I don’t know why we continue with the sight word fiction. It doesn’t work, never did.
Phonics worked much better.
Seems like they deliberately made reading far harder and more difficult than it is.
BTW, if you have a kiddo who is condemned to a see-and-say school and is behind in reading, buy a set of Bob Books. I used them when my kids struggled and they are fantastic, all phonics based. Buy a used set in good condition as the new ones are pricey.
When I was learning Russian, I noticed that I was instinctively using a phonics method to learn the words.
Bkmrk.
I think you can combine the two.
My son started school when we lived in the Caribbean and they called 1st year what we call our kindergarten...i.e. you start at 5 years old.
They used a British set of books, if I remember right, they were Peter and Mary books, and they introduced the sight words they would add in each book inside the cover of the book. They also taught phonics, and we had worked on phonics at home for a couple years, but they integrated the sight words with the phonetic words. (when we came back to the states we put him in school and he wasn’t learning anything he hadn’t already been taught overseas...we eventually made the switch to homeschool.)
If you think back to Elementary school (for me I’m talking way back in the late 50’s early 60’s) we used Dick and Jane (can’t forget Spot) and watch them run and stop and do all kinds of other things (words) and in a way there were also sight words integrated in those books because there are words that are much easier learned “by sight” than “sounded out.” (the person who mentioned Bob books was right, my nieces used them with their kids.)
I taught Jr High for 30 years. I had kids who could say the words, but had no idea what the words meant. I told them that they weren’t reading. Reading is when the writer’s ideas enter the reader’s brain.
Twice I was given an extreme example of this. I often assigned vocabulary words. Only my best students would attempt to define the words using their own words. Some kids would look for the vocabulary words in the text (they were often highlighted to make it easier) and get the definition that was. The rest would simply copy what they found in the text’s glossary. Twice I had kids copy the definition from the Spanish glossary that our history book, in the name of diversity had included. No, they weren’t Spanish speakers and they weren’t clever enough to be ‘cute’. They just didn’t notice that they had copied out a page of definitions in a language they didn’t understand.
Guess how they did it.
They taught little children the sounds of each of the letters first. Then they taught them how to put vowels and consonants together. Then they showed them how to put them together to make words.
This is how little kids learned to read in the "Dark Ages."
What John Dewey did in the early 1900s was to influence the teacher colleges, beginning with Columbia, on how to take out that one very important step of getting the children to first become familiar with he sounds of each letter. By 1923 he had made headway.
That one step does more to handicap a kid from reading fluently than anything else. And as a result, we can have illiterates graduating from high school and sometimes college.
“-————Starting in 1931, all of American elementary education depended on the memorization of sight-words”
That was certainly not true in Boston.
I was in elementary school in the late 30s,early 40s,and then taught first grade in the 50s.
It was phonics,not sight words.
.
.
rough
through
though
tough
thorough
enough
slough
although
dough
sough
hiccough
bough
cough
furlough
plough
borough
Phonics worked for my kids every time.
I disagree. knowing words at a glance is a valuable skill. First one learns the sounds letters make, then one learns to put the sounds together to read words. Then one learns to recognize frequently used words on sight so that one is no longer putting sounds together to read the words but is immediately recognizing such high frequency words. This is an important part of reading fluency.