Life as a SEN mum

This is one of the things we have really struggled with. It isn’t the case for every family of an autistic child, even where there may be a speech delay. But for us, particularly with James it has been a real struggle and there are several reasons for this.

You can’t really talk about learning to read these days without talking about phonics. It’s no secret I’m not really a fan of phonics, it seems to cause a lot of confusion in a lot of cases, although I do see that for some words and phrases phonics can be helpful. The biggest problem I’ve found, is the limited choice of books which aren’t particularly engaging. But obviously school have to follow the full programme regardless of how long this may take.

This is where part the problem lies. As much as it ensures every child is working at their own level, it can lead to problems further along. I’ve found phonics just didn’t really work for James and it’s taken him 3 years longer than most. He had been starting to read other books at home but the curriculum is designed to not take that into account and still force him to follow the phonics format. Now that he’s in year 5 it’s the start of SATs prep. Which is another complaint in itself. But while he’s only just got the hang of phonics, the English prep is much harder than he’s able to manage, because there hasn’t been any work on that side of reading up until now, other than little bits that we’ve managed to work on, which whilst we’ve tried our best is difficult when you don’t want to make the struggle harder when it comes to the teaching within school.

A lot of the struggles don’t come directly from phonics, but probably have made it harder. As we all know by now, James has quite significant speech delay, along with that his general understanding of language was behind, so as you can imagine it was then difficult to understand the whole aspect of phonics. But I do believe that if there had been the ability to look at reading in a different way (after all we didn’t learn using phonics and I managed to teach my sister to read when I was just a child myself). Maybe we would have been able to progress further. We will never know, and there will be children very similar to James who might find that phonics really does help. But for us it really wasn’t the right route.

Let me know your thoughts on all things phonics and reading in the comments.

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