I didn't realize how many times my mother read those "A,B,C'" books to me until I had children of my own and was doing the same. I could lay on the bed with my children and with my eyes closed read those books to them, over and over again.
Due to parents that loved to read, and passed that love down to their children, I read fast! We may have been poor little dirt road southern kids, but books were plentiful in our house, and we were expected to be able to read before starting school.
We need to return to phonics if our educational system is going to be rescued. I read more and more of schools returning to that method of teaching. When they do, their testing scores increase, and if more schools will return to that method, children will once again be able to read.
No wonder kids have such frustration in their lives. Can you imagine walking down the street and not being able to read the signs? Or purchasing a product and not being able to read the instructions included?
Our enemies have worked hard in dumbing down America. We need to fight back against that deliberate destruction of our educational system.
How many of us here remember the articles of concern from the 70s and 80s warning that children were entering school without knowing basic words such as “ball” or “cat?. Then it was concern that five year-old children didn’t know their “ABC’s”. Now, the concern is that the children aren’t potty-trained.
Destroy the educational system and you destroy the nation.
Thanks to my grandmother, I started the First Grade already able to read. I remember that syllables and phonics were the way I was taught, even if those words weren’t used.
LOOK. The first word in my first grade reading book, Dick, Jane, Sally, Spot, and Puff. For the first years of school I hated to read.
Also need to return to Flash cards for math.
Reading to our small children is one of the most developmentally important tasks that one can do as a parent. It is also wonderfully bonding for both.
(Johnny Can’t Read)
Oh, so that’s how rap got started.....
For 5 years my late beloved wife fought an educational guerilla war against Lucy Calkins. She avoided going to her workshops at Teachers College. When Calkins came to her Queens school she challenged her methods to her face in a civil manner. She organized her classroom as Calkins prescribed but taught her kids her way, except when a supervisor entered , then she switched to the Calkins method and switched back when the admin left. Her kids, 3rd graders from Maspeth, were in on it and loved it. She fought this fight till retirement and her kids are the better for it. The youngest of them are 21 now. She was called home 10 years ago. When I read this in the NY Post I drove to her resting place and said, “ You won!”
When I taught at a hippie school way back in the day they practically had a shrine to Lucy Calkins. Like many on here I learned to read by phonics. It is truly the only lasting way to learn to read. You also learn to decode unfamiliar words with ease.
I can even decode & pronounce foreign words. Phonics all the way.
I can understand the desire to make money off selling new textbooks and teaching materials, and for building careers aound promoting a “new” system every few years.
But why is it that “educators” return, again and again, to versions of the failed “whole language” concept? Years of dismal results across multiple iterations of the program is plenty of evidence that “whole language” does not work for most children learning to read in English (and languages written in Roman or Greeek characters), while phonics has been proven to work reliably for most.
Is there a Marxist angle, or some other ideological imperative driving this in Schools of Education? Is it sometimes a tool for racial levelling? This is harsh, but I could see leftist educrats using whole language to produce “equity of results” to render both “minority” and white children equally illiterate, crippling their ability to absorb any subject matter. Maybe it’s intended to fail.
English is a phonetic language and yet the educational establishment insists on teaching it by word memory like it was Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Phonics works well for teaching kids to read, while the other methods produce poor results.
English is a phonetic language and yet the educational establishment insists on teaching it by word memory like it was Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Phonics works well for teaching kids to read, while the other methods produce poor results.
Phonics simply works. If one wants to get out of the classroom and land a comfy seat on the gray train one must come up with a new secret sauce to do what phonics already does.
The Calkins-crap is known as See/Say and a bunch of other terms. It simply doesn’t work. Phonics allows one to sound out new words whereas See/Say doesn’t. If one wanted to control the spread of information and limit what one can read about, See/Say is your ticket.
The following episode shows the A-B-C approach. It starts at about 16:00 in my browser but I like the whole episode. Some of the actors also appeared on Phil Silvers's show about Bilko.