Posted on 08/14/2018 4:04:05 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
[TEACH A CHILD TO READ THIS SUMMER. MORE INFO.]
No less an authority than Robert Sweet, President of the National Right to Read Foundation (NRRF), said there are a dozen good phonics programs and which one doesn’t matter that much. This answer is reassuring; it furthers my resolve not to pretend I know which one is best. My goal is to make sure everyone understands why phonics is superior, and that phonics offers a lot of variety and creativity.
Search Google or YouTube, you’ll find there is a mountain of good phonics material. One popular homeschooling site lists more than 100 resources. At the end of this article, you’ll find examples of how various people teach phonics. I want to show there is no one right answer and you should explore the options.
Let’s start with a single example for people who aren’t sure they even know what phonics is. Phonics Song 2 is a lovely (and very popular) three-minute illustration.
To become readers, children learn the letters and the sounds represented by the letters. That’s phonics, and that’s the answer to our educational dilemma. Cost is almost nothing. Takes four months or less. We could have almost universal literacy, like we did back in 1910 before Progressives got control of the schools.
Amazingly, new phonics programs show up all the time. People who care about reading bring so much love and passion to their favorite methods.
With this preamble, I can mention a recent arrival, Teaching a Preschooler to Read by Stephen Parker, a parent who taught his three children, at age 3, to read and then decided to tell how he did this in his book.
Some people might ask, Why teach a preschooler to read?
Parker answers: “I suspect many of us underestimate the intellectual capabilities of preschoolers. We’re amazed at how quickly toddlers master their primary speaking language, and if offered, a second language as well. Yet most of us do not teach our children to read. Instead, we rely on our local schools to perform this vital task for us, starting in kindergarten or first grade. For multiple reasons, I believe this is a mistake.”
What I particularly commend to you is the smart sincerity of his writing. Almost everything in the public schools is a game and a con. The writing is rarely sincere and simple because the people are pushing scams. That's the theme of my many articles about saving K-12. It’s a pleasure to read prose by someone who is not trying to trick me. In addition to sincerity, Parker’s message contains the main themes of phonics instruction:
“One reason schools are doing a poor job teaching literacy is that many of them use methods other than Systematic Phonics. One such method, popular in the 80’s and 90’s, was called Whole Language; another, popular now, is called Balanced Literacy. It’s puzzling to me that educational leaders are so resistant to Systematic Phonics. They avoid it despite the findings of the National Reading Panel, despite the poor results of their own methods, and despite the fact that written English is based on an alphabet in which every letter symbolizes sound.”
Keep in mind that: “[E]arly reading instruction enhances the child’s brain development. By ‘early reading instruction’ I mean teaching letter recognition during the child’s twos, and starting actual reading instruction by the late twos or early threes. Brain development in early childhood defies belief. A baby is born with all the brain neurons she’ll ever have: around 100 billion. Each one of those 100 billion neurons is capable of forming thousands of links (synapses) with other neurons, giving the brain over 100 trillion synaptic connections.”
Parker’s final point: “If you grant the gift of literacy to your preschooler, you might suppose his peers will eventually catch up to him once he goes to school. This is not the case. Instead, a phenomenon, known variously as ‘Cumulative Advantage,’ or ‘The Matthew Effect,’ starts to unfold. The reference is to a verse in the Bible (Matthew 25:29) which has, over time, become a maxim: ‘the rich get richer while the poor get poorer.’ The effect, studied in such diverse fields as science, economics, sociology, psychology, and education, can occur when an advantage, conferred at the beginning of some process, becomes a resource that leads to skills and opportunities –skills and opportunities which in turn produce even further relative gains over time.”
Here is a startling fact that almost every phonics teacher mentions. Some children learn to read with little or no instruction so we can’t assume that any particular technique is the one and only answer.
Every piano teacher has a personal way of doing things and may be dogmatic about it. That’s understandable for the teacher but the rest of us should be more casual. We shouldn’t get bogged down in details.
The following examples are almost randomly selected to show qualities we want. Perhaps the main thing is that the teacher is enthusiastic and the children seem to be having fun. That’s how you pull children into humanity’s greatest invention, phonetic language.
How Can a Teacher Teach Phonics to Young Children (1:37)
Chinese Kids Learn English (3:20)
How to Teach Your Child to Read Using Phonics (7:28)
How to Teach Phonics to Kindergarten Children (5:41)
How To Teach A Child To Read - In Two Weeks (2:10)
How To Teach Phonics Reading To Kids Ages 2-7 (14:54)
How to teach English to very young children with songs (3:54)
How Do I Teach Phonics? 7 Tips for Teaching Phonics Effectively (6:31)
Engaging in phonics games in kindergarten (2:30)
For a short introduction to phonics, see my “54: Preemptive Reading”
Early Literacy Pack– items that will help you teach children to read, for example, the Alphabet Song and a placemat with all the letters. Some major organizations give books to poor families so parents can read to children. Better, provide materials that will let parents teach children to read, not be read to.
Also included in ELP is the Bouncing Ball Project This can be useful when children are first learning to read. It forces children to see syllables and the left-to-right movement of English. It also encourages children to memorize famous poetry. Very entertaining.
Sadly, tens of thousands of public schools continue to undermine reading. Children go home with lists of sight-words to memorize. About four each week. You can imagine how much fun that is. This is the technique our schools use to make sure "the poor get poorer."
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We used Bob Books at home. The early books focus on one vowel sound and a couple of consonants at a time. It's small steps, but if you read each night they really start to pick up the sounds. Very phonics driven and it works.
Stay off the Himalayan mountains unless you are experienced.
If you start with a baby they will read by age three..
It also makes their memory every good..
My wife is a first grade teacher...
There are probably some pretty good iPad app...we only had books
Thanks again for your posts, hopefully at least a few FReepers will get the message and understand what’s going on and make what is a really a minimal effort to teach their kids to read well before the institutions get their hands on them (math, I’ll admit, is a significant effort, but still well worth it). For if they can read well BEFORE entering school, then, despite their best efforts, their kids will read well, really well (and spell great too!, a bonus of phonics), and there’s not a thing the schools can do to stop that - your kids cannot be ‘untaught’ reading.
“It’s puzzling to me that educational leaders are so resistant to Systematic Phonics.”
It SHOULD NOT be ‘puzzling’ to people on this site. We all know that the Left literally wants to SINK THIS COUNTRY down to Third World status, and the best way to do so is through the (lack of) education of our kids. The teachers themselves are leftists, although maybe not flaming leftists, but still leftists - so they will glob on to their masters, who are the actual BRAINS of this operation. Those are the ones in DC, who control the Leftist agenda. In fact, what would be ‘puzzling’ is if our education establishment actually supported phonics, as that would imply that they wanted America to be a wealthy and powerful country...totally contradicting everything they stand for.
As for myself. I learned how to teach phonics from an infomerical, I think for The Phonics Game...or something. They gave a simple example of teaching sounds, I ran with it, and had my kids reading by age 4, and reading fluently by age 5. Once the kids can read, they will DEVOUR everything they can find with words in it. In fact, it worried me a bit when my mom was lending my kids adult novels at age 7 or so...but it didn’t seem to harm them...and they loved reading them.
So, people, GET OFF YOUR DUFFS, your kids simply WILL NOT learn reading, or for that matter math, to anything beyond a very basic level, from our public schools, FOR CERTAIN, and from what I’ve seen, it’s questionable now in private schools, as they they somewhat follow public schools. If you want to know why Asians and Indians, who do go to our public schools, do so well - ask their parents, EVERY ONE of those kids had serious help outside of school, and it was all done AHEAD of the public school schedule, again, so that the kids were certain to learn this stuff correctly.
True!
I remember being asked if I knew that my daughter could read at 4 years old. I told her yes, and she is taking piano lessons as well
Agree you start early and avoid pitfalls like in math waiting for them to answer with a flash card that is 2+2-4. As long as you have their attention is is getting in, when they drift you stop.
She ended up in a tough HS and took International Baccalaureate level classes, went to college for a semester between Junior and senior year and graduated USC in 4 years
I can live with that...
I started phonics with my infant daughter. Big flashcards with pics, and my repeating the sounds. I had purchased a phonics program to guide me. I never spoke baby talk, and used complete sentences. By eight months, she spoke in complete sentences, read by two. At age ten through twelve, she was reading The Great Books of the Western World.
Phonics is the way to teach your kids to read.
He was fascinated. What kid isn't fascinated in learning a code?
He learned it all and I didn't say a thing.
Our second son came to us from an orphanage at age five speaking only a little baby-talk Russian. He had significant learning disabilities as well. I decided to use the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelmann.
And despite His learning, language and communication disabilities, in 3 months he had graduated to the "BOB" books. What a kid!
BTW, don't do "Sight Words." Absolutely useless.
Tommy: Look mommy it’s a frickan elephant!
Mother: Young Man! What did you say?
Tommy: It’s a frickan elephant. The book says so.
Book: African Elephant
I have heard a bunch of free Youboob videos by Jack Hartmann used in public school Pre-K to teach beginning phonics. They are kinda catchy and fun.
“[E]arly reading instruction enhances the child’s brain development.”
Which is why the commie school system doesn’t want to teach kids to read. They want to keep them dumb.
I was reading before I got to school. That’s why I’m on FR and not DU.
Thanks for your excellent comments.
Any time!
Excellent point.
All words become "sight words" with repetition.
“BTW, don’t do “Sight Words.” Absolutely useless.”
Actually, worse than useless, if Sight Words are used before kids are taught phonics. The reason is that the kids get confused as to which approach to use when they come across a word that confuses them. Not to mention that any time spent on Sight Words is time that could have been spent on phonics.
Now, obviously, if the kid is taught phonics and can read...and THEN is ‘taught’ Sight Words in schools, it will be a joke to them, and the only problem that some kids will have is sheer boredom, since they’ll have trouble understanding why the hell the other kids are being put through this torture.
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