“US is said to have 50,000,000 functional illiterates’
One was testifying in the Zimmerman trial today.
If the author ever figures out this is a war on everybody, he might be on to something.
How very odd, Bruce. I had a completely different experience learning to read whole words, and took to it like a duck to water. By the time I was 11 I was reading on a college level. No one with whom I grew up had any reading problems whatsoever. And many of the kids had foreign parents.
How in the world do you explain this?
Teach them yourself. Buy workbooks, make a game of it.
Every letter makes a sound. You put the sounds together and it makes a word. Put the words together and it makes a sentence...
Start with simple and basic words, avoid silent letters and weird sounds. Teach the rules, then the exceptions...
I started my granddaughters (and great granddaughter) off with "I love you"--not only were they tickled to decipher it, the heartfelt little notes I got back from them were the best wages! They read ahead of their grade levels.
We sounded out the words together and I could see this "magic" in the books as we sounded out their words too. From there, she taught me comprehension; how to figure out meaning based on context.
By the 1st grade, I was already at what was considered a 6th grade reading level. I was bored in school and read my reader cover to cover before the first month of school was finished. The teacher had readers for other grades on a bookshelf.....I used to sneak the other readers home with me.
In the 6th grade, I maxed the state competency test and was rated at a collegiate reading level.
The point is, SHE spent the time teaching me how to "read," not memorize words on a page. She made it fun and she used basic concepts to teach me.
It was not any school that did this.
The downside was that school was geared toward the lowest denominator, and boring for me - leaving me free to disrupt everyone else and cause trouble. Boys will be boys.
I wish she would have had homeschooling instead of publik skewel......unfortunately, my parents separated when I was young, and I lived with my dad. Homeschool was not an option; even if I had lived with my mother, it still would not have been an option.
I remember reading about a study that was conducted where they had volunteers work with children after school having the children read to them. And what they found was that the children’s reading improved rapidly, meaning that the main problem most children have is that they are learning to read, however they are not practicing enough to build solid skills.
This is one of the reasons why parents are leaving the public schools in droves. Home schooling is growing 7 times faster than public school enrollment.
We have a large home schooling population in my town (who knew?) and our schools are supposed to be “excellent.” The classical charter school in a neighboring county has poor, immigrant children who do better on their tests then our county’s wealthiest, top-rated town.
People are getting fed up and doing something about it, and the public schools are going to go begging.