Posted on 09/24/2016 1:39:16 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Parents with children in elementary school should take a look at this short video.
At this moment, tens of thousands of public schools are making millions of little children memorize sight-words. This malpractice will retard their education and cripple their reading ability.
This four-minute video explains why.
Sight-words are, of course, the problem that Rudolf Flesch wrote about in 1955 in his famous book "Why Johnny can't read."
Our Education Establishment is relentless in pretending that phonics is no good and must be replaced by various "modern" methods. These methods had many names over the last 80+ years. But it was always the same gimmick: children don't learn how to sound out letters, all they try to learn is recognizing words as graphic designs. This is very difficult.
If we don't save the public schools, we won't save much else. The simplest way to save the public schools is to fix reading. Half of our educational problems would disappear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VcFj4FyAc
Please note Don Potter’s favorite approach: Blend Phonics
Nobody stays at the pronunciation of letters for more than a few months. You quickly move to blends. Two-letter blends and then three-letter blends.
Once you blend, for example, F plus L plus 0 to create a new sound—flo— you no longer deal with the letters or sound them out. So a long word like “flotation” is very simple. Three common blends, and you’re done.
A word like that would almost never be mastered by a sight-word reader.
In fact one of the jokes about sight-word readers is that all long words starting with V, for example, become basically the same word. Victory, victims, Virgin, vigilant, vigilante, violent, virulent, vigorous, virtuous, virtual, Viceroy, vitamin, and many more. The poor soul has to plug in all these words until one of them seems to make sense.
the NEA and the FEDS think that if non-whites know the ABC’s and can count to 100,they don’t need to know anymore.
Hmmmm .... learn a hundred or so sounds and blends or hundreds of thousands of words by sight? The choice seems clear to me. Young tots quickly learn the sounds different animals make and they can quickly learn the sounds different letters make. I sang my kids (and now my grandkids) an alphabet song,”A says a [long a] or ah,B says buh, C says kuh or sss, etc., and from having learned the sounds the letters make, it’s as small jump to sounding out words.
The written English language was constructed phonetically, using our 26 letter alphabet. There is absolutely no arguing that fact.
That being so, it is practically criminal to teach it in any other way - especially given the fact that it has been done easily and very successfully since the middle ages.
If you have a word message, type it out and post it as text so it can be read, or at least have a link to a text version.
Anyone raised on “Dick and Jane” books? Gorgeous illustrations. Lovely, happy stories for 1st graders. But whole word reading was the method used, and parents, like my mom, taught phonics at home. This method caused dyslexia in me, not severely, but enough to misread words and numbers.
Bruce,
Thank you for posting this! Just watched after my previous comment. What a great video! I will share it with others. Keep bumping this up every so often so those who missed it will get another chance to watch it.
The Westerner
I could write my name before 1st grade but couldn’t read nor did I really understand th alphabet. Thankfully my 1st grade teacher taught phonics using the McMillan Dot & Jim series. I can still remember the moment that letters and words suddenly made sense to me. The class worked in group and the teacher called us up individually so she could help those struggling with what she was teaching. She went over those words with me coaxing me to figure it out how letters could become words when suddenly Tag became not just letters but the name of the dog belonging to the children in the book and suddenly I could read and have never stopped. Thanks Miss Katzman where ever you are.
Once they know the sounds they try to read by themselves. One of mine with a few basics b and oo spells BOO which must mean that b-o-o-k spells bouquet. Lol this particular grown child of mine I know still reads. Not sure about the others but this one does read books or are they bouquets? Lol
By the time I see these students in middle school, I have to figure where they fell off the wagon. A couple quick assessments and I can get them on track....but they often remain behind. I use REWARDS, a multisyllabic approach to phonics for secondary students. Some are not wired for sounds and symbols...while others have had some horrible prior instruction. A few students require a whole different program that is very intensive.
By the time I see these students in middle school, I have to figure where they fell off the wagon. A couple quick assessments and I can get them on track....but they often remain behind. I use REWARDS, a multisyllabic approach to phonics for secondary students. Some are not wired for sounds and symbols...while others have had some horrible prior instruction. A few students require a whole different program that is very intensive.
Phonics is s tool as is memorization, recitation and rote learning. Without tools how does one survive and thrive?
I taught both of my sons to read at home using basic phonics. The two of them had strikingly different learning styles but it was not difficult for either one of them. When he finally entered the public classroom at Grade 10, one thing my older boy said he didn’t like about school was that it took too much time away from his reading.
Yes, in Jr High, the teacher caught me reading a book behind the textbook once and called in my mother, who asked the teacher to give me a quick test on the textbook. I was able to answer every question!
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