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We had SSR in my elementary school back in the 70s. It was my favorite time of day because I loved reading! If you didn't have your own book, the teacher always had a shelf of paperbacks to pick from, and the school had a small library too. Bringing a book from home was never a requirement.
One of the things that France has done for the past hundred years to ensure that all children become strong readers is that they have universal early childhood education beginning at age two. This is not daycare, but schooling. This year for the first time, the mandatory age of attendance has dropped from 6 to 3, even though nearly 95% of all 3-year-olds were already attending. What this does is mitigate the effects of poverty and family issues by providing all children the opportunity to learn to become a social being in a stable and reliable environment. School funding there is not based on local property taxes, so the schools in poor areas serving low-income children are funded the same as schools in all the other areas. This is vastly different than school funding in the United States, where the students at my school attend in a building with deteriorating conditions and no new books in some subjects for nearly two decades. France values all its children and serves them all the way every child should be served.
Because of their early schooling, children are engaged in early literacy activities that include the arts and movement. Here is a fascinating video on how they teach writing. Handwriting in France
Eh, French schools now suffer the same problems that many of our inner city schools suffer. There have been many programs aimed at the educational inequality with immigrant students in the Paris suburbs and in Marseilles. They have the same problems, crime, ineffective and uneducated parents, family dysfunction. I swear, some of those schools looked just like the schools in the Bronx.
The most important factor in my opinion (speaking as someone who taught her own kids to read) is reading TO children, every day. The more words they hear, and the more advanced the vocabulary and complex the sentence structure, the better. They need to hear books that are far more interesting than what they can manage on their own in first grade or second grade, and stories that can't be finished in five or ten minutes of reading. You're not going to get fluency and a love of reading out of kids if you don't first put it in.
Another thing I've noticed is that the current crop of teachers, educated in the "no phonics" period, have no idea how to teach phonics or decoding and only the faintest idea themselves now the phonetic system works. Some have no idea how to teach reading at all. The hardest thing about reversing the trend is that teachers now are not equipped with the skills and materials needed to provide a structured approach to the mechanics of reading and writing.
I taught reading and language arts, and did team teaching stints with teachers in other disciplines who consistently communicated things like, "Don't worry, I won't be grading for spelling or grammar," to the students.
A big favorite of mine was the math teacher who would misspell words on handouts, on the board, in notes, etc., whose disclaimer was that she shouldn't be expected to spell, because "I teach math, not English."
Umm...I teach English, not math, but I can still count change. Tell time. Write basic equations.
We had SSR in my elementary school back in the 70s. It was my favorite time of day because I loved reading! If you didn't have your own book, the teacher always had a shelf of paperbacks to pick from, and the school had a small library too. Bringing a book from home was never a requirement.
Same where my kids attended back in the 90s. And the program is still going strong today. I liked that it wasn’t just a reading time for the kids. Everyone from the teachers to the principal to the cafeteria workers participated. The point wasn’t just to add in some extra reading for the kids, it was to model that reading was a lifelong pleasure and worthy of ones time.
Notes, emails, school newsletter, PTA newsletter. No avail.
It didn't help that it was a project for one of the VPs to show he could implement a program in order to be given his own school, but that was side issue.
That's strange. Those families didn't have children's books of any kind at home? Are they just abandoning their kids to the internet, for reading material and entertainment (youtube, etc.)?
That I did. For effect I included your quote with that below.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
That's strange. Those families didn't have children's books of any kind at home? Are they just abandoning their kids to the internet, for reading material and entertainment (youtube, etc.)?
Not strange at all in a lot of places and, as I mentioned, it cuts across all income and education levels (my former system touts itself as the wealthiest and best educated majority Black jurisdiction in the US).
Some of your cognitive dissonance might be because I think you're thinking elementary and I was high school. Although that doesn't change the on the ground reality.
No, that's not what phonics is. "Phonics" as a discipline doesn't exist in European languages that are pronounced as they are spelled. It's not needed in those languages. English famously is not pronounced as it is spelled, so a system for teaching how to read and pronounce the elements that make up a word, and how to recognize patterns in those elements, is essential.
French has somewhat the same issues, having silent letters, entire silent syllables, consonants that are pronounced differently in different situations or that are silent in some situations. I don't know how the initial stage of reading (and spelling) is taught in France.
Phonics isn't a repackaging of anything; it's a separate discipline from the mere teaching of individual letters. It was first devised in the 16th Century, and has been used in the US and elsewhere since the early 20th Century.
...Phonics is a method for teaching reading and writing of the English language by developing learners' phonemic awareness—the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate phonemes—in order to teach the correspondence between these sounds and the spelling patterns (graphemes) that represent them.
The goal of phonics is to enable beginning readers to decode new written words by sounding them out, or, in phonics terms, blending the sound-spelling patterns. ...
The basic principles of phonics were first presented by John Hart[SIZE=2][1][/SIZE] in 1570. Since the turn of the 20th century, phonics has been widely used in primary education and in teaching literacy throughout the English-speaking world. ...
In other words, sounding out words based on the letters used to spell them. What I said previously.
Yes, vowels (and occasionally consonants) have different sounds depending on where they are in a word, or the letters preceding or following them. And yes, there are times when you have to rely on context to determine which of more than one words is actually meant ("Bow" vs. "Bow" - is it part of a ship, a gesture of respect, or something used in playing a stringed instrument? The chance of actual confusion by someone who already has these words in their spoken English vocabulary is slight).
All this stuff is taught in traditional reading instruction, which no one ever called "phonics" (except some academics) until the bizarre and largely discredited "whole language" approach came out and a name had to be used to describe what anyone who learned to read before about 1970 simply called "teaching kids how to read".
The whole idea that English, a language with an alphabet, whose letters represent sounds, and thus allows you to read words you've never seen before, should be taught like Chinese, by degrading alphabetic words to the status of pictograms, is something that could only have been dreamed up by academics and promoted by the educational materials industry.
The problem with that industry is that almost every part of elementary education has well established methods that have worked well for the vast majority of children since the late 1800s and don't need to be changed. Teaching kids arithmetic or reading or writing requires only simple inexpensive materials, all of which are in the public domain. The problem with that is that there's no profit to be made. So the Education Industry has to dream up "new and improved" stuff constantly, none of which works as well as the old stuff it supposedly replaces. But it makes tons of money for the Industry and the Consultants who sell it to the school districts, who then truck all this crap out to the schools where the teachers try to figure out where they can stash this year's pile of useless material because all the storage space is already taken up with the last four years' worth of useless material that this year's crap supposedly obsoletes.
I should make clear that nothing I've written here relates to that small fraction of children who have genuine learning disabilities or other disabilities, for whom special strategies will be required. Don't force all children to try to learn the same way as the special needs kids. Is the next thing that if one kid in the classroom has a wheelchair, all the kids have to use wheelchairs?
That I did. For effect I included your quote with that below.
Not strange at all in a lot of places and, as I mentioned, it cuts across all income and education levels (my former system touts itself as the wealthiest and best educated majority Black jurisdiction in the US).
Some of your cognitive dissonance might be because I think you're thinking elementary and I was high school. Although that doesn't change the on the ground reality.
Yeah, I caught that in your earlier post. This is the part I'm struggling to get my mind around.
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