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To: cinives
Did Dorian's Mom ever read to him as a child? Were there books in Dorian's home or just a TV and video game machine? Have Dorian or his Mom ever been regular visitors to the local library?

Yes, our schools often do a poor job of teaching reading and should be held accountable, but motivating children to read starts at home.

14 posted on 02/01/2006 6:17:01 AM PST by The Great RJ ("Mir wölle bleiwen wat mir sin" or "We want to remain what we are." ..Luxembourg motto)
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To: The Great RJ

You should read Rudolph Flesch's books (now mostly out of print but still extremely relevant).

The only way to innoculate kids from a bad reading curriculum at school is to teach them to read at home BEFORE they get to school. If your kid is not motivated before age 5, which many are not, then they get trapped in the "whole word" method still used by over 85% of schools to teach reading - of which the phonics content is abysmally low.

My kid skipped kindergarten and started in 1st grade because her knowledge of the basics was so good. The school, that year, decided to switch to the whole word method and bought hundreds of very pretty books with terrific pictures, no phonics, and one sentence per page under each huge pretty picture. And what happened ? No kid learned to read more than the most basic of words because the pictures were so big the words were lost.

What happened next ? (This was a parochial school, not a public school BTW) The 1st grade teachers went to the principal, told her that after 5 weeks in all previous years using phonics they'd had a class of readers. Now, only a few, who'd started school reading, were still doing so, and those kids were not progressing, and the others were not doing well either. The school went back to the old books and by the end of November the kids were all back on track, most reading at a 2nd or 3rd grade level or better by the end of the school year.

The lesson - there is no substitute for good teaching and a good curriculum, no matter whether the teacher is mom or the school. Those kids were trying but were not learning thru no fault of their own.


18 posted on 02/01/2006 6:33:01 AM PST by cinives (On some planets what I do is considered normal.)
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