As a teacher and from a family of dyslexics, I disagree. I watched a TA teaching phonics to two non-verbal disabled kids. She wasn't teaching life skills, refused to budge and kept teaching phonics. I put up some word cards and was showing the kids sentences, and one of the boys grabbed the word "the" and came up to me and said "the". He recognized that it was at the start of a sentence.
I was reading at the age of four, One Fish, Two Fish. My kids were reading above grade, my son was reading 10th grade material in 3rd grade. With dyslexia. Because I read to them an hour every night. The only phonics I did was slide my thumb across the word as I read it so they understood the concept of words and how they were written. He laughed loudly when he realized how the book was the same story, over and over again and by the time he was three, he pointed out the word TOY on a Toyota.
The reason the modern method of language education is failing, is not only phonics (American phonics is based on South Carolina phonics and I had a real go round with a teacher because the palm of my hand is not a pam, nor is a boot a but) That is why phonics is a failure because of regional dialects. But it is also failing because it is making reading a chore, dissecting sentences and paragraphs, turning it into an English major's delight but a misery for those of us who prefer to read and write information instead of dissecting sentence structure. As a teacher, I found kids that said they would never pick up a book again because of what was being done to them. As a substitute high school teacher, a kid complained about how boring the book they were reading was. I asked to see it, and started reading to the class, using voices, intonations of feelings, emotions, expectations, excitement. All the kids went and grabbed that exact book because I gave it life. No one read to them and gave life to books for them!
The best way to teach kids how to read, is to read. And many kids have exhausted parents that not only don't read to them but tune out as soon as they get home.
Sight reading, learning the shapes of words, increases cognitive awareness and understanding and increases the speed at which someone can read. My kids had lousy spelling in grade school, in part because of dyslexia, but they excelled otherwise.
Do you believe in results? Literacy plummeted after look-say became widespread.
Phonetics gets the student up and running with a general toolkit. Yes, it’s biased towards the standard pronunciation. Most people can code switch without issue. It’s not nearly as difficult as switching languages between school and home.
There are pesticides that cause ADHD, did you know that? I was exposed to it at the age of 21. I used to read tremendously, but now it is very difficult to read a book cover to cover because of my brain injury. When I was a student teacher, I did a class survey of 3rd graders. It was a habitat survey of if you see a …(example: deer), do you watch it, chase it, hunt it, feed it, or poison it. (these kids lived in the mountains.) We went through the animal chain, all the way to insects. Guess what? The kids whose parents sprayed twice a month, yes twice, had poor reading skills, poor math skills, couldn’t sit still, were disruptive in class with poor hand coordination and were more likely to be held back a grad. The kids whose parents only did it a couple of times a year? They still had sloppy handwriting and were distractable, but functioned better. And the kids whose parents would never use pesticides (it was a take home family survey), those kids were like kids used to be, polite, quiet, self regulating and self contained. They did math and read easily and smoothly.
These neurotoxic pesticides were developed during WWII as a nerve agent and then was found to be a great pesticide but have done terrible damage to the children and adults. My first exposure was as a student in school when the custodian sprayed my arm and splattered my face along with a row of ants. I remember getting sick and then getting yelled at because suddenly I couldn’t learn anything for awhile and was feeling sick all the time. My math and handwriting skills eroded and I had terrible handwriting after that.
I do, however, believe in teaching root words, prefixes and suffixes and the sources of those, in high school.
I agree, but 90+ percent of the students should be reading _well_ at that point.
As a teacher and from a family of dyslexics, I disagree. I watched a TA teaching phonics to two non-verbal disabled kids. She wasn't teaching life skills, refused to budge and kept teaching phonics. I put up some word cards and was showing the kids sentences, and one of the boys grabbed the word "the" and came up to me and said "the". He recognized that it was at the start of a sentence.
I was reading at the age of four, One Fish, Two Fish. My kids were reading above grade, my son was reading 10th grade material in 3rd grade. With dyslexia. Because I read to them an hour every night. The only phonics I did was slide my thumb across the word as I read it so they understood the concept of words and how they were written. He laughed loudly when he realized how the book was the same story, over and over again and by the time he was three, he pointed out the word TOY on a Toyota.
The reason the modern method of language education is failing, is not only phonics (American phonics is based on South Carolina phonics and I had a real go round with a teacher because the palm of my hand is not a pam, nor is a boot a but) That is why phonics is a failure because of regional dialects. But it is also failing because it is making reading a chore, dissecting sentences and paragraphs, turning it into an English major's delight but a misery for those of us who prefer to read and write information instead of dissecting sentence structure. As a teacher, I found kids that said they would never pick up a book again because of what was being done to them. As a substitute high school teacher, a kid complained about how boring the book they were reading was. I asked to see it, and started reading to the class, using voices, intonations of feelings, emotions, expectations, excitement. All the kids went and grabbed that exact book because I gave it life. No one read to them and gave life to books for them!
The best way to teach kids how to read, is to read. And many kids have exhausted parents that not only don't read to them but tune out as soon as they get home.
Sight reading, learning the shapes of words, increases cognitive awareness and understanding and increases the speed at which someone can read. My kids had lousy spelling in grade school, in part because of dyslexia, but they excelled otherwise.
Do you believe in results? Literacy plummeted after look-say became widespread.
Phonetics gets the student up and running with a general toolkit. Yes, it’s biased towards the standard pronunciation. Most people can code switch without issue. It’s not nearly as difficult as switching languages between school and home.
The phonics system was promoted in England as well as here and the literacy rates fell radically. It didn’t work. I did my teacher training in 2001.
I think you have it backwards.
https://youtu.be/A3wJcF0t0bQ?si=k8sINT-mcU7iMfgN
There are pesticides that cause ADHD, did you know that? I was exposed to it at the age of 21. I used to read tremendously, but now it is very difficult to read a book cover to cover because of my brain injury. When I was a student teacher, I did a class survey of 3rd graders. It was a habitat survey of if you see a …(example: deer), do you watch it, chase it, hunt it, feed it, or poison it. (these kids lived in the mountains.) We went through the animal chain, all the way to insects. Guess what? The kids whose parents sprayed twice a month, yes twice, had poor reading skills, poor math skills, couldn’t sit still, were disruptive in class with poor hand coordination and were more likely to be held back a grad. The kids whose parents only did it a couple of times a year? They still had sloppy handwriting and were distractable, but functioned better. And the kids whose parents would never use pesticides (it was a take home family survey), those kids were like kids used to be, polite, quiet, self regulating and self contained. They did math and read easily and smoothly.
These neurotoxic pesticides were developed during WWII as a nerve agent and then was found to be a great pesticide but have done terrible damage to the children and adults. My first exposure was as a student in school when the custodian sprayed my arm and splattered my face along with a row of ants. I remember getting sick and then getting yelled at because suddenly I couldn’t learn anything for awhile and was feeling sick all the time. My math and handwriting skills eroded and I had terrible handwriting after that.
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