It’s an age-old dilemma – how can we get ALL parents to engage with their children’s reading? It’s also one of the most common questions I am asked by teachers when I talk in schools about reading. As schoolteachers we work jolly hard to teach children to read and to foster their love of reading. We know that learning to read is a daunting task for many children and we also know the hugely positive impact that parents have upon this journey. 
 
It can be frustrating and even demoralizing when some parents fail to get on-board with home reading despite our best efforts to encourage them. My advice is to buckle up for the ride because there is no magic answer to this problem but here are three top tips for you to reflect upon…
 
1) Let’s consider why parents are resisting
 
Why don’t they read with their child? Is it because they won’t or because they can’t? Think about the parents as you think about the children – as individuals. Imagine them all sitting in a circle around you as you ask them outright ‘Why don’t you read with your child?’ Imagine each parent answering you completely honestly with their ‘Ah, but…’ reason: 
 
‘I do read with him sometimes, but I can’t often afford the time, I’m working until late.’
‘I do try my best, but I’m not good at reading myself.’
‘I would hear her read more, but I’ve got to confess I find it so boring.’
‘I’d like to, but what’s the point? I don’t know how to help her when she gets stuck.’
‘I would love to read with him, but he doesn’t want to read with me!’
 
These are all real examples of the issues that prevent parents from engaging with reading. We need to understand, acknowledge and be sympathetic to these reasons. Even with my background as a teacher and a literacy expert, there have been occasions when, as a parent, I too have fallen foul of being too busy and too tired to engage properly with my children’s reading. 
 
2) Know that educating parents is key
 
Most parental resistance could be overcome if parents absorbed the enormity of the impact they have on their children’s success. It isn’t enough to simply tell parents that reading is important, we must ensure that parents have understood why reading is important and how important it is. 
 
One way of doing this is to show the ‘maths’ of reading practice. Use an infographic, diagram or chart to visually demonstrate that the child who doesn’t read at home might get around 120 minutes per week of reading practice at school (depending on age and school routines) compared with the child who reads at home and therefore gets that 120 minutes at school plus an additional 210 minutes at home (30 minutes a day). Ask parents to think about that additional 210 minutes per week multiplied over a year – that works out at roughly 76000 minutes more reading practice for children that read regularly at home. Now ask them which children they think become confident, mature, and happy readers.
 
Another tip when educating parents about the importance of reading is to communicate clearly with strong messages. Think about the style of language you are using at your presentation, on your website or in your leaflets. Don’t shy away from stating facts like:
 

• Reading increases intellect – FACT
• Children who enjoy reading are more academically successful – FACT
• Reading increases vocabulary – FACT
• Children who read more produce better pieces of writing – FACT
• Reading improves spelling – FACT

 
3) We need to change our mindset
 
There was once a time when I was frustrated that I felt responsible for educating the parents as well as the children. I had become a teacher to help children, not adults, and it felt like a burden that there were some parents who wouldn’t or couldn’t engage with reading. It felt like an uphill struggle to spend my time planning and preparing information about reading that often appeared to fall on deaf ears. 
 
As I matured and became a more experienced teacher it dawned on me that my job was not just to educate the children in my class. My job was to be a teacher, a role model and a source of support for my local community, both to children and adults. It is our job as teachers – in fact, it is our duty to do the best we can to help parents to engage with reading. We need to offer viable solutions to their issues and clear the path for them to enjoy their children’s reading journey. This inevitably means we need to spend more time and more care reviewing, developing and delivering information about reading. 
 
If we don’t see immediate success, we must be patient and persevere:

• If no-one attends your reading workshops – keep offering them. 
• If only one parent comes to your presentation – great, you’ve helped that parent and maybe more will attend next time. 
• If you regularly review and improve your support provision it will become second nature, an enjoyable and rewarding part of your role. 

 
Use this checklist to think about the provision you currently offer to engage and educate parents, and the areas you might need to develop:
 

• Information on the school website – do you use the school website to communicate reading presentation and workshop dates, reading information to download, photographs to celebrate the success of reading events?
• Handouts/leaflets– do you have a selection of reading specific handouts that can be given out to parents at the beginning of the year, available to pick up from the reception lobby or classrooms, information to promote reading events and strategies? Are the handouts up-to-date, relevant and interesting?
• Promotions – how do you promote reading presentations, workshops, and special events? Does your school put on book fairs, author visits, and dress-up days?
• Presentations – how often do you hold a reading presentation? How do you encourage parents to attend? Is the presentation engaging and up-to-date?
• Workshops – do you hold these regularly? Do you provide coffee and biscuits to create an informal atmosphere? What activities do you use to get parents ‘hands-on’? How confident are you in showing parents how to teach reading? 
• Drop in clinics – how do you tell parents about these opportunities? Are they offered at a variety of times to enable parents with busy schedules to attend?
• Reviewing school resources – how often do you conduct a review of your class and school reading resources? Are the reading books you send home engaging, fun and relevant to young readers? Do you make use of book-linked teacher guide activities to send home for children to use with parents? Which systematic synthetic phonic programme are you using? 

How do you engage parents with reading?
​Share your tips and ideas in the comments below :-) 

This little story raises an interesting question when thinking about the balance of how much differentiation and support to give children in classroom activities…

In my Reception class, for Literacy lessons, the children fell quite naturally into two ability groups – those who were working on reading and writing CVC words (dog/mat/hen) and those who were just slightly more confident and could now read and write longer words (spin/clock/tent). 

For our daily segmenting session I taught the children in their respective groups so I could support them at the level they were working at. Both groups had the same activity – I called out whole words and the children listened, repeated the word slowly, recognised the individual sounds and wrote them down (a spelling dictation) e.g. Me: ”The word is pin"; Children: “p-i-n”. 

The children in the ‘CVC group’ were given lots of CVC words; the children in the ‘longer word’ group were given lots of longer words.

Soon all the children were very good at the routine and the process; their ears had developed to hear the sounds, they were remembering which letter shapes to write down and their letter formation was also greatly improved.

I recognised that it was the correct time to take the content of the session to the next level. So the next time we gathered together for our segmenting routine I told the ‘CVC group’ that I was very impressed and they were ready to try and work out some longer words. I dictated ‘spin’, then ‘milk’, then ‘jump’.

What do you think they did? (No, they did not get up and start jumping!)

By trying to support my children at their CVC level I had actually engrained in them a 3-beat pattern so now they tried to make the longer words fit into 3-beats, ‘sp-i-n’, ‘m-i-lk’, ‘j-u-mp’.
Not good! They had lost the ability to hear each and every sound (s-p-i-n, m-i-l-k, j-u-m-p).

I had to ‘un-teach’ the 3-beat trap before we could move forwards.

The moral of the story: ALWAYS include longer words, much longer words, in every example, in every lesson – even if it is just one word which you model, with no help or expectation from the children other than to show them that longer words exist and we ‘hear’ the sounds through them in the same way. 

Here is some useful info about how to teach tripod pencil grip (commonly recognised as the most effective way to hold a pencil):

1. Use a frog toy to show young learners the bowed back legs of the frog. 
2. Show children how to use their thumb and forefinger to create a shape which looks similar to the frog’s back bendy legs.
3. Pinch the pencil, just above the cone end, and use the middle finger as a supporting ‘log under’.
4. To make this skill child friendly say, “Put your froggy legs [thumb and forefinger] on the bottom of the painted part of the pencil [not on the cone shaped end part] with the pencil across the frog’s back [back of the hand], then put the log under the frog” [middle finger supporting the pencil to complete the tripod grip].
5. Emphasis the need for good sitting posture. 
6. The ‘writing hand’ should rest lightly on the paper below the words being written so that the words are not obscured. 
7. The paper may be tilted slightly to the right (for right handers) or to the left (for left handers).
8. Using a frog toy can be a great visual reminder to the learner about holding the pencil correctly and as an incentive – as a reward he likes to sit upon the desks of those who are making great effort with their pencil hold and handwriting!

Good handwriting is an essential skill in the quest to spell and write fluently, confidently and competently. A joined handwriting style links kinaesthetic ‘muscle memory’ with the relationship between the sounds of our speech and with the letter shapes, letter groupings and whole written words. The ability to write neatly also produces a motivating factor in the production of written work.

Spoken words can be split up into smaller sounds, of which the smallest units of identifiable sounds in a word are called phonemes. For example, the word ‘peach’ can be split into the phonemes /p//ee//ch/. (A phoneme is expressed within slash marks /-/). The phonemes are then represented by written symbols to create an alphabetic code writing system.

In the English spoken language around 44 phonemes can be identified but there are only 26 letters in the alphabet with which to represent the phonemes in the written code. Thus, not only single letters but also groups of letters are used to represent the 44+ phonemes for the English written code – known as The Alphabetic Code. A letter or letter group can be referred to as a grapheme.

If only the code was as simple as a letter, or a group of letters, representing any one particular phoneme, then the teaching and learning of the code would be speedy and straightforward – that is, one grapheme for each of the 44 phonemes. Unfortunately, in the English Alphabetic Code over 180 main graphemes are used to represent the 44+ phonemes. For example, nine different graphemes represent the /ai/ phoneme in common words: ‘a’ as in table, ‘ai’ as in train, ‘ay’ as in tray, ‘ae’ as in sundae, ‘a-e’ as in plane, ‘ey’ as in survey, ‘eigh’ as in eight, ‘ea’ as in great and ‘aigh’ as in straight. Whilst some of these variations are very rare, none of the words themselves are rare.

Our job as teachers is to make this complicated Alphabetic Code as simple and straightforward as possible – working from the simple to the complex in systematic steps with direct teaching methods and materials. To do this, we need good subject knowledge and we need to be organised with how we understand The Alphabetic Code ourselves; how we teach it and how we support learners in learning it. If we are teaching in a school situation we also need to be able to work in partnership with parents, sharing the information and the teaching steps with them.

The image above is part of an English Alphabetic Code chart available to download for free from www.alphabeticcodecharts.com They have a huge variety available in different formats - with pictures, without pictures, with teaching notes, large versions for wall displays, small versions for desktop references. 

Nonsense words 

The Teaching & Learning Cycle is nothing new, revolutionary or challenging. It's a good ol' fashioned teaching structure. You revisit and review previous learning, you teach or introduce something new, the children practise, apply and consolidate the learning. It's not set in stone, but it provides a common sense structure for phonics teaching - agree? 

I love the Teaching & Learning Cycle but it's not without it's problems...

1. It's open to interpretation. I know schools that follow the T&L Cycle, but at letter and word level only. So the 'apply' section = application of letter/sound correspondences to words (reading and writing words with the letters and sounds learnt). For me, 'apply' = about application of letters and sounds learnt to sentences and short texts. Both interpretations can be 100% effective. It's all about awareness of different models for phonics teaching and then making conscious decisions about your own formula. 
2. It doesn't fit into 20 minutes (depending on your interpretation - see point 1). Many reports and guidance documents, such as Reading by Six, allude to the 20 minute phonics lesson. Now if you are going for a 'word-level, no vocabulary, pure phonics' lesson you might be able to fit that into 20 minutes - and that's fine. But if your version of a phonics lesson includes application and extension to sentence and text level, includes vocabulary, includes spelling and handwriting, then you are going to need at least 30, if not 40, minutes to do the children justice. Anecdotally, I was finding more and more case around the country of phonics lessons that had great revisit & review, great teach or introduce, and then rushed, inadequate pupil practise. Put simply, teachers ran out of time for the children to practise what they were learning. then in the next lesson they moved back to the beginning of the cycle - so had minimal practise, and zero application opportunities. 

The solution/s: 

• The T&L Cycle can represent the structure of one lesson, but you might need to allocate longer than 20 minutes - depending on how far you go with phonics and what you include in the lesson.
  
• The T&L Cycle can also be extended across more than one session. You could do part of the cycle in the morning, and finish it in the afternoon. One of my favourite models is the '2-part' model - breaking the cycle up into two separate sessions. For example, on Monday you revisit & review, then teach or introduce something new; on Tuesday the children practise and apply the learning from Monday; on Wednesday you revisit and review, then teach or introduce something new; on Thursday the children practise and apply the learning from Wednesday; then on Friday you consolidate. 

Final thought... the Teaching & Learning Cycle can be used flexibly to meet your needs, but you should complete the cycle before moving on. Learners need plenty of opportunity for each section pf the cycle. 

When you start learning about phonics, or teaching phonics, you realise that it's not as straightforward as some people think. It isn't just 'a few sounds and letters'. It's actually a bit of a minefield. Especially if you want to do a good job of it.

'Conquering the complex English language for reading and writing is jolly tough.'

My job is to make learning about, and teaching, phonics as clear and straightforward as possible. If I can help teachers to have a deeper understanding of the way phonics works then they will be more effective in teaching children to read and write. 

One of my key messages is: 'Relate back to the Systematic Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles (SSPT principles).'

• What do you need to teach for phonics? The SSPT principles
• What do you need to assess in phonics? The SSPT principles 
• How do you evaluate whether an activity is worthwhile? Ask if it meets the SSPT principles

Get the picture? 

So what are these SSPT principles?
It's surprisingly simple... there are four points...

• Knowledge of the English alphabetic code (the 180 graphemes that represent 44 sounds)
• Skill of blending (also known as decoding) for reading 
• Skill of segmenting (also known as encoding) for writing 
• Skill of handwriting*

*The skill of handwriting wasn't specified by the DfE in their explanation of the principles. The DfE cites the fourth point as knowing that blending and segmenting are reversible skills. To me, and several others in the world of phonics specialism, this isn't a skill. It's a fact. A fact that is useful for teachers to know but doesn't need to be directly taught to children like the other principles. So it's unofficially replaced with the skill of handwriting because that makes absolute common sense :-) 

Going back to phonics being a minefield... the more you learn about it the more straightforward and logical it becomes... and the easier it becomes to teach confidently and effectively. Of course, for young and beginner learners the principles are fairly hefty. To know all of that code! To be able to blend! To be able to segment! To be able to write! Fear not, the SSPT principles can be broken down into much smaller sub-skills (and I'll cover this in another post). 

A CVC word is a word like 'cat'.
A CCVC word is a word like 'stop'.
A CCVCC word is a word like 'spark'.

We're talking about the structure of words. The consonants (C) and vowels (V) within words. It isn't rocket science to state that beginner readers (and writers) will find shorter words like cat, hen, map easier than longer words like philanthropy, exuberant and sophistication. 

The problem is that people have gotten a bit carried away with this idea and now we're getting in a muddle. 

Firstly, in a modern world of systematic synthetic phonics it's no longer accurate enough to talk in terms of vowels and consonants. Do you mean a vowel letter or a vowel sound? Do you mean a consonant letter or a consonant sound? 

Vowel letters = a, e, i, o, u
Vowel sounds = a, e, i, o, u, ay, ai, a-e, ee, ea, ie, ei, igh, y, i-e, ow, oa, er, ou, etc (there are about 20 or so vowel sounds in the English language)

So when you talk about a CVC word do you mean 'like cat' or do you mean 'like boat'? Or is boat a CVVC word? 

The answer is that CVC, CCVC, CCVCC etc word structures are referring to the sounds in words and not the letters. So the word 'light' is a CVC word because it has a consonant sound, followed by a vowel sound, followed by a consonant sound: /l/ /igh/ /t/.

However, you do need to be careful, especially if you download information/activities from the wonderful place that is the Internet as several sites contain mistakes. A well-known parent site lists 'chop' and 'ship' as CCVC words because they have wrongly identified the 'ch' and 'sh' as two consonants sounds and not one. To clarify, 'chop' and 'ship' are CVC words. 

Secondly, children taught using systematic synthetic phonics don't need to be held back by following a rigid progression in word structures. Although you might generally use shorter, simpler words during the earliest days of learning to read and write you should always include longer and more complex words in every lesson. This lifts glass ceilings and allows children to progress further and faster at their own rate. It enables a simple method of differentiation when teaching whole class. 

Furthermore, ensuring the teaching and practise of words with consonant clusters and blends from an early stage reduces the need to teach these separately later. For example, when you've taught 's' /s/ and 'p' /p/ include words in your lessons like 'spot' and 'spin', 'naps' and 'mops'. 

Final thought...
'Take CVC, CCVC, CCVCC etc word structures with a pinch of common sense and don't get hung up over them.'

Why are you using sound buttons and dashes? I want you to dig deep and really think about this one. 
​
Don't you think they're a bit weird? An odd distraction. Unrealistic. Nothing to do with real reading, writing or spelling. An overused scaffold. 

Let me bust the myth for you right now... 

'YOU DON'T NEED SOUND BUTTONS AND DASHES!' 

What are sound buttons and dashes? 
Sound buttons and dashes provide children with a scaffold. They help to remind them that when they read the word 'goat' the letters 'o' and 'a' go together as 'oa' to represent the sound /oa/. 
Admittedly some young learners struggle with this concept *for a moment in time*. You might recognise the beginner reader who looks nervously at the word goat and sounds out, "g - o - a - t". 
"Very good," you say, "but look (pointing), when we see the o and a together like this, we say /oa/. g - oa - t." 
The beginner reader nods their head eagerly at you then tries again, "g - o - a - t". 

The theory then, is that if the reader saw dots under the g and t, and a dash under the oa, they would be prompted to remember to say /oa/ and not /o/ /a/. 

My experience (from teaching swaths of beginner readers) is that very few children struggle with this, and even when they do it only takes a matter of days before they've conquered it. I distinctly remember one child that seemed to be held back from making progress for a couple of weeks because he just couldn't get his head around digraphs (two letters together representing one sound) so I did use a pencil to underline the digraphs in his reading book. I then rubbed the lines out again after a few days. 

I don't want children's eyes looking at dots and dashes - I want them focusing on the letter shapes through the word. 

Scarily I see activities like the third picture above - where children draw sound buttons and dashes under words - used in lessons all the time. It's depressing, a real waste of time in my opinion. Even worse if you're calling them sausages and beans, and talking about pressing sound buttons. Excuse me while I puke. 

So if you are going to use sound buttons and dashes please remember the purpose of them and that they should only be useful as a scaffold for a brief moment in time. Move on from them as soon as you can. 

Agree? Disagree? Let me know what you think of sound buttons and dashes in the comments below :-) 

What is a mnemonic system? 
A mnemonic system is an aid to memory. It's a way of helping learners to remember something. In phonics we are introducing young children to a large complex system of letter shapes that correspond to sounds (then trying to put it all together to read and write words). For some children, simply looking at the letter shape and hearing (then saying) the sound, repeated day after day, is all they need for them to remember. However there are lots of children who struggle to remember which sound goes with which letter/s. 

Examples of mnemonic systems: 
Jolly Phonics uses actions. Look at this video by Little Learners to see the Jolly Phonics mnemonic system. 

Read Write Inc uses pictures that are drawn onto the letter shapes. Look at this video to see the mnemonic being used in a phonics lesson.

Phonics International and Floppy's Phonics both use key pictures and key words. Here is Debbie Hepplewhite demonstrating some sound and letter correspondences using her key pictures and key words. 

The case against using a mnemonic system...
When I was teaching phonics to Reception aged children (aged 4 - 5 years) I mostly used the Jolly Phonics programme. The children adored the characters, storylines - and the mnemonic system with its actions. The problem was that after a few weeks of teaching I wanted the children to be able to look at a letter and say the corresponding sound without doing the action and repeating the sound multiple times "a - a - a - ants on my arm". I needed to hold up a flashcard with the letter shape on 's' and for them to reply with the sound /s/ - and nothing else. But they didn't. Every letter I held up induced a chorus of repeated sounds and actions. This meant that when children came to blend for reading they read 'pan' as "p, p, p, p, p, a, a, a, ants on my arm, nnnnnnnnnn net". I just wanted "p - a - n, pan". Was it so much to ask? 

Poor children - the mnemonic system that was helping them to initially remember the sound for the letter was in fact causing a barrier, preventing them from moving forwards. I found myself needing to actively unteach the very mnemonics that had been designed to help them. 

So, do the benefits of having the mnemonic system outweigh the bad habit that becomes quickly engrained and must be untaught? Should we bother with mnemonics? Can the children manage without it?

I decided to experiment one September by not using a mnemonic system. I introduced each letter/sound correspondence in as pure and simple a way as possible. I held up the letter on a flashcard and said, "This is /s/. You say it, /s/". The result? 50% of the cohort managed completely fine without, the other 50% struggled and we needed to do far more over-learning and repetition to help them to remember. 

My thoughts...
I learned that a mnemonic system is worth it - but you need to move on from it as soon as the children are ready and don't allow it to linger around unnecessarily, becoming engrained and preventing a smooth transition to blending. Mnemonic systems can be extremely useful when talking about spelling alternatives too. I'll save that for a separate post and link it here. 

I must mention that in recent times I have been working with some schools who have completely abandoned the use of a mnemonic system. Although it's not what I personally would do, you can't argue with their excellent consistent results. They've focused on purity, repetition and consistency. They've eliminated and stripped back anything not essential to teaching the Synthetic Phonics Teaching Principles.