"That's right Anna, capitalism harms the proletariat!"
Posted on 09/23/2014 4:14:20 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Another school year is about to start.
Let’s cut to the chase: if your kid comes home with list of sight-words to memorize, you better get involved right away.
Reading is the single most important skill a kid needs to have.
Our Education Establishment seems to have a cruel tendency to use the wrong methods, thereby guaranteeing that millions of children remain semiliterate. Don’t let your kid be one of them.
There are hundreds of books on this tricky subject, but I’m going to boil it down to a few words:
English is a phonetic language and it must be learned phonetically. That simply means that you learn the alphabet; then you learn to recognize every letter instantly; then you learn the sounds that those letters represent; then you learn the blends of those sounds. When a child can see that b plus a equals bah-, that is reading. That’s the very essence of the whole thing. Two sounds blend to form a third sound.
All the phonics experts say they can teach children to read in four months. Why not let them do it??
Meanwhile, all the faux-educators in this country seem to love the idea that you can teach children to read by memorizing words as graphic designs. This is virtually impossible unless someone happens to have a photographic memory. How many people have you met in your life with a photographic memory? Point is, it’s an exotic ability like perfect pitch. It has no relevance to the ordinary child.
Many schools send children home with sight-word lists, knowing full well that the process of learning even 100 sight-words can take almost the entire year! Phonics experts will teach them to read in four months. But sight-word experts want to waste the whole year on a 100-word vocabulary? It doesn't make sense. (And this list becomes a reading vocabulary only if the children can recognize the words with automaticity. That means a fraction of a second, which almost never happens.)
Parents can teach their children the basics. Simply knowing that letters represent sounds will go a long way to insulating children from the worse problems that public schools often cause.
There's an article on Improve-Education.org called “54: Preemptive Reading” which is a quickie phonics course, less than 3 pages. Just the nuts and bolts of how it works and how to start teaching it. Think of #54 as inoculation. ( http://www.improve-education.org/id81.html ) END
"That's right Anna, capitalism harms the proletariat!"
For over 30 years the Education Establishment has been and is still pushing whole language over phonics. Question them and they will be most condescending.
My children’s teachers actively worked against me when they were in school back in the 90’s. Now that I am raising a grand-daughter I just bulled ahead and taught her how to read phonetically. She still gets confused between her teacher’s preferred methods of sight reading and my way of phonics.
I will win though in the end!
As for my own kids, they eventually figured out that I was right after all and with some remedial teaching from me now are doing quite well.
On another note I can say with no ambivalence that ‘sight reading’ is designed to KILL the love of reading for fun and pleasure.
I learned the old way. No phonics and I am and always was a good reader. “See Zip run. Run Zip run! Worked for me.
Gosh, Bruce..
It seems like you are only interested in promoting your own stuff here.
http://www.freerepublic.com/tag/by:brucedeitrickprice/index?tab=articles
What would be your comment about that?
“I learned the old way. No phonics and I am and always was a good reader. “
Phonics IS the old way.
.
We home schooled, used a phonics program with a book and an LP. When our daughter was 10 she was reading to her teenage cousins *and* explaining the definitions of words *they* didn’t know. Our home looked like (was) a library. When reading is easy, kids love it.
She is a successful college graduate with a challenging and stimulating job. Her two cousins, products of sight reading and public school? One barely graduated from high school, did Jack Shit for 15 years and died of a drug overdose. The other quit school and has drifted from sofa to sofa and jail to jail for nearly 20 years.
People have no clue how massively reading ability and love of reading affects one’s entire life.
If your kids walk into a kindergarten and can’t read, unless something is “special” about your children, you and your children already lose, IMO.
One might ask why, when look-see which has been an utter failure for decades, does it continue to be used with phonics being denigrated. One explanation might be that EdD types (doctor of education) have no serious training in research. I started in an EdD program, but quickly became disgusted by what I was being taught, especially with regarding qualitative research. EdD programs are devoid of serious research and certainly would never come to the conclusion that the look say method of teaching reading has failed despite decades of experience that show its failure.
My 6 year old is in week 7 of first grade and seems to read remarkably well.
You get what you put into it.
I am old enough to remember being taught to read with the phonics method.
By seventh grade, I ditched the summer reading list and dove into Dostoyevsky.
Since Russian is also a phonetic language, I found it easy to pronounce the names of people and places. (There is no word for the verb “to spell” in Russian, only to “write”)
By 9th grade I could make myself understood in Russian.
I used the program “Reading Made Easy” by Valerie Bendt. Totally scripted for the parent. Here is a review
http://cathyduffyreviews.com/phonics_reading/Reading-Made-Easy.htm
Agreed. Read to your kids for at least 15 minutes before bed every night (I prefer 30 minutes). Teach them to read, not as formal lessons that are a chore, just showing them the words as you read, from time to time telling them what letters make a particular sound or using a book with lots of rhymes, "oh, look, there is another 'a-t' which says 'at' so after a C that must be k-at cat, and the cat is wearing a h-at hat. How about that!" Then back to the story. My kids are good readers and love reading, and I think reading to them every day, even once they could read on their own, was a big part of that.
The same is true for math. Parents should teach their kids math, number sense, and thinking about whether answers are reasonable. If you wait for a teacher to do everything, your kids will lose relative to kids whose parents are involved in education. As for social studies, kids should grow up knowing our history (the positive history of an America that is a force for good in the world), our Constitution, and the writings of the Founding Fathers. They shouldn't learn just a whitewashed history, they need the warts too so that won't be a shock later, but they should understand just how overwhelmingly the good outweighs the bad in our history.
If you do that well, it doesn't matter much whether you homeschool or send your kids to a good public or private school. If you're not involved, it won't be pretty no matter what school your kids attend.
All part of the plan to, in the immortal words of LBJ, “Keep those (insert racial slur here) voting democrat for the next 100 years”.
Reading is the most important thing learned in school. I’m good at explaining what’s done right and what’s done wrong. Why you would object to that I’m not sure. But parents need all the help they can get given that the Education Establishment never lets up. Did you read the comment above from The Working Man who said that the school officials tried to push him around until he just bulled ahead. That’s what everybody needs to do. That’s what I’m trying to encourage.
“Preemptive Reading” is probably the best introduction to phonics you can find anywhere Period. It specifically encourages parents to teach their children to read when they are four or five so that they will be safe when they reach first grade in a public school, and a teacher hands out a list of sight words. The kid will already be able to read them phonetically.
Who, besides yourself, has granted you status to lecture anyone about anything?
Mostly what I see is your arrogant self-promotion using Free Republic as an advertising tool.
Your thoughts?
Another good one:TEACH YOUR CHILD TO READ IN 100 EASY LESSONS. Takes about 15 min for a lesson. You can easily do two in a day. By the time you finish, your child will be reading - even the”weird” words.
With regard to phonics programs, I have a list on my site, see “42: Reading Resources.”
As reported there, Don Potter has always had a fondness for Hazel Loring’s “Blend Phonics,” which is only 20 pages long and free.
.
More recently he has decided that Word Mastery is best; and he has published his own version of it.
http://wordmastery.org
When my Daughter was 1 I bought the “Hooked on phonics” set.
I was planning ahead.
I don’t think we ever opened it.
My wife, her mom had the most annoying tendency of needing to speak constantly. Annoying to me, but I believe it was extremely beneficial in our Daughters reading development. Her vocabulary and reading ability was off the charts when she entered school. I’m always amazed that some parents don’t talk to their infants, 0-2 years old. We never ever did the “baby talk” thing. We both read tons of books to her and didn’t really follow any reading program.
In the end I believe it was her mothers constant and I mean constant talking about anything and everything in her early years that made the difference.
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