If you have a 3-4 year old: Bob Books
Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
301–310 of 524 posts
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#302Ironically a story about reading is provided as a series of podcasts. At least there are transcripts, but the info density is extremely low.
Let that be a warning to anyone who gets excited about this podcast! Wow it stinks. It's like the creators were trying to replicate a Dragonball series of cliffhangers without any substance. In that way it is good. A tremendous demonstration of how the tiniest bit of information (Many kids benefit from phonics) can be stretched into hours and hours and hours of content through some emotional manipulation.
A good application for a Transformer system like GPT to listen to the podcasts and generate the single sentence inside.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#303As someone who's both worked as a teacher and as a software engineer, my feeling is that what happened in reading education is roughly what engineers' jobs would be forced by their CTOs to use software methodologies and languages that came from their university professors who've never really spend much time (at least not in well over a decade if at all) doing actual salaried software development where code had to be…
My wife mixed reading with spelling, starting when each boy was four. She'd work on simple letter sounds, then make a list of 'rhyming' words: sat, pat, fat, cat, mat and so on. They would sound out the list, then come up with some more, even some silly ones like dat or jat. Hilarious! for a four-year-old.
So they learned to read without really trying. It would take a few weeks of evening 'spelling time' and that was it.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#304No one is talking about the impact of kids seeing parents read on phones instead kids seeing parents read on books. When kids see a parent reading a book there's no doubt as to what they're doing. They are reading. OTOH, even if a parent is reading the most wholesome text on the most wholesome app, the fact that they are doing it on a phone admits some possibility of confusion in the eyes of the child observing. Ther…
I don't think the kid even has to be confused about what the parent is doing.
If a kid sees a parent on the phone all the time (reading), they want to imitate being on the phone. The fact that the parent is reading is a second level distinction that matters less to young kids, especially when they can more easily imitate "using the phone" by playing games or watching videos.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#305All the teachers I know are pretty irritated by Sold a Story, mostly their criticisms are: - if you just teach phonics you aren't actually helping kids to read (they've tried) because reading is more than just sounds - Sold a Story omits basically any nuance for shock facts I also think it's important to point out that APM Reports isn't an independent journalistic outfit. They accept grants for specific research. In…
Literally no one is suggesting phonics only, that’s just the language decoding step. The problem is that the “whole language” approach has been shown not to work at all, and we regularly see 4th graders who are functionally illiterate. If your teacher friends are mad, maybe it’s because they’re being called out for using a shitty method that’s ruin the lives of poor children.
You've gotta wonder how a nation's schooling standards shift to something like "Whole language" without, say, at least testing the methodologies to see if it results in better or worse outcomes. Seems like no actual validation was done.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
History! Britain got conquered a bunch of times and some of the old words have just stuck around.
My son, not a native English speaker, even taught himself the Chaos poem. It's a good way to learn to appreciate the horrors of the English language.
They are living relics of the ancient past! and we still use them today! English is cool.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I just read the "transcripts". I guess I missed a lot, because I suspect they're not transcripts, but single-sentence summaries. I think presenting content as podcasts is lazy (and rude). To consume podcast content, I have to sit through the whole thing, because I can't skim or skip ahead. Of course, it saves the author's time - it's quicker for them to speak it than to write it; so they're trading their time f…
It's not an exaggeration to say that most episodes of the podcast could be summarized with a single sentence. The proper summary is simply that "Phonics is a vital tool to teach many kids to read."
Thank you! None of the episode summaries says that.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
We were told it was better to let the teachers teach otherwise kids learn bad habits or don’t engage. That being said our eldest went to school at 4 1/2 in Australia and they had to learn 100 words in their first year (phonics), and we were a little worried that it seemed so intense, though she ended up learning 200 or so and went on to become a voracious reader. But then we moved to the US and our youngest started s…
Is this an anglosaxon thing? Here in Germany, I have never heard of anyone telling a child they had to "learn x words". We teach letters and common diphthongs, and then make the kids understand that these glyphs can form words with meanings. When I look at my father's schoolbooks, that already was the common way to teach reading in the 1950s.
Probably - English doesn't have good rules of spelling, so phonetics is not a good approach to learning to read. There are often several different phonetic ways you could spell a world, only one of which is right (to, too, two). In reverse there are often several different phonetic ways to pronounce a written word.
As someone with Dysgraphia I often wished we reformed English to be more phonetic (I'm not sure if it would help me spell, but it wouldn't hurt)
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have heard many teachers make this same criticism and it's so odd to me. Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. It's only later that 'silent' reading develops, and for most of us (I'd venture), we silently read by internally 'hearing' the audio version. At least I do (I'm listening to myself narrate this comment as I type it out silently). How else can you learn to read if not sounding o…
> Little children learn to read first by literally reading out loud. IME, little children learn to read first by recognizing whole words that other people read out loud, and the best learn-to-read curricula recognize and leverage that heavily, and use it to progress to add in phonics skills via using words that vary in one phoneme to reinforce what the common part sounds like. Phonics is useful as one of the skills u…
Young kids don't start with logographic languages or whole world recognition. Just look at languages that use logographic scripts: Japanese has two phonetic "alphabets" (kana), and kids learn those first. Content for kids is written in kana. Kids start learning basic Kanji later on, but the phonetic script comes first.
Re: Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
This instruction book was authored by Siegfried Engelmann, who, among others, developed Direct Instruction. In the late 60s/early 70s there was a thorough comparison of various teaching methods called Project Follow-through; Direct Instruction did far better than all of the other methods. The results of this study were devoutly ignored by the educational establishment, and often denigrated as being "authoritarian". E…
From the his wikipedia page [0], he seems to have spent at most 4 years actually teaching (from "early 1960s" to 1964), was a marketing guy among other things before that, and spent a long career writing eductation books and articles and seminars after that. You have valid point on his work being assessed and valorized in studies, but parent's point also stands stronger in my mind. The ratio of actual experience in t…
I (O.P.) want to be clear for the record that I am not endorsing (though not discouraging either) that Engelmann's or DISTAR methods be the new guiding light in schools. I can certainly envision that implementation going awry for lots of reasons.
I'm just stating that this particular book, in a 1:1 parent:child setting, has a great track record. 100 days of spending 10-15 minutes with your kid doing these lessons is a low risk intervention with tremendous upside. You don't have to have a teaching background to utilize it (the intro for parents is fairly extensive and important pre-reading), you just follow the parental directions.