Posted on 03/20/2016 7:29:25 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
We must eliminate sight-words from the public schools. That's the only way to save reading, and the only way we're going to save the schools themselves.
The Education Establishment is great at creating jargon, convoluted theories, propaganda, lies, fake research, and new packaging for failed ideas. Average parents don't stand a chance of understanding all this nonsense.
So here is a little video, 7 1/2 minutes, that explains almost everything you need to know about phonics, sight words, Dolch words, high frequency words, dyslexia, and how they are all connected.
There is some very intense music which I still love; but if you don't like it, just turn the volume down. Me, I love it loud.
Ideally, everyone would look at this thing three or four times until they really know the fine points. Then make their neighbors look at it three or four times. Until everybody in the country has seen it and the Education Establishment has to surrender in shame.
In fact, this is just one of 30 related pieces. I keep producing these things, and the public schools keep right on using sight-words. Quite depressing. But not just for me. For the future of this country. If they keep dumbing down all the students, then we will have the dumbest country anybody ever saw. The Education Establishment has always understood that literacy was what they had to destroy first, if they want to destroy everything else.
Bruce Deitrick Price / Improve-Education.org
“I couldn’t find his/her creds”
Ugh! That’s icky.
Most of us DO NOT have Political Science degrees, but we do have COMMON SENSE and thus we know that we are being SCREWED, big time, by the GOPe.
In this case, it is NO DIFFERENT. Telling kids that they must memorize works by their ‘shapes’ until they are 8 YEARS OLD is just plain SICKENING, especially considering all of the successes that are attributed to phonics.
I know that look say is a scourge on our educational system. Why? What happens to you if you miss school for a month or so from having a string of illness (as my husband did)? You miss those words! They are never taught again! It isn't till adulthood when someone shows you how to sound out words that you become literate! Phonics worked in this country for hundreds of years; look-say/whole word has failed in only 50.
If you’ll look at the posting history.....seems to post articles linked to his/her blog and doesn’t come back to engage posters on the thread *s/he* posted.
Smells fishy - icky to me.
Have fun. TTFN.
Yes.
Ebonics as a second language
I did battle with the Whole Language zealots about 25 years ago. My daughter started Kindergarten and I wondered what the heck they were doing. Whole language, child-centered philosophy. I couldn’t believe any thinking person could fall for anything so silly.
Pulled her out of school, home-schooled her and her brother, did some radio shows speaking out about this nonsense, ran a group for parents, started a tutoring business (which paid for my children’s private schools later on) and wrote my own reading/spelling/writing program.
I am now home-schooling my little grandkids - little girl 6 and little boy 4. My little granddaughter is already reading like a champ, and spelling correctly!
Fighting the Whole Language/Child Centered zealots is like fighting a religious group. They don’t care about facts - it’s about their philosophy.
There is no need to learn words by sight if you are properly taught the letter-to-sound, spelling pattern-to-sound system. It’s so much easier - confusing a child with this sight reading and guessing is the worst thing you can do.
You know, a mediocre reader could have read the content in that 7-1/2 minute youtube clip in about 30 seconds, tops.
Yet native Italians rarely get dyslexia. This seems to be because the Italian language has little disparity between the sound of words and their spelling.
Well I don’t know if these were exactly the reactions you were expecting but you certainly got responses on your video! I was one who was dissatisfied with the quality of education that my kids were receiving and so took it upon myself to correct their flawed approach.
For a long time I’ve known that leftists create solutions in search of problems and “fixes” for things that aren’t broken. I’ll be damned if I will allow them to experiment on my children.
As a child, I was frustrated to no end by the mindless Dick and Jane readers. My teacher picked up on this and told my mother. She asked me why I hated reading and I said it was because of the stupid Dick and Jane stories we were being forced to study. I wanted to read Donald Duck comic books. So, mom and I started to read Donald Duck comic and we did them using phonics. Once I got the hang of sounding out the words, reading became a piece of cake and I zipped through the Donald Duck comics. My teacher was astounded at my progress. Moral: ask the child what they'd like to read, teach them phonics to sound out the words they don't know, and then watch them read.
You can acquire it. My daughter had a brain 8 jury at 6 weeks old. Dyslexia is one of her issues, but mostly resolved. Her identical twin never had reading problems and is very, very gifted (got a 35 out of 36 on ACT).
We started my daughter with Barton Reading, a multsensory reading program for dyslexics. She went from reading below grade level to reading above grade level.
The school district in California wouldn’t even test her for dyslexia. She always got 100% on her spelling tests because she has a great memory.
However, I noticed she was having trouble with unfamiliar words. She had speech problems from a brain injury, so she was high risk of having problems.
She had auditory processing problems and low phonemic awareness.
The reading program taught her how to overcome that.
Dyslexia is a general term for reading problems. Each child is different. Some can sound out words, but can’t comprehend. Some can’t sound out words. Some transpose words.
English is a phonetic language. Teaching children to read it in any other way, is a disservice to the child.
It simply isn’t necessary to teach it in any other fashion, than in the manner it was constructed.
Automatic recognition of whole words by sight is where you want to get to, but it’s the end point, not the beginning. Sure, there are some really crazy small words in the English language, like “one” and “the”, so it can’t hurt to teach those by recognition. But to be able to read words that they’re not familiar with, kids need to learn the connection between sounds and letters. it’s unfortunate that the sound-letter connection is weaker in English than in any other alphabetic language, but it’s still the magic decoding ring for learning to read.
Great minds think alike.
Sight words seem pretty stupid to me.
We have an alphabet, as opposed to other languages, like chinese, that use pictograms, one for each word.
So why on earth would you not start w/the letters?
Chinese characters are the reason I had to give up on my study of Mandarin. In order to learn Mandarin, we learned a Romanized version of writing Chinese, in which the words are spelled phonetically, with accent marks to indicate the correct tones. Learning like that, Chinese is fairly straightforward. But then characters were added to the mix, where you have to memorize THIS character represents THIS syllable--and the same syllable with a different tone has a different character--I could not keep up. I could not memorize by rote the characters, even after spending hours a day studying and trying to memorize them. It does not help that many of them are written with a dozen or more strokes--even in simplified PRC characters. Thank goodness my native language has a (roughly) phonetic means of writing.
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