Is it true they haven't been teaching phonics in school? I've heard kids are trying to learn how to read by recognizing words and sentences instead of learning the basic structures and rules of letter combinations and words. A quick search: Comprehension Hypothesis vs Skill-Building Hypothesis "Subconsciously absorb" ??? This is bullshit. You need to learn the rules of the alphabet, groups of letters, words, and sentences before you can begin to understand what is being read. You need to build a foundation first. btw, have they stopped teaching grammer too?
Pardon? Where have you been for the past 30 years? essentially, the whole word method came in over 30 years ago, partly as a trendy method. It has been wholly discredited since, and indeed, older teachers like my mother, (who started teaching in the early 70's) never stopped using phonics to teach children how to read. Of course, in typical fashion, someone has come up with "Synthetic phonics", which is just old fashioned phonics with bells and whistles added. This is in the UK, no idea about USA.
Hell. I mostly taught myself to read well before anybody tought me. Seeing my older family members make words manifest and later scry meaning out of the twisted squiggles was an arcane magic to me. It was a power I just had to posess. Thinking back, I think I actually did use something like homecooked phonics. It worked pretty damn well, I must say.
Out of grammer school and never really took an interest in teaching methods until now. My daughter is entering kindergarden next year. (Also, my mother's not a teacher). Wasn't a law just passed in the UK that phonics must be used in all schools? Anyways, this is all nnew to me. I'm sure I'll be shocked when I find out all that's going on (or not going on) in primary schools today.
The phonics vs. "whole language" debate is still going on to some extent in Australia. As far as I can see, there's little point in studying Shakespeare before you know which letters make which sounds.
Looks like it did work for you. Now all you need to do is learn to spell. Well, as for teaching small children to read, many of htem can learn when they are 4 years old. And i believe that some variety of phonics, whereby you pronounce the alphabet out, learn what noises the letters make, then put them together into words (The cat sat on the mat) is the best way to go for most children. Obviously, some will be different. Part of the whole stushie in education as far as I can see was simply due to proponents of different schools taking too much of an approach that their way was THE BEST WAY IN THE WORLD EVER!; never mind that each child is an individual, and some children willl learn better when taught in different ways from others. Basically, like everything else, if you want your child to get a good education, check the school, and what work they bring home, etc etc.
