Posted on 03/20/2016 7:29:25 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
We must eliminate sight-words from the public schools. That's the only way to save reading, and the only way we're going to save the schools themselves.
The Education Establishment is great at creating jargon, convoluted theories, propaganda, lies, fake research, and new packaging for failed ideas. Average parents don't stand a chance of understanding all this nonsense.
So here is a little video, 7 1/2 minutes, that explains almost everything you need to know about phonics, sight words, Dolch words, high frequency words, dyslexia, and how they are all connected.
There is some very intense music which I still love; but if you don't like it, just turn the volume down. Me, I love it loud.
Ideally, everyone would look at this thing three or four times until they really know the fine points. Then make their neighbors look at it three or four times. Until everybody in the country has seen it and the Education Establishment has to surrender in shame.
In fact, this is just one of 30 related pieces. I keep producing these things, and the public schools keep right on using sight-words. Quite depressing. But not just for me. For the future of this country. If they keep dumbing down all the students, then we will have the dumbest country anybody ever saw. The Education Establishment has always understood that literacy was what they had to destroy first, if they want to destroy everything else.
Bruce Deitrick Price / Improve-Education.org
Hogwash!
Early exposure to many sight words will actually improve phonetic reading.
Dyslexia is a condition you are born with, you don’t acquire it. You are an education expert???!!!
We home schooled. Taught the kid to read phonetically at an early age. Very easy to do.
By 10 she was reading at a (today’s) 12th grade level. The only bad thing was we had to screen her reading material, she could read far beyond her age maturity.That was a bit of a mine field, chuckle
If the Dutch can learn to say them, we can too.
I didn’t watch it, but in my opinion whole word teaching is certainly at the root of some reading disabilities. Don’t know about dyslexia.
Exactly what are your teaching creds?
Where have you taught children in a classroom?
What are your degrees in education?
How many years have you taught children?
I tutor little kids who have to memorize hundreds of sight words. I think it totally ruins their reading; they learn to guess by shapes instead of deciphering. And poor little things - 5 and 6, can’t do it. They freak out.
We homeschooled too. Straight to phonics, took about 3 weeks for our son to learn to read.
I don’t understand the vitriol aimed at protecting Sight Words. Is this not just a discussion? Some Freepers are invested in Sight Words at the expense of being polite? Did you write it? Invest in it? Honesly, get a grip.
Whole language in California left a generation of kids TOTALLY ILLITERATE. [whole language is where the ‘beauty’ of the written text, like Shakespeare, is so good that the kids simply ‘absorb’ reading skills by having it read to them - it never had a prayer and California proved that out in the early 1990s]
Parents also figured out the scam behind Whole Language and wanted NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
But the Public School establishment is WORLD FAMOUS for using stupid ideas (like Common Core math) and NEVER LETTING GO. But Whole Language was SO BAD that they could not continue with it.
...and so came SIGHT WORDS!!! They don’t call it Whole Language, because they don’t want to see their own kids being burned at the stake, but it is NO DIFFERENT. The intent of Sight Words is to DELAY PHONICS, until the kid is simply TOO OLD to ever be fluent in reading. Phonics can be learned by most 3 year old kids, and virtually all 4 year old kids (except for the handful with true disabilities) - but SIGHT WORDS delay that another 4 years, at which time those same kids will NEVER be fluent readers.
But I know - who the hell am I to pass judgment on an educational system that is the laughing stock of the free world...
In math, if you emphasize “rote learning” such as actually memorizing the times table, some people go absolutely berzerk. Memorizing static math facts is BAD! BAD! BAD!
Likewise, in reading, if you support phonics, and believe the wealth of studies which show that sight reading causes all kind of reading problems, you are BAD! BAD! BAD!
And many people who consider themselves “experts” will look down their nose and say that the unwashed masses are not qualified to have an opinion.
Fact is, home schoolers know this stuff very well and have a track record of success. The government schools? No phonics, no rote learning in math, and also no education taking place. “Modern Education Theory” is the problem. And the solution is always “more money”. No wonder nothing ever improves.
“The only bad thing was we had to screen her reading material, she could read far beyond her age maturity.That was a bit of a mine field, chuckle”
Yep, same problem with our kids. We also taught them Phonics, and PHONICS ONLY.
Grandma would hand over her novels for them to DEVOUR when they were like 6 and 7 years old. I really didn’t know what was in them, but they didn’t seem to affect my kids in the end - it was ok.
“We homeschooled too. Straight to phonics, took about 3 weeks for our son to learn to read.”
Took my kids 6 weeks to learn to read their first book. I feel like a failure...LOL.
For parents that are stuck with SIGHT WORDS, the solution is very easy - TEACH THEM READING VIA PHONICS first. Then when they are given a ‘sight word’, they’ll simply read it, rather than try to remember it’s shape as to what word it is.
“I don’t understand the vitriol aimed at protecting Sight Words. Is this not just a discussion? Some Freepers are invested in Sight Words at the expense of being polite? Did you write it? Invest in it? Honesly, get a grip.”
Sadly a HUGE NUMBER of FReepers have links to public education. Tell them that their teaching methods are f’d up and they will ATTACK LIKE AN ANGRY BEAR. Just pity them, they have NOTHING to support their cause...because it’s unsupportable.
Teaching sight words only is a problem which will guarantee that the child will have a limited vocabulary and will be unable to easily learn words that have more than 3 or 4 syllables.
We sent our daughter to a speech therapist before she started preschool because of a hearing discrepancy problem secondary to a serious illness. She had difficulty distinguishing letter sounds.
The speech therapist used phonics to rapidly teach our daughter to read and pronounce sounds correctly.
In true Freeper tradition...I didn’t listen to the video.:).. But if sight reading is what I think it is I have this to say.
My husband and I were the same age. They taught him to read by flashing cards at him and he had to memorize the words. He was a very poor reader, bless his heart. But a very smart man.
In a different area, I was taught to read phonetically and am a very good reader. I read to the man all of our married life. Not a bad thing I guess. It bound us together. But it always made me feel bad for him. I think it always made him a little intimated in life when he shouldn’t have been.
So if this is what sight reading is...it is a terrible disservice.
I clicked around a bit on the screen name...seems as if links lead to his/her blog.
Funny that
I couldn’t find his/her creds ..... just a stream of XXXX.
Whoa!
Over the target, posts 2,3.
When you learn phonetics, you eventually learn the shapes of the words that you see frequently. I think that the effort to teach kids “sight” reading was a misguided attempt to skip the phonics part and jump right to the skill that one develops after a lot of practice reading phonetically.
Phonetic reading allows you to figure out words you’ve never seen before. Although English pronunciation is only loosely related to spelling, it is, IMO, indispensable to learn phonics.
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