I am thinking that I might have blogged about this before - but it is SO important. For all you mom's out there STOP teaching your child to sing the alphabet song and spell the word cat - "SEE A TEE". That's not helping them. CAT is spelled /k/ /a/ /t/ - truly sound out the letters not just the letter names. It is confusing to learn letter names and the sounds and it is so easy to just teach the sounds the letter typically makes. Please consider getting either Reading Reflex or Spelling to Read and Write or something similar. They need to know that the letters we write represent the sounds of our language. They already have the sounds down (if they can talk) now they just need the pictures (letters) that represent those sounds. English has between 45 and 70 sounds (depending how you break them down) - not the 26 we find in the alphabet. This is my little rant but you can read the intelligent argument before the senate here.
Whole Language instruction (I took a class on this I think - or at least had to read a book about it for a class) - is a bunch of HOOEY! Please do not let your child be allowed to stay in a class that is ONLY using this approach. Can you imagine someone trying to tell you that you learn math by being around numbers and somehow you will magically understand how numbers work? NO! But that is basically what whole language tries to say about reading. Study after study confirms that whole language does NOT help children learn to read. I agree that just teaching phonics, phonograms or direct instruction WITHOUT hearing great literature and having a reason to want to read is an issue - but that doesn't mean that pleasure should be the primary goal of our reading programs. In fact, this fails because they may love to hear stories -but after a while, when they don't "get" reading, they begin to guess, feel stupid, and never are really able to read. Kids often take these things upon themselves and just figure it is their fault they can't read. Well, no one ever explained how reading works in a way that they understood. So please, learn the sounds of the language and teach your kids to listen to the sounds.
End of rant.
3 comments:
The ONLY "nursery rhyme" I can remember to sing with my grandchildren IS the ABC song! How pathetic is that?!? Please send me a link to nursery rhymes so I can sing something else with them!!!
Not to mention ... how the heck did you and your brother learn to read? I certainly did not employ any particular method to teach you how to read. Have you ever figured that out?!?
Whole language if done correclty should include reading with phonics, direct instuction, small and large group instruction and should include the link of reading and writing. At least that is how I was trained to teach Whole Language and how I used it in my classroom. You have to have all componants or it isn't really whole language. The program should include phonics it shouldn't be a whole language versus phonics debate because a good program will have that as ONE componant because it isn't the only part of learning to read! Children need to know other stratagies along with sounding it out, such as what would make sense, look at the picture, skip and then GO back and re-read. You loose kids as well if your only focus is on phonics and phonics rules. I'll get off my soap box now. THis is a hot topic for me and one we can debate later.
I agree that you need to teach letter sounds before letter names or at the same time. Meghan knows all of the letter names and is now putting a sound to the letter. And when children first start spelling they will often write only the first and last sound. Vowels are often the last to be added to writing sicne they change how they sound. Then when they write dress or dragon it will look like "jess" or "jagn" because the dr makes a /j/ sound and if you have no idea how it should be spelled, you hear the /j/ sound instead of a /d/ and /r/ sound.
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