Posted on 07/28/2018 5:06:38 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Subtitle: Fix reading and half of our education problems disappear
--It's a common problem in the US. Children in the second and third grades, even the fourth and fifth grades, are struggling readers. They guess; they skip ahead; they search for clues from context; they look at pictures to read words. Did I mention they guess? Typically, these children are unsuccessful in most school subjects and very unhappy.
The school may think this slow progress is fine. But perhaps you as a parent know younger children who've already learned to read. You worry that your child Is falling behind. You are right to worry.
The first thing to confront is that teachers and school officials will mislead you. Truth is, they'll lie: "Your child is doing fine. He's getting plenty of phonics." But then your child comes home with a list of sight-words to be memorized. You know phonics is being slighted. But what can you do?
Here's a second problem: finding help is not easy. The media are basically a dead zone. You're not going to find advice on reading in your local newspaper or TV program.
Bottom line, sight-word instruction (that is, learning to name word-designs on sight) is the cause of most reading problems. Ideally, schools stop using them. The good news is that a list of sight-words can be a valuable wake-up call. They tell you that the school has embraced the destructive ideas which have been hurting children for the past 80 years.
Parents should trust systematic phonics where the focus is on learning letters, then the sounds represented by the letters, then the blends of those sounds. (Usually the whole process takes five months. All phonics experts say the same thing: reading is easy.)
So let's say your child is having reading problems; and simultaneously your child brings home lists of sight-words to memorize. Get involved immediately and teach your child the basics of phonics. Namely, letters represent sounds.
To start, parents can read "Preemptive Reading," a quick introduction to phonics. (It includes a list of complete phonics courses.)
YouTube has many helpful videos. A. J. Jenkins in Australia has made some wonderful phonics videos. One of these has attracted more than half-a-billion views! Encourage your child to sing along. Very quickly he'll have the phonics idea in his head.
The main thing is that children get the concept that letters and words are symbols for SOUNDS. When looking at b-words like beach, branch, ball, and block, the child knows that all of them start with the same sound. At that point, language becomes logical and predictable.
Sight-words, on the other hand, are always arbitrary, like a phone number you just committed to memory. (Wait a minute, was that 5271 or 5721?)
Despite all the propaganda we hear, the English language is 100% phonetic. There is no such thing as a non-phonetic word in an English dictionary. Indeed, all the words are arranged alphabetically, which is to say that all the words listed under B start with the same b-sound.
English is an old language that has borrowed many foreign words. So our vowels can be inconsistent. But old tennis shoes are still tennis shoes. Whole Word promoters try to pretend that a small difference means that something is "non-phonetic." No, merely non-consistent. For a word to be truly non-phonetic, it would have to be something like XXFG, which you're told to pronounce "shuffleboard." Fortunately, English has no such words, although the Education Establishment loves to pretend otherwise.
Some children learn to read almost without instruction. The brain figures out the easy way to read, which is to identify the phonics information. Less verbal children seem to need more rules and more practice. But keep in mind that phonics rules are stepping stones to reading, not goals in themselves. Don't hesitate to teach something over and over; on the other hand don't hesitate to move along. It's good to make the learning process as fun as possible. Mix in singing, poetry, knock-knock jokes, and football cheers.
The most important thing of all is helping children find things they want to read. Once reading is easy for children, they'll read everything in sight. The problem in our schools now is that many children never reach that point. Especially make sure that boys find material that is appealing to boys.
Sight-words (also known by many other names) are probably viewed by our far-left as one of the most successful subversive tricks in history. They imposed this incorrect theory on the public schools in 1931. They carefully destroyed phonics books, and since that time they have been conducting a rearguard operation insisting that sight-words are terrific, phonics doesn't work, and kids will read when they are ready. If they don't read, that's because they have a serious problem like dyslexia. Nature caused this problem, so our Education Establishment can claim to be blameless for what it has perpetrated! Phonics experts reject the sophistry, saying that "dyslexia" should be relabeled "dysteachia." That is, a disease caused by classroom instruction.
The simple way to save American K-12 is to eliminate sight-words and return to phonics. Children must learn to read before they can read to learn.
where’s Betsy DeVos? I thought we would have heard something from her by now on our education system. It’s like she fell of the face of the earth
The children may not be able to read but at least the teachers were able to fund their UNIONS.
Poor demos. Going to have to look other places for rat funding.
“”My kid can’t read. What should I do?”
Get off your fat, useless, mammon-worshipping “conservative” ass and attend a schoolboard meeting to demand an answer.
Sometimes, conservatives are as stupid as liberals.
Oh Lordy! How rewarding!!! Thank You!!!
I rarely see books in homes any more. I know some have books on devices but I so rarely see someone reading a book on a device or hard copy that I know that is not the whole answer. I began to notice few books in homes before it was possible to read books on a device. When I was growing up homes were full of books, some people had newspapers, magazines and comic books while others had bookshelves or rooms full of books as well- but nearly everyone had something around to read.
I attended Detroit Public Schools on the east side of Detroit until about 1969. The most exciting thing that happened during the school year, for me, was the week when the teacher brought in the small pamphlet of books that were available to purchase by me and my classmates. I have always been a voracious reader ever since I learned how to, so I alway enoyed purchasing those books over fifty years ago. Some of the books I remember purchasing was Encyclopedia Brown, Ivanhoe, and a Tale of Two Cities.
Teach them to read yourself. My mom taught me to read when I was three. (And she didn't even have a teaching certificate.) {But then thanks to the NEA and the AFOT drones, it is probably illegal to teach your own kids anything useful without a license nowdays.}
But seriously, if you can't homeschool, at least start working with your kids at about three years old to teach them to read.
“Sometimes, conservatives are as stupid as liberals.”
What conservative are you addressing?
.
Uhhh...teach it? Assuming they can read themselves. My great niece went to kindergarten. Writing her name,knowing the alphabet and counting to 20. We read to her from birth. She is a voracious reader now and an A student in her senior year.
My father taught me to read (phonetically) before I started school. I am forever grateful to him for that.
Don’t breed ‘em if you can’t read ‘em...
Dick and Jane were sight books.
Almost everything in that drawing is denigrated and rejected by modern popular culture and by the Ruling Class.
When I was tested in the fifth grade, I had a reading level of a student in grade twelve. Also, later when I was tested, I was in the ninety-eighth percentile for reading comprehension. I hate to brag, but I’m better today.
Reading is such a key to education, problems with reading are an obvious cause of nearly every other issue with students that act out and drop out.
By second or third grade readers are off and running, those that cannot read are so embarrassed they begin act out to divert attention. Students that cannot read cannot succeed at any other subject, even math is tough if you cannot read the directions. At a certain point the student that cannot read to their grade level just gives up and stops trying.
Yet schools, and many teachers act as though the issues with school are all separate issues to be dealt with. Reading has to be a priority and it doesn’t seem to be treated that way by most educators. They say it is critical, but their actions don’t show that they believe it.
I think so many of my fellow ‘educators’ are idiots themselves, and don’t have the ability or patience to get their kids reading.
They also insist that reading HAS to be done at home.
Most of my kids come from drug addicted, homeless, criminal parents who are barely literate themselves... so to get *them* to read?
Yeah... right.
Nope, kids don’t have to be taught to read by sight, that comes automatically once they master phonics. Don’t get caught up in their BS that the best solution is a mix of both, do not! Phonics is the ONLY approach to teach kids reading.
It’s similar to people like Colin Powell saying that conservatives are a bit too ‘rough around the edges’ and liberals have valid points - so Trump should alternate judicial selections with Schumer for the best outcome for the country. Or that calculators should be used in kindergarten, but not all the time.
There are ABSOLUTES and teaching sight words in any form is simply DESTRUCTIVE to kids, and will screw them up as they try to figure out whether to apply phonics or sight words, when they see something new. Stay away from sight words!
Use www.play-n-talk.com Play’N Talk are phonic dvds for students to follow with books. I homeschooled for a couple decades and always used this method. The teacher is a British lady the kids love.
It seems I was tested high but I couldn’t say how much now. That was the late 70s.
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