In the end, I of course advocate reading to your children and children hearing great books in school. I would never advocate children learning phonograms to the exclusion of good reading. However, in my experience, the education programs I have been around have not really taught anything about the mechanics of teaching reading. They helped you know how to pick good literature, create activities/ units around that litearature but nothing that resembled making sure that you taught kids the sounds of the language to begin to help them to decode. Programs that do both are obviously the best option. My issue is that very few teachers are truly prepared to systematically help students learn the sounds of the language and decode it so that they can learn to read. As the article points out they often teach rules that don't work and make the language more confusing than necessary.
In response to Flogger I found a great resource: I'll Tell You a Story, I'll Sing You a Song. This little treasure talks about why storytelling is so important (not just story reading - although that is very important too). It also includes a simple outline of the most common folk tales, nursery rhymes and similar things. Basically, as she says, these are all the stories that you know but you can't remember the details of them. I just started the book but I think it will help me to pursue storytelling with my little guy.
1 comment:
Sounds like a great book. However, it is out of print and hard to come by. I, for one, have never purchased from other resellers on Amazon. Is it safe to do so?!?
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