I too have taught at a primary school for a long time.....17 years and I believe this without a shadow of a doubt that explicit phonics instruction makes the difference when acquiring beginning reading skills. I have taught K, 3rd, 4th, Dyslexia.. Title 1/ARI..TAKS intervention...(during the same years) and Gifted and Talented. Across the many different levels, most (not all) of the students I have taught in the upper grades, GT classes, upper Title/ARI classes who have difficulty reading have poor phonics/phonemic knowledge.
My district has tried many different approaches to reading- using basals, whole language, Johnny Can Spell, MTS/MTA, Accelerated Reader and Saxon Phonics. In my pull-out program now, any child in 2nd-3rd who sees me is put in an intensive phonics program.....Great results happen-through decoding, spelling, reading, writing, etc. The phonics program we use is strong and explicitly teaches vowel sounds, orthographic patterns, SYLLABLE DIVISION (which I personally believe to be one of the top important skills), word origin, spelling patterns, etc. This program helps lead to much more fluent readers. When I was five(barely by two months), I started school in a foreign country and solely learned (at school) by sight reading. Fortunately, I had a mother who taught me phonics/phonemic awareness beginning at two! However, when we returned to the states, my parents put me back a year, so that I would be appropriately aged in class and would receive more intense phonics- thank goodness they did! I know that there are poor programs that teach these skills and I strongly feel that the really strong-researched based proven programs are the ones that should be used and not altered by educators....at least not done so without a committee looking at what can possibly be changed. We have had too many teachers- new, old, emergency certified-decide what is important in the progression and have seen it be detrimental to the students. H _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
