Educating your kid in a commercial world
I recently stumbled across this site – outside the (toy) box – by a mother of two. Browsing this superb site led to The Underground History of American Education. Not a very comfortable read if you have kids on their way to school…
Chapter 3 (see Name Sounds, Not Things and The Meatgrinder Classroom) led me to do a search on Google for teach kid read using phonics. Which led me to this paragraph at dyslexics.org.uk, an independent, non-commercial, no-nonsense website with the aim of providing material to assist you to school-proof your child:
Reading test scores reflected these strategies, with the phonemic decoders superior, part-word decoders next, and whole-word guessers the worst. When these children were followed to third grade, the whole-word guessers had not changed their approach and were the undisputed worst readers in the class. Some part-word decoders had graduated to phonemic decoding, but the majority of the third graders remained primarily part-word decoders. Once more, phonemic decoders were far and away the best readers. This shows that children are active learners, and when confronted with vague or misleading guidelines for how to read, they try out strategies to overcome this difficulty. The fact that these strategies are different, and that they tend to stay constant over such a long period of time, is strong evidence against a developmental explanation. (near the middle of page 2 of “The Main Methods to Teaching Reading”)
What this in effect means is, that if your child learns to read by looking a picture of an apple, see the word apple below it, and say: “apple“, they are only recognising the word in its context in relation to the picture of the apple. The next time they see the word “apple” without the picture, they may or may not remember what the word is. If they don’t remember, they can’t break it down into its components and read the word.
Jolly Phonics at Read Australia list the five basic skills for reading and writing as well as examples to get you started. Abelard.org also explains how to teach a child to read using phonics.
