They made us all bad spellers!
Chinese kids learn several thousand characters. Just sayin’.
Onomatopoeia is a category of words that sound like what they attempt to describe. There is no category of words that look like what they are attempting to describe.
“Teach a child what each letter stands for and he can read. I know, you say, it can’t be that simple. But it is.”
Yea, verily! I was able to read about as well as anyone in my one-room country school on the day I first entered the building, because (1)I had been given a colorful alphabet book as a “toy,” and my grandfather (a proxy Dad in my case) satisfied my innate curiosity about the sounds represented by those letters; and (2) books were made available to me at least a year prior to my enrolling in a school, and Grandpa helped me as needed in my attempts to do what came naturally, read.
Much later, my own children, supplied with alphabet books and a mother that would sit down and read to them, at age 4-5 were trying to read the words on the Wheaties box at the breakfast table. Why is it so difficult to teach children something that they want to badly to learn, imitating what they see their parents do?
Possibly I just answered that question.
Here is Mr. Price’s prescription below. Who can argue with any of this except the Universities and Colleges who keep churning out people who have no clue how to teach children anything except SJW propaganda. This abject failure posing as “Formal Education” is a purposeful fraud. If I had a young child these days, he/she would be home schooled using this approach.
1. REAL READING. That means systematic phonics for several months until children learn to read. That means no Whole Word, no sight-words, no Dolch words, no high-frequency words. These gimmicks are all the same thing and the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates.
2. REAL ARITHMETIC. Schools use sensible, coherent programs such as Saxon Math, Singapore Math, or the like. (They do not use Reform Math in any of its forms— Everyday Math, Connected Math, TERC.) Children master basic skills, know the multiplication tables, and can find answers. No more spiraling, fuzziness, or dependence on calculators.
3. REAL LEARNING. It’s knowledge-based and fact-filled. Children learn basic information in the fields of Geography, History, Science, Literature, etc. Students advance in a logical way from the simple to the complex—which leads to genuine critical thinking.
4. REAL EDUCATION. It’s academically correct (as opposed to politically correct). The emphasis is on building study skills and scholarly character. Students know a great deal, and know how to learn more. They can do independent work. They understand that precision, rigor, and honesty are the same things.
Creating failure in students by using destructive reading methods creates A LOT of union-dues-paying jobs to "fix" the problem they created. Just sayin ....
I have reprints of McGuffy and a computer version. Both are excellent tools for home schooling.
we knew it all along...
Been reading all my life and started at 4. Have a decent vocabulary and can’t claim to “read/sound out” most words these days because when i see a word, my brain recognizes it “by sight”. It would be a step backwards to have to mentally go through the process for each word as if it was new to me.
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