cover article in Time magazine on gifted education

Ouch -- that's not good. I see kids in high school doing that and it
really
messes with their reading comp.

But why would one assume that just because a preschooler
does this that it will be characteristic of their reading once
they're high schoolers? People do different things at different
stages.

Exactly, he's 4 years old, it's far better that he has a go, rather than
doesn't try to read at all, doesn't sound a great idea when he's just
told me that something is cinnamon flavour, to be correcting him and
telling him he read it the wrong way doesn't sound a particularly
enriching thing for a small child.

Cheers
Anne

"Banty" wrote in message
...
In article , nimue says...

Anne Rogers wrote:
Yeah -- these are the kids who would have had reading problems
regardless of which approach was used -- and phonics still benefits
these kids more than whole language.

I think you're saying exactly what I intended to say, it really does
seem to give the best overall results for group teaching at
kindergarten age. I think a lot of children without even being taught
it are going to learn a proportion of their vocabulary by word
recognition - after
all, a good number of children can recognise their own names before
learning any phonics. My son kind of does half and half, he knows the
majority of the sounds, but a lot of the stuff he attempts to read is
single words, with some kind of context and he'll sound out the first
syllable then guess at the word from the context.

Ouch -- that's not good. I see kids in high school doing that and it
really
messes with their reading comp. Guessing a word is very different from
knowing a word. Guessing is NOT recognizing -- it's guessing. Granted,
these are kids with reading problems anyway, so perhaps someone like your
son, who doesn't have reading problems, might be able to use that method.

My son, who is actually pretty bright, *did* to exactly that a lot!
Because,
confronted with a new word, and a whole word learning background, what
else is
one supposed to do?? It's a reasonable way to interpret what the teacher
is
telling him to do.

I
guess reading may evolve into that -- after all, none of us is sounding
out
the words we are reading anymore -- we just recognize them. You can't get
to whole language without phonics, however, so it's pointless to teach
something (whole language) that just evolves out of something else
(phonics)
naturally. I guess it's kind of like driving to a friends new home. The
first time you will need directions, need to have the way broken down and
made clear. Later, you can just drive there -- but you needed those
directions first.


'Xactly.

Banty


Phonics is a stepping stone. A method of what to do on your way to having a
large array of words at your quick disposal and when you come across of
somethign new. Even I still sound out words when reading scientific and
medical stuff.

They don't seem diametrically opposed to me, the way the debate seems to
have gone in the last 20 or so years that I have been passingly aware of it.
I have seen phonics taught so rigidly that absolutely no connection is made
from one sound to the next, and the young reader has no idea of anything but
the sound that they are current;y working on. And I have seen see-say-learn
taught so rigidly that a new reader had no idea how to decode a new word to
examine whether or not it exists in their vocabulary. Every new word needed
external help whether or not it was already part of their oral repetiore.

In the course of preparing for homeschooling, I stumbled across
http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/index.htm. While I am not completely certain
that I subsribe to the entire philosophy (mostly because I have not had time
to read all of it), I have found the material I have used very interesting.
In the book "What Your First Grader Needs To Know" the author speaks of the
need for *both* decoding skills for reading new words (phonics) AND a richer
exposure to language in many forms and within many contexts. I think this
has happened somewhat accidentally with my son through casual reference to
phonics principles in the even earlier years as well as a ton of reading TO.
I think the reading TO a child is fantastic way to foster word recognition
as they will internalize certain words that they see over and over without
any knowledge that they are doing so. But also, you can talk about other
aspects of language and literature as well as achieve story and subject
comprehension that becomes more difficult when you are struggling over each
new word.

What I cannot see is why these 2 concepts need to be diametrically opposed
to each other unless one seeks to Reign Supreme in the Collective
Consciousnees, which is a royal waste of time in my book.

"nimue" wrote:
Ericka Kammerer wrote:
Banty wrote:
It all sounds so nice and good to teach some kids by whole word,
some by phonics, tailored oh-so beautifully to the individual kid.
But having gone through this with my son, I saw that he was confused
by the two approaches being applied to him. He's a concrete-minded
kid. They want him to just look at the word, peering at this part
and that in no particular order, then when, given no formula, he
gets too frustrated with that they teach some phonics, but then he's
to read with this other kid who hasn't a clue about sounds and
letters...

I think this usually works best when kids with similar
needs are grouped so that instruction can be tailored to them.

What the **** happened to jigsawing, group kids of different skill levels
together so that the stronger kids could model for and help the weaker ones?

That doesn't contradict "differentiated instruction". What they are
all being taught is related. The more advanced kids may be taught
more advanced concepts or be subject to higher expectations, but they
are still there to model for and assist less advanced kids.

When my kids were in first grade, I think there were something
like 7-8 different reading groups so that instruction could be
tailored to their needs more precisely. It seemed to work
quite well.

I remember that -- tracking!

Tracking is when they separate those groups into different classes
that do not interact (and possibly even different schools, like a
school for the gifted and one for the mentally retarded). That the
separation wasn't always based on academic needs is summarized by the
connotations of the other word used for such an approach:
"segregation"

(And kids who were way out of bounds could go
work in reading groups in another grade.)

Does anyone think that any of these methods turned bottom-track kids into
top-trackers?

The purpose of "tracking" was specifically NOT to try to turn kids
from one track into qualifying for another; once in a track, you
stayed there for the long term. The purpose of "inclusion" (which is
what I think you mean by "jigsawing" is to as much as possible allow
kids to work at whatever pace they are capable of at the moment
*without* any assumptions about the long-term.

Why do we think that everyone can be a scholar, if we just teach them in the right way?

We don't. Put public education isn't about making "scholars", but
rather about making "educated citizens", something our society DOES
presume is possible for everyone.

lojbab

"nimue" wrote in message
...
Stephanie wrote:
"nimue" wrote in message
...
Stephanie wrote:
"nimue" wrote in message
...
toto wrote:
On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:05:11 -0400, "nimue"
wrote:

One weakness in the system that comes to my mind is the ...
preference of the teacher! I wish all learning could be aimed at
the needs of the children.

How do you propose to do that in a class of 30 students?

It's called differentiating learning

It's called differentiated instruction and the NYC school system is
hot for
it right now -- that and using data to help differentiate
instruction.

and it is done all the time in
elementary school classrooms. It's not always easy, but it is
being done.

http://members.shaw.ca/priscillather...entiating.html

1. Differentiating the Content/Topic

Content can be described as the knowledge, skills and attitudes we
want children to learn. Differentiating content requires that
students are pre-tested so the teacher can identify the students
who do not require direct instruction. Students demonstrating
understanding of the concept can skip the instruction step and
proceed to apply the concepts to the task of solving a problem.
This strategy is often referred to as compacting the curriculum.
Another way to differentiate content is simply to permit the apt
student to accelerate their rate of progress. They can work ahead
independently on some projects, i.e. they cover the content faster
than their peers.

2. Differentiating the Process/Activities

Differentiating the processes means varying learning activities or
strategies to provide appropriate methods for students to explore
the concepts. It is important to give students alternative paths
to manipulate the ideas embedded within the concept. For example
students may use graphic organizers, maps, diagrams or charts to
display their comprehension of concepts covered. Varying the
complexity of the graphic organizer can very effectively
facilitate differing levels of cognitive processing for students
of differing ability.

3. Differentiating the Product

Differentiating the product means varying the complexity of the
product (http://www.rogertaylor.com/reference/Product-Grid.pdf)
that students create to demonstrate mastery of the concepts.
Students working below grade level may have reduced performance
expectations, while students above grade level may be asked to
produce work that requires more complex or more advanced thinking.
There are many sources of alternative product ideas available to
teachers. However sometimes it is motivating for students to be
offered choice of product.

4. Diffferentiating By Manipulating The Environment or Through
Accommodating Individual Learning Styles

There has been a great deal of work on learning styles over the
last 2 decades. Dunn and Dunn (http://www.learningstyles.net/)
focused on manipulating the school environment at about the same
time as Joseph Renzulli recommended varying teaching strategies.
Howard Gardner identified individual talents or aptitudes in his
Multiple Intelligences theories. Based on the works of Jung, the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
(http://partners.mce.be/wbt/mbti/personal.htm) and Kersley's
Temperament Sorter focused on understanding how people's
personality affects the way they interact personally, and how this
affects the way individuals respond to each other within the
learning environment. The work of David Kolb and Anthony Gregorc's
Type Delineator follows a similar but more simplified approach.

--
nimue

"Let your freak-flag fly, and if someone doesn't get you, move on."
Drew Barrymore



It sure as heck is not being done in Fairfax VT. At least not
effectively.

Differentiated instruction takes nearly everything we learned about
cooperative learning and tosses it. No more jigsawing! Nope, we are
grouping by ability now and giving different assignments to different
groups
in the same classroom.




I don't know what cooperative learning or jigsawing are. I am not a
classroom educator.

I have to wonder that if they were working they would not be being
abandoned. Maybe that is simplistic.

It is. Every few years a new style of educating comes along that is
supposed to level the playing field and work for everyone. After a bit of
time, it is always abandoned and the new savior is adapted -- it's
ridiculous.

Sometimes things fail to work
because the principles were not properly applied.

Well, you've never taught, have you?


Well certainly not in a classroom! I did not mean what I said specifically
as it relates to education. What I meant was, given that I don't know what
the cause of the perceived failure was of the former instructional methods
that you mentioned, there are two possibilities
- it was a failure of a mthod
- the method was incorrectly applied

while most folks will automatically assume the problem was with the method.
As I mentioned, before you filled me in, I did not know which was the case.




I have always wondered about our grouping by age anyway.

None of the strategies I mentioned (indeed, none I ever heard of)
addresses
the appropriateness of grouping by age. It just isn't mentioned.




Any idea why? Sounds like you are a professional educator so you would know.
The overhead of transitioning from our current system, as well as a great
number of issues, would prevent a transition. But I don't understand why it
never even comes up as a possibility.

I went to a private school as a kid. This is exactly what they did. Now
granted, it was a SMALL school. But the grades were together for much of the
time, and the groupings were done per subject. Socialization was a mixed
bag, within certain subgroupings. We 1st graders did not hang out with the
12th graders for example except when the 12th graders were doing some act of
service for us. But the k-3, I think, were mixed. We learned a lot FROM our
elders, and our elders learned responsibility and caring for the younger. It
was kinda neat as far as my eutopian memory servers.



Why would
you not be working with people who are working on the same level as
you are?

You do -- as long as they are in your age group. Anyway, you do NOW and
you
did years ago, but there has been a long time in between during which
"tracking" was thought to be a dirty, even racist word and concept.



But I dont see why. What is a kid to do who's level does not exist in his
classroom?

Why do you have to be with the same people in reading as
your are in math or free play?

Huh?


Why do we group by age AT ALL. Why cant kids be in different groups for
different subjects/ activities/ purposes?

In article vJEyi.3427$6h3.2486@trndny05, Stephanie says...


"Banty" wrote in message
...
In article , nimue says...

Anne Rogers wrote:
Yeah -- these are the kids who would have had reading problems
regardless of which approach was used -- and phonics still benefits
these kids more than whole language.

I think you're saying exactly what I intended to say, it really does
seem to give the best overall results for group teaching at
kindergarten age. I think a lot of children without even being taught
it are going to learn a proportion of their vocabulary by word
recognition - after
all, a good number of children can recognise their own names before
learning any phonics. My son kind of does half and half, he knows the
majority of the sounds, but a lot of the stuff he attempts to read is
single words, with some kind of context and he'll sound out the first
syllable then guess at the word from the context.

Ouch -- that's not good. I see kids in high school doing that and it
really
messes with their reading comp. Guessing a word is very different from
knowing a word. Guessing is NOT recognizing -- it's guessing. Granted,
these are kids with reading problems anyway, so perhaps someone like your
son, who doesn't have reading problems, might be able to use that method.

My son, who is actually pretty bright, *did* to exactly that a lot!
Because,
confronted with a new word, and a whole word learning background, what
else is
one supposed to do?? It's a reasonable way to interpret what the teacher
is
telling him to do.

I
guess reading may evolve into that -- after all, none of us is sounding
out
the words we are reading anymore -- we just recognize them. You can't get
to whole language without phonics, however, so it's pointless to teach
something (whole language) that just evolves out of something else
(phonics)
naturally. I guess it's kind of like driving to a friends new home. The
first time you will need directions, need to have the way broken down and
made clear. Later, you can just drive there -- but you needed those
directions first.


'Xactly.

Banty


Phonics is a stepping stone. A method of what to do on your way to having a
large array of words at your quick disposal and when you come across of
somethign new. Even I still sound out words when reading scientific and
medical stuff.

They don't seem diametrically opposed to me, the way the debate seems to
have gone in the last 20 or so years that I have been passingly aware of it.
I have seen phonics taught so rigidly that absolutely no connection is made
from one sound to the next, and the young reader has no idea of anything but
the sound that they are current;y working on. And I have seen see-say-learn
taught so rigidly that a new reader had no idea how to decode a new word to
examine whether or not it exists in their vocabulary. Every new word needed
external help whether or not it was already part of their oral repetiore.

In the course of preparing for homeschooling, I stumbled across
http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/index.htm. While I am not completely certain
that I subsribe to the entire philosophy (mostly because I have not had time
to read all of it), I have found the material I have used very interesting.
In the book "What Your First Grader Needs To Know" the author speaks of the
need for *both* decoding skills for reading new words (phonics) AND a richer
exposure to language in many forms and within many contexts. I think this
has happened somewhat accidentally with my son through casual reference to
phonics principles in the even earlier years as well as a ton of reading TO.
I think the reading TO a child is fantastic way to foster word recognition
as they will internalize certain words that they see over and over without
any knowledge that they are doing so. But also, you can talk about other
aspects of language and literature as well as achieve story and subject
comprehension that becomes more difficult when you are struggling over each
new word.

What I cannot see is why these 2 concepts need to be diametrically opposed
to each other unless one seeks to Reign Supreme in the Collective
Consciousnees, which is a royal waste of time in my book.


I don't think they are opposed either. What's iconoclastic is that I'm really
not so sure that they're actually different learning styles! I suspect strongly
that kids with good memories/visual skills who internalize phonically decoded
words fast are thought to be wold word learners. And furthermore that kids
coming to school with some words already recognized (from early home reading)
presents to a teacher, who has all this training on whole word vs. phonics
reading styles, "evidence" that a lot of kids are whole word learners.

I also suspect that kids who are doing well without phonics (note: the
statement is made that the kids having difficulties are the ones who 'need
phonics') have internalized some phonics already, little Suzy having noted
already that "S" in her name and the stop signs in her neighborhood both start
with "S" and both require the same sound at the beginning.

I had two piano teachers who thought I was a music learner "by ear". Actually
not. It was that I found sight reading of music very difficult, and being
memory-loaded, quickly memorized music rather than have to sight read it again.
I didn't "sit down to memorize" as most other kids had to do to prepare for
recital - it just was in my memory after playing from the sheet music maybe
twice or three times. But, although I could pick out simple tunes "by ear" with
some trial and error, I certainly needed to decode written music to do much more
than that, painful as it was. But the piano teachers weren't geared to expect
to see someone memorizing quickly first, to master music. So they thought I was
some kind of learn-by-ear person.

Banty

"nimue" wrote in message
...
Ericka Kammerer wrote:
Banty wrote:

It all sounds so nice and good to teach some kids by whole word,
some by phonics, tailored oh-so beautifully to the individual kid.
But having gone through this with my son, I saw that he was confused
by the two approaches being applied to him. He's a concrete-minded
kid. They want him to just look at the word, peering at this part
and that in no particular order, then when, given no formula, he
gets too frustrated with that they teach some phonics, but then he's
to read with this other kid who hasn't a clue about sounds and
letters...

I think this usually works best when kids with similar
needs are grouped so that instruction can be tailored to them.

What the **** happened to jigsawing, group kids of different skill levels
together so that the stronger kids could model for and help the weaker
ones?


I will grant that I have never seen this work *well* in action. What I have
seen is that the stronger kids wind up losing out on any meaningful learning
experience of their own in order to be responsible for another.



That was all the rage until about 5 minutes ago. I wonder how long
diffentiated instruction will last.



Where do you live? I am trying to figure if I am seeing an upcoming trend or
an outgoing one? It seems to be alive and well here!

When my kids were in first grade, I think there were something
like 7-8 different reading groups so that instruction could be
tailored to their needs more precisely. It seemed to work
quite well.

I remember that -- tracking! It's back. It was an evil term for years
and
now it has returned. That is how I was taught in elementary school and it
worked well for me -- I was in the highest track, so of course it did. I
was already really good at reading. The question is, how well did it work
for the others? I have no idea.

(And kids who were way out of bounds could go
work in reading groups in another grade.)

Does anyone think that any of these methods turned bottom-track kids into
top-trackers? Really? Nothing, and I mean nothing, in this world will
make
me a professional baseball player. I might be better than I am now, but I
will never be good. Why do we think that everyone can be a scholar, if we
just teach them in the right way?



You hit the nail right on the head, as far as I am concerned, about what the
National debate on education ought to look like. We have to first determine
what our set of goals is / should be. We should have a set of goals that
involves providing an education that helps each student meet *their*
potential. And help them love the process of striving to make goals and
progress and learn. As families, communities, and a country, we should be
pleased and proud when smarty-pants, Jane gets into Harvard and when
learning disabled Sally gets into Community College based on how their
progress was made, not that Harvard is "better" than Community College. I
think we have some societal issues in collective mindset that prevents us
from crafting an appropriate goal for education. And if your goal is wrong,
then your outome.,, well isnt going to meet what I would call a right goal.


Not everyone is a scholar and many of
those who aren't still do quite well. I remember my bottom-tracked
neighbor
never did well in school, but his boat maintenance business has made him
quite comfortable indeed. I am sure he makes a lot more than I do.

Best wishes,
Ericka

--
nimue

"Let your freak-flag fly, and if someone doesn't get you, move on."
Drew Barrymore

Banty wrote:
In article , Ericka
Kammerer says...

nimue wrote:
Anne Rogers wrote:
Yeah -- these are the kids who would have had reading problems
regardless of which approach was used -- and phonics still
benefits these kids more than whole language.
I think you're saying exactly what I intended to say, it really
does seem to give the best overall results for group teaching at
kindergarten age. I think a lot of children without even being
taught it are going to learn a proportion of their vocabulary by
word recognition - after
all, a good number of children can recognise their own names before
learning any phonics. My son kind of does half and half, he knows
the majority of the sounds, but a lot of the stuff he attempts to
read is single words, with some kind of context and he'll sound
out the first syllable then guess at the word from the context.

Ouch -- that's not good. I see kids in high school doing that and
it really messes with their reading comp.

But why would one assume that just because a preschooler
does this that it will be characteristic of their reading once
they're high schoolers? People do different things at different
stages.

Guessing a word is very different from
knowing a word. Guessing is NOT recognizing -- it's guessing.
Granted, these are kids with reading problems anyway,

Exactly. It's not surprising that they have adapted
long term maladaptive strategies as a result of their problems,
not necessarily because initial pre-reading experiences *caused*
their problems.

But it's clear to see why this maladaptive approach comes about. If
a teaching technique is leading a fair number of kids to use
maladaptive approaches, there's something wrong with it, no?


so perhaps someone like your
son, who doesn't have reading problems, might be able to use that
method. I guess reading may evolve into that -- after all, none of
us is sounding out the words we are reading anymore -- we just
recognize them. You can't get to whole language without phonics,
however, so it's pointless to teach something (whole language) that
just evolves out of something else (phonics) naturally.

But the point is that it *doesn't* evolve that way for all kids.
Some kids, probably those who are more visual and have excellent
memories, learn the other way around. Phonics can actually confuse
them because they're already quite proficient at reading and there
are so many exceptions to the phonics rules. At some point, they'll
either make some generalizations themselves or learn some phonics
rules as a way of dealing with novel words, but will still basically
learn to read via whole word. And frankly, there's not much you
can do to stop these kids short of refusing to read to them so that
they can't make the connections between the spoken and printed words.

There's no need to go and stop kids who are picking things up more
quickly by recognition.


I guess it's kind of like driving to a friends new home. The
first time you will need directions, need to have the way broken
down and made clear. Later, you can just drive there -- but you
needed those directions first.

But it just doesn't work that way for everyone in
reading.

Probably not. But to me the question is - which way to start?

And I also think kids who are just more memory-loaded or have more
exposure to looking at words from home reading, are taken as
whole-word learners when they're really not. (Say, possibly the early
home reading they emphasize so much nowdays makes kids seem like
whole word learners!) They need those specific directions to get
somewhere. In nimue's example, one might recognize more quickly than
another that the path takes them past how Mom gets to the mall, and
therefore can put the whole map in their mind very quickly and be
able rely on that mental map. But they *still* need those initial
sets of directions. And some way to read a map or get specific
directions to a totally new area.

It really is a fundamental problem with whole word - how to learn by
recognition the unfamiliar. That things are sooner or later
recognized does not mean that's how they were learned, or how the
next thing should be learned.

Banty

Brilliant, Banty. Brilliant. It's actually common sense, but that seems to
be missing from education. I am impressed with your insights, your
conclusions and your way of arriving at them.

--
nimue

"Let your freak-flag fly, and if someone doesn't get you, move on."
Drew Barrymore

"Banty" wrote in message
...
In article , Ericka Kammerer
says...

Banty wrote:

It all sounds so nice and good to teach some kids by whole word, some by
phonics, tailored oh-so beautifully to the individual kid. But having
gone
through this with my son, I saw that he was confused by the two
approaches being
applied to him. He's a concrete-minded kid. They want him to just look
at the
word, peering at this part and that in no particular order, then when,
given no
formula, he gets too frustrated with that they teach some phonics, but
then he's
to read with this other kid who hasn't a clue about sounds and
letters...

I think this usually works best when kids with similar
needs are grouped so that instruction can be tailored to them.
When my kids were in first grade, I think there were something
like 7-8 different reading groups so that instruction could be
tailored to their needs more precisely. It seemed to work
quite well. (And kids who were way out of bounds could go
work in reading groups in another grade.)


Again, fine and good, except how to manage all that. My son's classes
were
divided into three groups, and in first and second grade he was in the
bottom
group getting pull-out help; after the second he was in the middle group.
They
didn't divide it any more finely than that, and it was by overall ability,
not
learning style.



I don't know (notice I said I dont know vs I dont think, I am still working
on this tought) that I think learning style grouping makes sense. I think
exposure to activities that speak to all learning styles is best since I
don't believe that any person is pegged into owning one or two learning
styles. I think which is the dominant learning style can even depend on the
material being studied. I have no studies to back this up, just casual
observation of a small set. So if you want to disagree with me, I wont argue
too hard.


And one thing I noted was that they seemed to go to whole word as the
front up
approach, which makes absolutely no sense to me. How does a kid apply
Toto's
list, for example, of looking at beginning letter, ending letter, seeing
if a
known word is present within the new word, etc., if they've just started
and
already expected to recognize words??



It always seemed lacking in any guidelines to decoding new words which draw
a complete blanks. I am glad it is not just me.


That kids know, for example, what their name looks like and recognize
"Coca-Cola", for instance, DOES NOT mean that therefore they're whole word
learners and are all set to learn a whole first grade vocabulary that way.
It
only means a word has been in front of them a lot. We know roads have
white
lines on either side, a yellow double in the middle. That does NOT mean
highway
designers learn their engineering by being shown a progression of
pictures - it
only means what's in front of people a lot is familiar. I see this
brought up
time and time again - that kids come in recognizing certain words, as
evidence
that they're "whole word learners". I just don't think it's true.
Indeed, in
the course of learning by phonics, eventually common words become
recognizable,
and the word looks familiar - but that does not mean that the best way to
attack
an unfamiliar word is by trying to recognize it! If anything, phonics
should be
the front up approach, with more emphasis on word-recognition as a
strategy for
kids that are doing that more quickly.



I would change that a tad. The ultimate goal of reading is comprehension and
understanding of the whole wide world of language. But that is not the sole
goal of reading instruction. You cannot leave out the decoding skills. But I
don't beleive it is wise either to ignore the utimate goal of comprehions. I
don't suggest that that is what you mean to do. But I just want to be Mrs
Anal Retentive Clear as a Bell. Comprehenstion might come in the form of
combing self-reading to very early decoders who are spending so much effort
on the decoding that they miss the point with read to. So they read a litte,
you go back and re-read out loud to them. Continue this approach until their
decoding skills have exposed them to sight words.

There are sight word activities and games that can be played which help
increase the sight word vocabulary that don't hurt.

From my very limited experience (and I dont think anyone would argue to
far), either teaching method is greatly hampered by a failure to read aloud
at all ages.


I just don't have faith from what I've seen in the whole "whole word -
phonics
combined" learning style philosophy that's taken hold.



I dont know about whole word philosophy. Sight word reading without any
decoding instruction never has made any sense to me, as I mentioned. But the
phonics advocates of the past decades did something that I think lead to the
whole language arrival. They seemed to stop their reading concern at being
able to say words in a row. If I could look at S T O P and could sound out
stop then I had read. But if I had not the first clue what I had read, that
was not the concern of phonics. And really, it isn't. That is where I see a
happy marriage between whole language (as I understand it) and phonics.


Not that it's applied
well in ordinary classrooms; not even that it's actually really well
studied and
understood, frankly. Partly because of the somewhat circular rationale I
hear
supporting whole word.

This is like how my faith in current educational teaching of math is
broken,
since there's a philosophy that math learning is verbally based floating
about.
It might even be another example of what's devised by an education
profession
that has relatively few analytical people.

Banty

Bob LeChevalier wrote:
"nimue" wrote:
Ericka Kammerer wrote:
Banty wrote:
It all sounds so nice and good to teach some kids by whole word,
some by phonics, tailored oh-so beautifully to the individual kid.
But having gone through this with my son, I saw that he was
confused by the two approaches being applied to him. He's a
concrete-minded kid. They want him to just look at the word,
peering at this part and that in no particular order, then when,
given no formula, he gets too frustrated with that they teach some
phonics, but then he's to read with this other kid who hasn't a
clue about sounds and letters...

I think this usually works best when kids with similar
needs are grouped so that instruction can be tailored to them.

What the **** happened to jigsawing, group kids of different skill
levels
together so that the stronger kids could model for and help the
weaker ones?

That doesn't contradict "differentiated instruction". What they are
all being taught is related. The more advanced kids may be taught
more advanced concepts or be subject to higher expectations, but they
are still there to model for and assist less advanced kids.

They aren't working together. Sure, they are in the same classroom, but the
element of cooperative learning has been removed. It's exactly the way it
used to be when I was young -- fast-trackers work with fast-trackers,
slow-trackers with slow-trackers, and so on, in the same room. I NEVER
worked with slow-trackers, even though they were in the same room that I was
in.

When my kids were in first grade, I think there were something
like 7-8 different reading groups so that instruction could be
tailored to their needs more precisely. It seemed to work
quite well.

I remember that -- tracking!

Tracking is when they separate those groups into different classes
that do not interact (and possibly even different schools, like a
school for the gifted and one for the mentally retarded).

No, you can track within a room. It was done at my elementary school.

That the
separation wasn't always based on academic needs is summarized by the
connotations of the other word used for such an approach:
"segregation"

No, the separation was based on academic ability and achievement. However,
it did often turn into segregation.

(And kids who were way out of bounds could go
work in reading groups in another grade.)

Does anyone think that any of these methods turned bottom-track kids
into top-trackers?

The purpose of "tracking" was specifically NOT to try to turn kids
from one track into qualifying for another; once in a track, you
stayed there for the long term.

You could move up or down a track at my elementary school.

The purpose of "inclusion" (which is
what I think you mean by "jigsawing"

It's not. Jigsawing is when you put students at different ability levels in
the same cooperative learning group, a group that generally numbers no more
than four students.

is to as much as possible allow
kids to work at whatever pace they are capable of at the moment
*without* any assumptions about the long-term.

Inclusion occurs when LD kids are mainstreamed, when they are no longer in
self-contained classes. That is different from jigsawing.

Why do we think that everyone can be a scholar, if we just teach
them in the right way?

We don't. Put public education isn't about making "scholars", but
rather about making "educated citizens", something our society DOES
presume is possible for everyone.

Sure -- at different levels. However, schools are penalized for not making
every student a scholar.

lojbab

--
nimue

"Let your freak-flag fly, and if someone doesn't get you, move on."
Drew Barrymore

"Banty" wrote in message
...
In article vJEyi.3427$6h3.2486@trndny05, Stephanie says...


"Banty" wrote in message
...
In article , nimue says...

Anne Rogers wrote:
Yeah -- these are the kids who would have had reading problems
regardless of which approach was used -- and phonics still benefits
these kids more than whole language.

I think you're saying exactly what I intended to say, it really does
seem to give the best overall results for group teaching at
kindergarten age. I think a lot of children without even being taught
it are going to learn a proportion of their vocabulary by word
recognition - after
all, a good number of children can recognise their own names before
learning any phonics. My son kind of does half and half, he knows the
majority of the sounds, but a lot of the stuff he attempts to read is
single words, with some kind of context and he'll sound out the first
syllable then guess at the word from the context.

Ouch -- that's not good. I see kids in high school doing that and it
really
messes with their reading comp. Guessing a word is very different from
knowing a word. Guessing is NOT recognizing -- it's guessing. Granted,
these are kids with reading problems anyway, so perhaps someone like
your
son, who doesn't have reading problems, might be able to use that
method.

My son, who is actually pretty bright, *did* to exactly that a lot!
Because,
confronted with a new word, and a whole word learning background, what
else is
one supposed to do?? It's a reasonable way to interpret what the
teacher
is
telling him to do.

I
guess reading may evolve into that -- after all, none of us is sounding
out
the words we are reading anymore -- we just recognize them. You can't
get
to whole language without phonics, however, so it's pointless to teach
something (whole language) that just evolves out of something else
(phonics)
naturally. I guess it's kind of like driving to a friends new home.
The
first time you will need directions, need to have the way broken down
and
made clear. Later, you can just drive there -- but you needed those
directions first.


'Xactly.

Banty


Phonics is a stepping stone. A method of what to do on your way to having
a
large array of words at your quick disposal and when you come across of
somethign new. Even I still sound out words when reading scientific and
medical stuff.

They don't seem diametrically opposed to me, the way the debate seems to
have gone in the last 20 or so years that I have been passingly aware of
it.
I have seen phonics taught so rigidly that absolutely no connection is
made
from one sound to the next, and the young reader has no idea of anything
but
the sound that they are current;y working on. And I have seen
see-say-learn
taught so rigidly that a new reader had no idea how to decode a new word
to
examine whether or not it exists in their vocabulary. Every new word
needed
external help whether or not it was already part of their oral repetiore.

In the course of preparing for homeschooling, I stumbled across
http://www.coreknowledge.org/CK/index.htm. While I am not completely
certain
that I subsribe to the entire philosophy (mostly because I have not had
time
to read all of it), I have found the material I have used very
interesting.
In the book "What Your First Grader Needs To Know" the author speaks of
the
need for *both* decoding skills for reading new words (phonics) AND a
richer
exposure to language in many forms and within many contexts. I think this
has happened somewhat accidentally with my son through casual reference to
phonics principles in the even earlier years as well as a ton of reading
TO.
I think the reading TO a child is fantastic way to foster word recognition
as they will internalize certain words that they see over and over without
any knowledge that they are doing so. But also, you can talk about other
aspects of language and literature as well as achieve story and subject
comprehension that becomes more difficult when you are struggling over
each
new word.

What I cannot see is why these 2 concepts need to be diametrically opposed
to each other unless one seeks to Reign Supreme in the Collective
Consciousnees, which is a royal waste of time in my book.


I don't think they are opposed either. What's iconoclastic is that I'm
really
not so sure that they're actually different learning styles!



Me neither.


I suspect strongly
that kids with good memories/visual skills who internalize phonically
decoded
words fast are thought to be wold word learners.



Combined with some just got hammered so often that their letter components
may have come later but the word was not really "read." I cant make that
sentence make any more sense, so I will try an example. My son could "read"
stop signs for a long, long time. Then he could read the word stop anywhere
he saw it. It is a teeny tiny word, learned when he was teeny tiny himself.
We never sounded out ST O P. We just pointed and said stop and he laughed.
So is he a whole word learned since he learned that ONE word that way? (Or
twenty names for various trucks, cars whatever is of interest). Not at all.


And furthermore that kids
coming to school with some words already recognized (from early home
reading)
presents to a teacher, who has all this training on whole word vs. phonics
reading styles, "evidence" that a lot of kids are whole word learners.

I also suspect that kids who are doing well without phonics (note: the
statement is made that the kids having difficulties are the ones who 'need
phonics') have internalized some phonics already, little Suzy having noted
already that "S" in her name and the stop signs in her neighborhood both
start
with "S" and both require the same sound at the beginning.

I had two piano teachers who thought I was a music learner "by ear".
Actually
not. It was that I found sight reading of music very difficult, and being
memory-loaded, quickly memorized music rather than have to sight read it
again.
I didn't "sit down to memorize" as most other kids had to do to prepare
for
recital - it just was in my memory after playing from the sheet music
maybe
twice or three times. But, although I could pick out simple tunes "by ear"
with
some trial and error, I certainly needed to decode written music to do
much more
than that, painful as it was. But the piano teachers weren't geared to
expect
to see someone memorizing quickly first, to master music. So they thought
I was
some kind of learn-by-ear person.

Banty


I think I agree with you.