Posted on 09/24/2016 1:39:16 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Parents with children in elementary school should take a look at this short video.
At this moment, tens of thousands of public schools are making millions of little children memorize sight-words. This malpractice will retard their education and cripple their reading ability.
This four-minute video explains why.
Sight-words are, of course, the problem that Rudolf Flesch wrote about in 1955 in his famous book "Why Johnny can't read."
Our Education Establishment is relentless in pretending that phonics is no good and must be replaced by various "modern" methods. These methods had many names over the last 80+ years. But it was always the same gimmick: children don't learn how to sound out letters, all they try to learn is recognizing words as graphic designs. This is very difficult.
If we don't save the public schools, we won't save much else. The simplest way to save the public schools is to fix reading. Half of our educational problems would disappear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VcFj4FyAc
This is a large part of the reason I am now homeschooling. My very bright daughter began learning how to read this way and it was a disaster, I had to re-teach her from the very beginning, repairing some very bad habits.
The “Whole Word” reading method keeps coming back because there is money to be made promoting it. Money for the textbook publishers, conferences, experts, remedial education instructors. The fact that it produces millions of functionally illiterate adults is acceptable collateral damage.
Yes, and many people defend their Publik Skhool educatshun.
Don't you think that phonics also teaches logical thought processes?
Ping for tomorrow
You start a baby at six months
Read to him simple picture books cow dog
And then harder books
The child will be reading by 18 months or two years
My wife was a first second teacher
They figure it out some how
Start math at two years
I’ve seen some provocative assertions that once a child learns to read, that child’s brain is no longer the same. It moves up to a higher level.
The ruthless effect of sight-word teaching is that a child never actually learns to read, not truly. And thus this jump in cognitive ability is prevented.
Don Potter, after many years of involvement in the reading wars, seems to consistently favor Blend Phonics.
There are many excellent programs, so far as I can tell. Anything teaching “systematic phonics” is good. But Don Potter’s recommendation of Blend Phonics carries a lot of weight.
He is, by the way, a schoolteacher and reading tutor in Texas.
The thing is, after you have experience reading, then you do naturally use a “sight method” for reading. But you have to use the basic building blocks first—learn the approximate sound for each letter, and how the letters fit together to give a clue about the pronunciation of the word.
Written English is only semi-phonetic, so it is not completely possible to teach a pure phonetic method. (For example: phonetic is pronounced “fo ne’ dik.”)
Actually, many don’t “figure it out, somehow”.
I got involved in this 25 years ago when I saw what they were doing to my 5 year-old daughter. I pulled her in a matter of months and home-schooled.
The whole language nonsense is based on a false premise - that children learn to read naturally, the way they learn to walk. Wrong.
I have written my own reading/spelling program. I started a tutoring business which put my own children through private schooling once they entered the system. I still warn parents about “sight” reading. I have taught my own grandchildren to read and spell, and am going to tutor another little girl starting next week.
The damage done by whole language is beyond comprehension. It is a major cause of behavioral problems, low self-esteem, illiteracy, and failure through high-school. Most of the young people in juvenile detention centers are illiterate.
Falling for the whole language method of NOT teaching children to read and spell has cost untold billions of dollars, and many, many hardships.
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My wife and I had all four of ours reading by age 4. My youngest daughter’s 2 boys are 3 and 4. The 4 yo is reading and has a vocabulary better than many adults. He is not terribly clear yet on how to use the words he knows how to say and read but he is narrowing it all down steadily. The barely 3 yo is taking after his brother and appears to be learning it faster but it is that he has big bro as his role model and example. Big bro was a relatively late talker but once he started he was using complete sentences, likely because his parents always speak to the children in complete sentences.
Yes, always follow the money. Communists love money; they just want to have it all for themselves.
But their being functionally illiterate is more than acceptable: the concomitant lack of critical thinking skills that accompany a basic reading impairment is priceless to the communists.
They don’t want liberty-loving citizens who know and understand the history of the world.
I've noticed that on some rather graphical sites. Not sure if they were "C's" or "D's", but they jiggled.
If it weren't for phonics, how could I pronounce a name like Qua'Lifriaqui'Sha'Niquia?
Sight read, shee-it. Although, I must admit that I read some Thai, and there are generally no spaces between the words. And the consonants and vowels wrap around each other or are up above. It's the worst of both worlds, both pattern recognition and phonetics, sorta. Apparently works for them.
I think it may leave the culture stuck at the level of bathroom humor!
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