"Why reading IS phonics" (video)

YouTube ^ | April 21, 2015 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[BruceDeitrickPrice]

This short graphic video explains why phonics is what matters, and almost everything else they add in the public schools is a waste of time.

When possible, the Education Establishment will banish phonics on the grounds that it is irrelevant and doesn't work. But even when they admit some phonics into the schools, these malevolent ideologues will try to encumber the whole learning process to such a degree that children learn at half-speed, if they learn at all.

All the phonics experts say they can teach almost all children to read in the first grade. That should be the gold standard. If you've got a school in your community where children can hardly read in the second or third grade, you know you've got a deliberate failure.

Reading remains the single biggest problem in the public schools, and as well the single biggest opportunity. Get rid of all the bad methods, and you will have a Renaissance.

(As for which program is best, there seem to be a half-dozen excellent choices. Many people still swear by Samuel Blumenfeld's Alpha Phonics. I know a schoolteacher who raves constantly about Sing Spell Read Write. Don Potter loves Blend Phonics (http://www.donpotter.net/education_pages/blend_phonics.html)

As long as the program is systematic phonics, and not some mishmash of phonics and other methods, then you will be okay.

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video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEaEmGTTqxQ

I don't know how to embed this video. Is there a way?

[momtothree]

Agreed. I have been a “room mom” for many, many years. I was amazed (and saddened if truth be told) that some kids entered kindergarten NOT knowing their colors, basic shapes, or letters. The parents “assumed” the school would do it. They probably didn’t realize (or care) that the kids were already behind.

The Hooked on Phonics worked for us but I didn’t start it till they were around 4. I never used the CD”s/tapes but only the flash cards (initially) and the workbooks. I think the major point with kids (IMHO) is the interaction. For example, “What color is that sign? What letter is that? The plate is a circle and the table is a rectangle” Easy, peasy stuff and they soak it up like sponges. Each child is different but I never liked the see and say. I would “cringe” when the kids wouldn’t have their spelling corrected in kindergarten and first grade (leftover residue from Sister Mary Katherine.. I believe).

[Zeneta]

It’s difficult for me to comprehend how detached some parents are from their own kids.

Fundamentally, I don’t get it.

All the books and parenting classes and public schools and media have seemed to provide very self-centered parents an excuse for doing something that should come naturally.

My girl is in college and she still sends me her papers to edit/review. Papers that are deep in the weeds of public policy, terrorism etc, by prof’s take are admitted Socialist’s and even Communists.

Thankfully, she’s a hard core conservative that is extraordinarily objective.

I think she got that from me.

[NTHockey]

Another lost part of education is sentence diagramming. I showed my granddaughters how to diagram “The ball is red.” They looked like I was telling them about organic chemistry.

[JudyinCanada]

If I wanted to intentionally dumb down the population by creating masses of illiterates, I couldn’t think of a better plan than what they do in the public system now.

Years ago, I was very vocal in Ontario to bring phonics back into the classrooms, and was mildly successful. The whole language system for teaching reading is clung to like a religion.

I pulled my daughter from the system after 3 months in Kindergarten, home-schooled her and my son, along with a few other children, then started a tutoring business which paid for private Christian schooling for grades 7 onward.

I put together a wonderful program for the step-by-step teaching of reading and spelling, which I am now using to teach my little granddaughter.

[The_Reader_David]

I taught all my kids to read using phonics before they his grade school. (I even made a picture book with words labeling the pictures illustrating all the spellings I or my wife could think of for each English sound, with the letters making the sound underlined — some can’t occur as initial sounds, though whenever possible I picked a word where the sound to be illustrated was initial.)