Posted on 06/20/2014 3:47:06 AM PDT by afraidfortherepublic
Not much is certain in life, but here are two things you can take to the bank. If you want a child to learn to read, phonics is the way that works. Second, you can be sure that our Education Establishment will try to keep phonics at a minimum and force children to memorize the English language one sight-word at a time.
Where reading is concerned, the nonsense never stops.
In his famous 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read, Rudolf Flesch said he looked at all the research. There were 11 studies from 1913 to 1948; in all of them, phonics was superior.
~snip~
We have a hundred years of research showing that phonics is best. (That’s where you start with letters, sounds, and blends.) But our ideologically impaired Education Establishment schemes continuously against phonics and in favor of “whole words.” (That’s where you treat each word as a unitary design.)
The result is that you find, across the country, every possible degree of real phonics, adulterated phonics, and no phonics at all. There are school districts so benighted that they are almost entirely Whole Word, just as almost all school districts were 50 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Phonics was not in use in 1965 at the California school where I learned to read. I was reading by the first week.
About 20 years ago, a local school district decided to skip printing and begin cursive in Kindergarten. The program lasted 2-3 years. My friend’s daughter was one of the guinea pigs in that group. She never learned to read until 6th grade since also being denied phonics, they had no idea how to read the LETTERS. Shameful.
This is a subject that rouses my anger, for sure! I lived in Scotland the year I would have been in Kindergarten, and was taught phonics by an old pro who had me sing the alphabet phonetically until I knew the sounds backwards and forwards, and she brought me from being able to recognize the letters of the alphabet a la Sesame Street, to reading books with chapters in about six months. From there, I have always been a good speller and love, love, love to read. I thank this Scottish woman for this, wholeheartedly.
My daughter (in America) could not grasp sight reading, and I finally got some help for her in third grade, because she could read only about 100 words, and those; not well. She was taken in for special classes and they taught her phonics (with a lot of help from home) and she could finally read. The awful part was (and I was a middle school teacher and saw this happen to other kids, so I think it is a huge problem) she was labeled with whatever the p.c. version of “Learning Disabled” was, and has been struggling to get out of resource classrooms for the past five years. Because so many school districts give more funding for children with learning problems, it is obvious to me that “sight learning” is just part of the racket for schools to get more money (and inflate administrator pay, among others). My poor kid has busted her rear end, trying to prove she isn’t “dumb”, and she will get the pay off next year.
(Before you all pile on, I was divorced and not getting paid child support from my eurotrash husband, so I can’t imagine how I could possibly have home-schooled).
Sorry to be long-winded, but just my anecdotal evidence on the power of phonics and the idiocy of sight learning.
Standard NEA policy. The dumber the kids are, the more money the teachers and administrators are paid.
—great article—personal experience tells me it is absolutely correct-—
I was already reading by the time Sesame Street came to be.
The District of Con-Artists (DC) have been conning the American people for over 100 years now.
How to determine if your child needs more phonics:
1. He guesses constantly.
2. He confuses “a” and “the.”
3. He can usually sound out the first letter and the last letter but the middle of the word is a mystery.
3. He looks at the pictures first and does a lot of his guesswork based on the pictures.
4. A word list to memorize is sent home, sometimes with instructions for him to call out the words as quickly as possible. (Speed is stressed rather than accuracy.)
5. If readers come home, they contain a high volume of irregular words that are difficult to sound out. Phonetic readers have a mere handful of irregular words.
If you suspect your child is failing to learn to read, research the Internet and find a compatible phonics program to help you teach him. Or hire someone to tutor him.
Reading is the most important thing he will ever learn in school and his future depends on it.
For most kids, it’s a developmental thing, at the end of first grade, most kids are reading
certain words are sight words, but most lend themselves to phonetic analysis
As long as kids are kept in stupid mode,they will tend to vote Democrat.
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