"Oh see the deer. Has the deer a little doe?"
"Why soitenly....Two Bucks!"
Posted on 10/08/2020 6:13:55 AM PDT by Kaslin
Whole Word (one of almost a dozen aliases) was first introduced into public schools circa 1931. The official goal required that students memorize at least 500 sight-words each year. Two insurmountable problems showed up immediately. For nearly all children, this goal is impossible to reach. Even if someone did reach 500, that's not nearly enough.
Wait, it gets much worse. Throughout the following decades, the official goal was reduced again and again. The typical goal now is about 100 sight-words per year. Even for good students, sight-words are hard, tedious work, like memorizing phone numbers and chemical compounds. Only children with near photographic memories can easily master 100 sight-words per year. However, even this low number rarely adds up to even 1,200 at the end of high school, because new words tend to overprint earlier words. So that's 12 years of hard work and struggle. But you still can't be called literate because you can't read the typical book or newspaper except in a slow, unpleasant way.
Another huge defect is that sight-word lists for grades 1 to 6 usually include only lowercase words, mostly short. How were children supposed to learn Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and Independence Day? Sight-words seem designed to undercut not just reading, but also the study of geography, history, and science.
So it's easy to see that sight-words, from the start, were hostile to traditional education. Why did the education commissars recommend a ride on this garbage scow? The simplest explanation is that Progressives prefer leveling and mediocrity, presumably because it facilitates their social engineering schemes.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Sight words are for Chinese or hieroglyphs that use a single symbol for a single word or phrase.
Phonics (even with some of the wacked out pronunciations or spellings) is the way to go.
The people promoting sight words are trying to damage the kids.
Is that good? Did you use any particular technique?
Sight words are awful. They pushed that crap on my daughter. The only thing that worked was when her Gen X (and English teacher momma) secretly taught her phonics.
That’s what I learned with too.
We had Dick and Jane. About 1953 for me.
Look, Look, Oh Look.
I think that was the first sentence.
But we were taught to ‘sound it out’.
Didn’t know the teachers were rebels.
Sight words are a joke. If you're versed in phonics, picking apart pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is easy. As a Welsh learner, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch joins the large words. Chew the words apart as phonetic particles and they are easy.
"Oh see the deer. Has the deer a little doe?"
"Why soitenly....Two Bucks!"
The McGuffey reader series is a great way to teach kids how to read. I used it with both of my daughters, to supplement the crap they learned in school.They were way ahead of everyone fairly quickly.
Why do you think dumbing-down for easier to control group-thinkers is “dumb”?
Great link to the McGuffey readers! I normally loathe PDF files, but it probably is the best format for those books. I might try to see what I can do to convert it to EPUB. The Project Gutenberg EPUB is a mess, and is useless.
You want to raise a genius, start by not using baby talk with exaggerated facial features. That koochie koo and goo goo talk is destructive to a brain struggling to find first meaning. Talk to your baby with warmth, pride and admiration for what they can become, but in a normal tone using normal words. Be a rational parent, not a party clown. Don’t dumb the kid down right out the gate.
English is a very phonetic language so why have educators decided reading must be taught like the Chinese memorizing of characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics? Look say teaching of reading has in every variation failed for decades to effectively teach kids to read so why do educators persist? Our son was fortunate to have had a first grade teacher who bucked the trend and still taught the kids phonics and he learned to read well. When our daughter five years later had the same first grade teacher she had been browbeaten into abandoning phonics for the latest variation of look say reading and our daughter struggles with reading thirty years later.
When learning Japanese, I find the phonetic nature of hiragana and katakana very digestible. I'm stymied with Kanji. Someday. When reading Russian, I prefer Cyrillic as there are many sound elements that map directly to Cyrillic and only approximately to Latin letters used in English. Arabic is also phonetic, but colloquial usage omits the vowel marking. That is a common reason that Arabic learners end up wallowing in the Quran where the Arabic is fully vowel marked. Turkish is also very phonetic with simple rules on "vowel harmony".
I did that - not using koochie-koo, but using adult words and expression (30+ years ago)...
Exactly, that’s how I learned to read and phonics, phonics and more phonics. My wife was part of an experiment in the 1940s that didn’t teach phonics or spelling. It was a disaster.
BTW, anybody remember diagraming sentences? That was part of my education right up to, and including, 12th grade.
“I hugely prefer phonics (supplemented by some core sight words) to whole word reading, but the argument that kids were deliberately taught whole word as some leftist plot to create an uneducated population is just dumb.”
I would agree that by the time you get in the field, most teachers have no clue as to which is better, and even if they did understand phonics (something they no longer get trained on in any depth), they would be prohibited from teaching it.
But the people on the top know better, for sure, and they are hard-Leftists - so if it’s not political motivation (i.e., knock this country down a notch, or whatever), than why do they persist in Whole Language (or whatever term they use, until it’s again discredited)?
Yep! I diagrammed sentences in HS and JUNIOR HIGH (Some states call it ‘Middle School’)................
Your daughter and I are of a type. There is a group for folks like us on Fakebook, called “Grammar Libertarians”. IF she’s on that platform, let her know, she may like it.
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