Posted on 08/29/2022 7:31:52 PM PDT by Jamestown1630
I have a question that I hope someone here can help with – especially if you taught elementary school education in the late 1950s to early 1960s or have knowledge of public education history of that era.
I remember nothing about how I learned to read!
I recall that my parents never really talked ‘baby talk’ to us; as soon as we were able to learn words and speak, they spoke to us in more or less adult language. So, I grew up knowing a lot of words, and probably using a lot of them without really knowing them except by inference.
But I don’t recall having any instruction in the alphabet and spelling until I actually went to school, in September of 1958; and I can’t for the life of me remember how I learned to read!
I recall a little about singing the alphabet in school and learning to write letters (big fat pencils on lined paper almost like newsprint :-), but the rest – for all I recall – was just picked up through some kind of ‘osmosis’.
I know I became an avid reader at a young age, but can’t figure out how I got there.
Is there anyone here who knows the techniques that were used in public schools in those days, or can recommend any old books or manuals about this?
Thanks very much!
-JT.
Yep. Learned reading by living
Reading the side of the Louisville Slugger.
Reading the labels off bottle of milk delivered.
Reading street signs, ballpark titles, uniform names,
Etc.,
What Is the Piaget Reading Theory? Piaget’s theory in a nutshell was that children begin the process of reading and language acquisition by first gathering sensory and motor information. This is information about the way things feel, taste, smell and look
Teach your kids the alphabet early. Then read to them all the time pointing at the words as you read. Never miss bedtime stories with good kid books.
Our kid’s English/reading scores were off the top of the page from kindergarten on. I do have to confess that my wife did most of the bedtime stories but it was their special time.
Not to be missed. ;-)
Also, because about 60-80% (sources give different numbers) of English is Latin and Greek based, knowing some Latin and Greek root words will help immensely with building vocabulary and it’s an easy thing for children to learn.
https://www.amazon.com/English-Roots-Up-Reading-Spelling/dp/1885942303
I used English From the Roots Up. It’s a good program but there are a lot to choose from or just make your own. Using this program you make (or buy) your own flash cards and the kids learn the roots and then they are able to figure out Latin and Greek based word meanings.
For example, they’ll learn things like, in Latin, avis means bird, aqua is water, luna is moon. Sol is sun in Latin and helios is sun in Greek. The Greek word hippos means horse and potamos means river so a hippopotamus is a river horse. (For some reason I like that one! :-)
We adults have learned most of these meanings even if we didn’t study foreign languages but teaching some of these at an early age is very helpful for children who are building their vocabularies.
Learning roots is simple and involves no complicated conjugations or anything more than memorizing basic root meanings.
Lol!
I was driving past the mall one day. My son was still in diapers, sitting in his car seat. He asked me, “Daddy, why would that woman rather be naked than wear fur?”
I almost ran off the road. What in the world? Then I saw the PETA protesters: there was a woman carrying a sign saying, “I’d rather be naked than wear fur.”
I asked by boy, “Dud you read her sign?” He said, “I don’t know.”
I pointed out other signs along the road and he could read them all. When we got home I pulled out books and he could read. Even my college textbooks! As long as he had heard the word before, he could read it. But if it was a word he hadn’t heard before, he wouldn’t even try.
As he grew up, he was always a voracious reader. He was what they call a spontaneous reader. He also had an adult vocabulary as a small child. People in the stores would gather around to hear him talk.
I thought he was some kind of genius, but he wasn’t. He was just gifted with reading and language skills at a very young age.
Along with my previous post about my son who was a spontaneous reader: when he started kindergarten, they quickly learned to cover up any confidential correspondence when he was around because he would read it and talk about it. Even if it was upside down from where he was standing he would read it.
See Spot run.
Run, Spot, run!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py2U80qxvHw&t=696s
Above is a link to an interview with Ronald Reagan. Note that he was 78 at the time, about the same age as Biden today!
At about 2:30 he talks about his mom reading to him and his brother before bed. She would read and point at the words as she read.
When he was 5 years old his dad came in from work and saw Ronald laying on the floor looking at the newspaper.
“What are you doing?”
“Reading the paper.”
Dad thought he was being a smart-alec and said “Okay - read to me.”
So Ronald commenced to read the paper. His dad reached down and grabbed the paper seeing that he actually WAS reading. He ran out the front door and started yelling about how his 5-year old boy could read!
I went to a language camp in Norway for two months after high school. They started us off with a class in the morning on the alphabet and the sounds the letters made.
In the afternoon were classes where the teacher would say sentences and we had to recite them. They weren’t supposed to tell us what the words meant in English, but some of them gave us hints.
After several days of learning the alphabet and reciting a bunch of sentences like a tourist might use (going to the bank and changing money, getting on a bus, going shopping for various items, etc.) they told us to write the sentences out!
Didn’t know any of the words, just their sounds. But the Norwegian letters were pretty basic with the sounds (not like English).
We all thought it was the stupidest thing. Hand in two pages of sentences in Norwegian. The instructors would just cross out all the stuff that was wrong - with no hints at their corrections.
We had to keep doing that until we got it correct. So that first assignment probably took six tries or more! Spelling the words correctly, getting the spaces correct (we might hear two words when it was only one and vice versa).
After awhile we got the hang of it. I don’t recall if they ever gave us the meanings of all of the words we used or if we just figured them out. I’m pretty sure the later.
Afterwards I spent two months hiking and visiting relatives. At one store I was ordering some stuff that they had behind the counter. I had spent several minutes speaking with them in Norwegian but got stumped on how to pronounce a brand of chocolate bar that they had displayed.
I asked the gal if we could speak in English (asked it in Norwegian).
She said “You’re Norwegian and you want to speak in English?” in perfect English.
I laughed. “No - I’m American and I can speak some Norwegian.” I think my Minnesotan accent helped me sound Norwegian too.
And seismic.
Combination of phonics and look-say.
The closest approximation today is the Abeka K and 1rstcgrade reading program. Teaches letters and sounds for decoding and look say for fluency and speed.
Taught 4 with it. Worth every dime.
And there it is. And yet all the Ph.D's in the US education system can't figure it out.
Wow...that must have been kind of fun. I have been a voracious reader all my life...I remember phonics and Dick and Jane books, but I think I already knew how to read when I got to school. No one read much too me at home, but I did read to my younger siblings. So your story is interesting.
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https://www.readandspell.com/us/blog/what-are-dolch-words
I was in Kindergarten in 1960, IIRC. We got Phonics and Dolch list words. My very short teaching career in the mid 2000’s had me teaching special education students to read, and do arithmetic and a bit of algebra. The Dolch word were (and still are) words that occur very frequently in reading. They’re also called “sight words” because they need to be recognized on sight to help with the reader comprehending what they’re reading. Phonics is great, and necessary, but sounding out basic common words makes it more difficult to read.
One of my students, a 5th grader, introduced himself to me with “Hi! I’m MR and I can’t read.” I told him that having mental retardation didn’t mean he could not read, though it could make it more difficult. I tested him, using the Brigance diagnostic book, and found that he was right. He couldn’t read. He recognized two of the Dolch list words, “a” and “I.” I told him about the janitor at the high school I worked at a few years before. He had been in the school’s Trainable MR program about 20 years before I met him. On his breaks, he was reading Battlefield Earth, by L. Ron Hubbard. It is a MASSIVE book even in paperback. I told the kid if this guy could learn to read, he could learn to read. We worked on the Dolch list, and phonics. Intensively! When his mom and I did his IEP, I told him that by the end of the year, he would be able to read, or one of us was going to die, and it wasn’t me. And his mom is sitting there nodding her head “Yes!” At the end of the year, I retested him with the same Brigance diagnostic, and he tested early 1st Grade. Last thing he said to me was “See, I told you I could read!” He could read most of the first year Dolch words, and sound out longer words that he didn’t recognize by sight.
OS
Sight words do have their place. They are not the be-all and end-all of learning to read. Phonics is also not the be-all and end-all of learning to read, either. The original Dolch list was only 220 words. Back when I was teaching, reading in particular, 2008-2009 school year, they were up to 330 words over five grades.
You need to be able to read fluently to comprehend what you’re reading. You can’t do that if you have to sound out every word. The goal is to turn every word into a sight word. That is one you recognize and understand the meaning of on sight. A good few of the Dolch words are on that list because not only are they necessary for reading comprehension, but because they are among the many words in English that break some of the rules of English. As you advance in reading skills you will recognize by sight more and longer words. Some folks sight read antidisestablishmentarianism. Back when I learned that word, it was listed as the longest word in the dictionary. And it is of very limited use in modern life. ;) Depending on your field, you will, by sight, recognize words I wouldn’t because my field is not the same as yours. “Unionize” is currently used as a test word to determine if you have a Blue Collar or White Collar background. You’re probably a blue-collar worker of some sort if you understand it as union-ize, where a chemist would read it as un-ionize.
THE very biggest fad in education is the One-Solution-Fits-All fad. Sight words are the only way to teach reading is one such fad. Phonics is the only way to teach reading is another. Natural Language is the “New Math” of reading instruction. “It doesn’t matter if you get the right answer as long as you understand the process.”
It’s supposed to destress the learning process. It may do that, but I learned that it is harder to unlearn something that is incorrect that to learn it correctly the first time. When you’re trying to communicate, you need to have a common language. That’s difficult to do if you don’t use the correct words in the correct grammar and syntax.
Finally, not everyone learns the same way, has had the same experience, or even a stable family life. I had students from K-5th grade in my class, each one had their own individualized education program (IEP) and needed help that differed from all the others. That’s pretty extreme in some ways, and I only had 16 students. But a normal 1st grade class might have 40 different students, from 40 different backgrounds.
Some kids show up already reading at the 4th grade level, some below 1st, some don’t even know their letters. One of my 4th graders had been in 9 different schools, in 4 states before she got to me. My only actual 1st grader was on his 3rd school that year, and was only with me for about half the year, since he’d started living with his grandparents. You need a very flexible attitude to successfully teach reading to a bunch of students. Only one method won’t do it. There are things I like about Natural Language. Even with the little kids, I used movies and books to help them learn to use language. We watched movies, read the books, discussed the differences in them, and discussed what happened, what they said as it was happening, all that stuff. Plus we identified Dolch words, and practiced phonetics as well.
Home school dad here.
I read with my two daughters. We took turns with Hardy Boys...the old ones from the 1930’s: the ones with brown covers...far superior to the watered-down versions of the 60’s. The phonics we’re taught using ad-hoc
circumstances during the process, and the stories were a joy for them. Before too long, I challenged them with great books from the past: ‘The Law’ by Blackstone; histories written in the 1800’s, e.g.: anything they encountered after that was a snap for them. The interactive instruction allowed me to make sure they knew what new, unfamiliar words, meant.
Very organic, and effective. That was exactly the process my mother used to get me reading: she read with me and my sister every night before bed. No technical phonics training. I would have been bored with such stuff. Interest in the stories was the incentive to program the reflexive memory of grammatical rules.
My youngest is homeschooling her children,and the older is an officer in the Merchant: Marine engineer and First Mate on a research vessel. (Thanks to Saxon Math and reading with them corporately, and not just letting them read books.)
I was curious because reading has always been such a powerful force and influence in my life - but I couldn’t recall how I learned.
In recent decades people have talked a lot about ‘empowerment’ but I don’t think there is anything more empowering for a young child than the ability to read and a love of reading. It also struck me, during the years I worked with college-age people, how lacking in literacy many were compared with my generation. They could read of course, and comprehend; but their ability to express themselves verbally seemed relatively retarded in comparison.
That’s an interesting way to teach and learn that. I guess there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
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