Posted on 07/28/2018 5:06:38 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Subtitle: Fix reading and half of our education problems disappear
--It's a common problem in the US. Children in the second and third grades, even the fourth and fifth grades, are struggling readers. They guess; they skip ahead; they search for clues from context; they look at pictures to read words. Did I mention they guess? Typically, these children are unsuccessful in most school subjects and very unhappy.
The school may think this slow progress is fine. But perhaps you as a parent know younger children who've already learned to read. You worry that your child Is falling behind. You are right to worry.
The first thing to confront is that teachers and school officials will mislead you. Truth is, they'll lie: "Your child is doing fine. He's getting plenty of phonics." But then your child comes home with a list of sight-words to be memorized. You know phonics is being slighted. But what can you do?
Here's a second problem: finding help is not easy. The media are basically a dead zone. You're not going to find advice on reading in your local newspaper or TV program.
Bottom line, sight-word instruction (that is, learning to name word-designs on sight) is the cause of most reading problems. Ideally, schools stop using them. The good news is that a list of sight-words can be a valuable wake-up call. They tell you that the school has embraced the destructive ideas which have been hurting children for the past 80 years.
Parents should trust systematic phonics where the focus is on learning letters, then the sounds represented by the letters, then the blends of those sounds. (Usually the whole process takes five months. All phonics experts say the same thing: reading is easy.)
So let's say your child is having reading problems; and simultaneously your child brings home lists of sight-words to memorize. Get involved immediately and teach your child the basics of phonics. Namely, letters represent sounds.
To start, parents can read "Preemptive Reading," a quick introduction to phonics. (It includes a list of complete phonics courses.)
YouTube has many helpful videos. A. J. Jenkins in Australia has made some wonderful phonics videos. One of these has attracted more than half-a-billion views! Encourage your child to sing along. Very quickly he'll have the phonics idea in his head.
The main thing is that children get the concept that letters and words are symbols for SOUNDS. When looking at b-words like beach, branch, ball, and block, the child knows that all of them start with the same sound. At that point, language becomes logical and predictable.
Sight-words, on the other hand, are always arbitrary, like a phone number you just committed to memory. (Wait a minute, was that 5271 or 5721?)
Despite all the propaganda we hear, the English language is 100% phonetic. There is no such thing as a non-phonetic word in an English dictionary. Indeed, all the words are arranged alphabetically, which is to say that all the words listed under B start with the same b-sound.
English is an old language that has borrowed many foreign words. So our vowels can be inconsistent. But old tennis shoes are still tennis shoes. Whole Word promoters try to pretend that a small difference means that something is "non-phonetic." No, merely non-consistent. For a word to be truly non-phonetic, it would have to be something like XXFG, which you're told to pronounce "shuffleboard." Fortunately, English has no such words, although the Education Establishment loves to pretend otherwise.
Some children learn to read almost without instruction. The brain figures out the easy way to read, which is to identify the phonics information. Less verbal children seem to need more rules and more practice. But keep in mind that phonics rules are stepping stones to reading, not goals in themselves. Don't hesitate to teach something over and over; on the other hand don't hesitate to move along. It's good to make the learning process as fun as possible. Mix in singing, poetry, knock-knock jokes, and football cheers.
The most important thing of all is helping children find things they want to read. Once reading is easy for children, they'll read everything in sight. The problem in our schools now is that many children never reach that point. Especially make sure that boys find material that is appealing to boys.
Sight-words (also known by many other names) are probably viewed by our far-left as one of the most successful subversive tricks in history. They imposed this incorrect theory on the public schools in 1931. They carefully destroyed phonics books, and since that time they have been conducting a rearguard operation insisting that sight-words are terrific, phonics doesn't work, and kids will read when they are ready. If they don't read, that's because they have a serious problem like dyslexia. Nature caused this problem, so our Education Establishment can claim to be blameless for what it has perpetrated! Phonics experts reject the sophistry, saying that "dyslexia" should be relabeled "dysteachia." That is, a disease caused by classroom instruction.
The simple way to save American K-12 is to eliminate sight-words and return to phonics. Children must learn to read before they can read to learn.
I raised our kids reading aloud together in bed for 1/2 hour before bed time, every night, without fail.
When they learned to read, I gave them the choice each night to read or listen. Most of the time they read, but if they were tired they’d let me read to them.
So important!
the other half of kids need solutions too
Not so simple if they have dyslexia.
Barton Reading program really helped my brain-injured daughter to read. It’s a multi-sensory Orton-Gillingham reading program.
My daughter has auditory processing problems and couldn’t hear the difference in sounds. Barton Reading uses lots of tricks to teach phonics rules.
There are other Orton-Gillingham reading programs.
Of course, the public school did nothing.
We put her in a private school that taught her it.
Uhhhh your response was I hope in sarcasm...
The author of the article is a friend of mine and in my view having been involved in education for decades at the professional level (Corporate - technical and other skills) he is an expert in what he says. We have talked many times and all here are in agreement that the removal of the foundations (vowels, phonics etc) has been devastating to anyone who attends a public school pretty much no matter what state you live in.
So if they are tasked with providing this and we as taxpayers fund it then why are they continuing on the same path. It seems to me that if they are supposed to be turning out functional graduates and they are not they are in violation of their contract to “educate” the children in their care. This to me should open the door for alternatives but if you know how it is all wired together even charter school funding has to feed through this parasitic system and in many cases Union Teachers must be hired.
So as many have posited here the only alternative until we can throw the rascals out is to do it ourselves. When my daughter was 3 her education began by me and her grandmother as we;ll as watching a lot of sesame street (circa 1980) When she entered kindergarten she could read, knew all the alphabet, a lot of math and had been taking piano lessons since she was 4.
So Mariner I ask again who your comment is pointed at, as this issue has no color or country of birth associated to it.
Before I went to school, I learned hundreds of words just by watching commercials.
Got to sit and read with your kids. Otherwise you can tie them up in the back yard and have both a poorly behaved dog AND child.
Yep! My brain injured daughter did all 3.
She’s a senior in college with over a 3.8 GPA, and she wants to go to grad school for Biostatistics.
Let them read ANYTHING they want. Even if it's comic books. So long as they are reading. As a child, I went through stacks of comic books, MAD magazine, pulp science fiction and other so-called junk. Eventually I grew bored of that and started reading adult novels, biographies and more challenging reading.
The problem is not with the schools. It's that children come home from school and do nothing but watch TV, play video games or surf YouTube.
I sent all four of my kids thru private schools (and 3 thru college). Best thing I ever did. I’m paying for a few of my grand kids now too.
I pulled it up on amazon and will most likely buy it but let me ask you; does it get alittle more advanced early on after the sounding out of letters? Teaching an adult is different than a little one, as he’s had some schooling (although the schools are pathetic). He knows the alphabet and sounds of letters so I don’t want to get bogged down with things he’s “mastered”.
I read in school. But after teaching roddlers to read, i think that if a kid is basically waiting around for school to start then something is fundamentally wrong.
And Plano is a good school district and Texas tests and treats for dyslexia.
In California, they wouldn’t test or treat my brain-injured daughter.
She was great at site words, but you can only go so far with site words.
Thank God I learned to read in the early ‘70s. My old school teacher, Mrs. Whitaker, made me sound the words out. I deciphered the ‘code’ quickly and NEVER looked back. Growing up in an intellectual family didn’t hurt, either.
Fast forward forty years, I’m a teacher of at-risk kids (gangs, victims of sex trafficking, you name it...) Most of my teens read at a third grade level if at all.
The handful that do read have a better chance at turning their lives around. The ones that don’t — they’re nihilistic and hopeless.
I tutored a 13 year old who was in 5th grade. Used those workbooks for kindergarteners that start from scratch. I think they are still available near coloring books in stores and do not cost much.
Phonics is the only way.
it has to be based on sounding out words or they’ll be stumped whenever they come to a word they can’t remember.
They’re NOT supposed to learn reading, until 3rd or 4th grade (once they’re through with sight words).
Of course, they’ll be terrible readers for life by being delayed that long, but considering that the vast majority of Americans, and the majority of people here, continue to dump their kids into government schools, expecting them to be taught properly, I guess that’s ok...
Read an editorial in The Washington Times in the early 90’s where California discovered their sight reading initiative left them with a HUGE functional illiteracy rate.
I think it was over 80% and it took the OVER 20 YEARS to figure out the problem.
My mom was a grade school reading teacher, and no way in hell would she teach sight. Lady was hard core phonics.
Home schooled my kids in reading via phonics, Kumon math, Hands on Algebra in 3rd grade (That was a hoot! They understood the concepts!), and US History.
That’s a parent’s job.
Bingo! You got it!
That is how I teach reading. Sounds like you are doing great.
Yes, you are correct. Did not think of that. One of the first words I could not sound out in the “Dick and Jane” book was LAUGH. So “gh” soundS like “F”...sometimes.
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