He was much more interested in look-and-say than sound-it-out. Both are now enthusiastic and fluent readers.
Thus the bit of all this that bothers me is that the government “has said it will scrap the official “searchlights” model which, to oversimplify, urges children to use a variety of methods to decode words.”
Well we couldn’t have children using a variety of methods, could we? I mean, it’s not like children are at all different from each other, is it? 
According to the BBC, “This has worried those teachers who say that children learn in different ways and that there is no “one sizes fits all” in learning to read.”
No wonder. Frankly I have difficulty understanding how anyone who has spent more than half an hour with a group of children could possibly not understand how different children’s learning styles are. I’m astonished that anyone is stupid enough to think that insisting that all children are taught to read using the same technique is a good idea. And I’m very glad that my children have the opportunity to learn to read in the way that fits them best, rather than chopping and changing every time some new theory comes along (which seems to be every week).
There’s a certain irony in the latest plans: there’s no consensus among the “experts” about what synthetic phonics actually is, much less whether it’s a good idea. So they don’t all think the same - but they expect children to do just that.
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a government elected after a campaign of “education, education, education” might have got it sorted by now. Or that they might at least have got a clue.
But you’d obviously be wrong.
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with you all the way on this one.