Posted on 10/30/2012 2:22:36 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
I’m so glad I homeschooled.
Phonics all the way. My son was reading at a college level by 7th grade.
Sounds like a bastardization of route memorization....
Perfect to keep a future generation enslaved and thinking like robots...
They don’t teach critical thinking skills anymore, just mindless repetition.
My grandson is homeschooled. Learned to read with phonics. Reading at a 7th grade level. He is almost 8. Nuff said.
I could read before entering kindergarten at the age of 5 and a half, so I never understood why we were wasting all that time on beginning reading lessons.
Considering the widespread availability of computers that could easily teach children to read at a first grade level without any supervision, it’s really unconscionable that we’re having to teach beginning reading skills to 6 and 7 year old kids in a formal school setting.
Marie, phonics is the ONLY way - there is no other. Hundreds of years of phonics success emphatically proves it.
I learned to read when I was very young. I even used to go to the library and check out books my self. They were mostly fiction but because I enjoyed reading them I read.
If I didn’t know a word, I asked my mother to pronounce and explain it.
While I was in first grade I was measured at 120 words per minute with full comprehension.
The unfortunate result of all the very young reading was that I needed to wear glasses at a very young age. In fact, I had my first eye exam while in the first grade and the eye doctor told my father that I was so near sighted he should send me to a school for the blind.
I learned to read when I was very young. I even used to go to the library and check out books my self. They were mostly fiction but because I enjoyed reading them I read.
If I didn’t know a word, I asked my mother to pronounce and explain it.
While I was in first grade I was measured at 120 words per minute with full comprehension.
The unfortunate result of all the very young reading was that I needed to wear glasses at a very young age. In fact, I had my first eye exam while in the first grade and the eye doctor told my father that I was so near sighted he should send me to a school for the blind.
I totally agree with you, Ron C.
How do we approach teaching reading in English to second language students.
So many of our urban schools are struggling to teach these children, who have negligent, uninvolved parents. Teachers get so quickly burned out, stuck with every edu fad that comes along, none of which work very well.
I don’t know why they don’t do phonics, and I don’t know why they don’t do more multi-sensory reading programs. Multi-sensory reading programs will help kids with dyslexia and they won’t hurt kids that easily learn how to read.
My daughter has a brain injury that caused speech problems. It affected her reading. The school kept on saying she was fine because she knew her Dolch words and she passed her spelling tests. I know she was good at memorizing.
I knew when she came to a word she didn’t know that she could not sound out the word. I also knew that being able to memorize words well would only get her so far.
In 4th grade, we put her in a private school that had a pull-out for and Orton-Gillingham reading program (Barton Reading). She became a great reader after that.
Some kids really do need help. The ones with dyslexia need help, and computers will not work with them.
They could easily teach Barton reading or one of the other Orton-Gillingham methods of reading. I think they would be very beneficial to ESL kids.
They teach phonics rules. They teach how the different sound combinations work (like eight).
It’s simple, but very effective.
You can’t read a book by its pictures.
As the parent of two children who went through public school, and was very active, volunteering in the classroom, on the PTA board, etc. I can say that the schools are designed to NOT teach children to read.
The teachers don’t understand that they are being used to “dumb down” kids, they are just teaching what are supposed to be the “most effective” methods.
What they are actually doing is teaching kids to hate reading. People who read can get lots of different opinions and form their own conclusions. Something the powers that be aren’t always in favor of.
If you’ve never heard of Charlotte Iserbyte - she has a web site with a free download here:
http://www.deliberatedumbingdown.com/
I read her book a few years ago, and it stunned me because it confirmed all these weird things I’d been seeing in the classroom but couldn’t understand.
By the way, my kids learned to read before kindergarten using nothing more than Dr. Suess books and a set of phonics flash cards that I happened to pick up at the dollar store. It just isn’t that hard. But if you have young kids, don’t count on the schools to do it!
You’re right. I was fortunate to have read Charlotte’s book, and books by Sam Blumenfeld and John Gatto, before I had kids. Fortunately, I was able to convince my wife to homeschool.
I can’t think of a single positive aspect of mass, compulsory schooling.
Totally agree.
I also read before entering kindergarten. My parents read to me, I followed along and I really don’t recall ever not being able to read.
I was taking adult books out of the library at age 7. The librarians challenged me, so I began giving them detailed oral book reports of the maximum 10 books a week I was allowed. After 2x of this, they told me:”We know you read them.” and with my parents signature, I had free run of the library.
Thanks for many good comments.
Want to mention this: “...teachers said she was fine because she knew her Dolch words.” All the phonics people say this is cause for great alarm.
Memorizing sight-words actually gets in the way of learning to read phonetically. The brain tries to recognize shapes OR it tries to sound out. Two very different processes.
I learned to read with the Dick and Jane books and it gave me a great sense of accomplishment to have memorized the entire wordlist at the back of the book. Our teachers supplemented this with phonics, sounding out word groups, there was a spelling book that had a lot of phonics in it, and we did round robin reading thru the fourth grade. Fifth and six grades were private readings from color-coded cards and answering questions on the content.
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