Yesterday was a snow day. We had face the threat of large amounts of snow and sheets of ice, so school was cancelled and I was home from work. We didn't do as much reading work as I would have liked. But the kids have to have some free time too.
My daughter finally brought a J book home from school. She told me that she had told the teacher that her mom wanted her to bring harder books home. This J book, however, was hand picked by the teacher and did not require much sounding out. But it's a start to getting the harder books from school. But even so, we have harder books at home we can use anyway, plus there's always the dry erase board. We have, for instance, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which is providing lots of challenging words to sound out as well as a lot of humor.
In addition to re-reading the J book, we read a day in the Diary of Wimpy kids. The Diary of a Wimpy kid, according to Scholastic, the company which sells books through the schools, is a 5th grade level book. It has very few pictures and the pictures that it does have show additional meaning and do not in any way operate as context clues. There are some pretty big words in the book, some which sound out pretty easily and others that require a little extra help. But my daughter loves the book - she finds it humorous. So, as long as she wants to read it, I'll help her when she gets stuck with her sounding out but not by just telling her the word.
We also practiced the spelling words for the week. Yes, finally, in the month of January, spelling words started coming home. Although there is no direction or even encouragement for us to actually "study" the words, I have my daughter practice anyway. So, today with her spelling word "by," I pointed out to my daughter that there are two other ways to spell the word and asked if she could name them. I was thinking of by and buy, but she wrote by and bye. So, I laughed and told her that there were actually 3 ways (Mommy is not perfect) and I showed her buy. I asked her if she knew what each one meant and she could identify the correct meaning for each version. I mentioned then to her that these were homonyms and I gave her some more examples. I think that is a pretty important concept to know, particularly if a child is going to be having spelling tests using a word with homonyms. I explained to my daughter that is why I have been using the words in a sentence. She told me the teacher uses a sentence too.
As for my son, he is a bit hit or miss as to whether he wants to read, so I haven't pushed too hard. I tried to get him to read this morning but he did not want to, so later in the day I put on Leap Frog's Talking Words Factory DVD and then later in the day he wanted to read. It was at bed time though, so perhaps her just wanted to stay up later. But that's one ploy that will work with me right now.
We have been reading the Bob Books which my son says are "stupid." But I have been giving him a lot of praise so he's been reading with me a bit. I've also told him that when we get farther and farther with harder words that the stories will become more interesting. We don't do these books every night, though. I use the dry erase board with him other nights. We're going a bit slow at the moment, which I think is ok.
Every so often I continue to look for interesting reading material about whole language vs phonics. I found the following enjoyable piece:
http://www.nrrf.org/satire_WL_at_Fork.html
Ok, now that you're done laughing, here's a more serious article:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801091500.htm
From a study of 11 adult readers (a small sample, I think), an NYU professor of psychology and neural science found that 62 % of an adult's reading speed comes from phonics, 16% from "holistic word recognition" (recognizing words from their shape) and 22% from whole language (recognizing a word from the context of a sentence). Admittedly, I have not YET read the study, but the article indicates that this means there is a role for whole language teaching in conjunction with phonics. In my opinion, assuming the study results to be accurate, this study was based upon adult reading and not the reading of a child. Adults, in my opinion, probably do learn to just recognize some words over time after having read them for a long time. Further, my guess is that when an adult uses a context clue, it is only a momentary guessing of a word because the word is anticipated and then a quick either holistically or phonetically for accuracy. But that is something that adults with many, many years of experience may have developed. It is not evidence of whole language being a viable method for children. Moreover, if the results are accurate, they show that even with an experienced adult reader, the knowledge of phonics plays a large role in reading. So, in my opinion phonics should not play a backseat or little or no role in reading education, it should have a primary role.
No comments:
Post a Comment