We were in the grocery store last night and as we passed the deli, my daughter stopped me and said, I am going to sound that word out. She really didn't get any father than del- before she started adding letters that were not there. We've worked so hard at sounding out and she knows all the sounds and many, many of the rules- why is it still so hard at times. The word delicatessen can be figured out if you just break it up and don't just start guessing. At times its so frustrating, and I wonder if as she grows older it will come together better? I also thought it was just the big words that she might not know the meaning to, but every so often, something like "cold" trips her up. One night she read cold as clod. And, I know she's not dyslexic.
Am, I expecting too much? She's reading well above grade level - but I'm not sure how much of it is that she's memorized a huge vocabulary of words, or that she is using her phonics. Should I just relax about it and just keep on what we're doing and hope it just naturally works out?
I'm thinking of having a retired reading teacher (who teaches phonics) to do an evaluation. Maybe she can either point to some things that are missing that we can work on or help me put this all into perspective.
I don't want to be too hard on her. But I don't want her to have problems when she's later reading textbooks (science, social studies, etc.). When she's reading about cold blooded animals, I don't want her thinking they are clods.
Concerned Parent, have you read "Why Johnny Can't Read", by Rudolf Flesch? It's a classic. At the end of the book he provides a basic phonics curriculum, in the form of lists of phonics-related words that you can work on with your child. We're using it with our Younger Daughter. You might like it too ...
ReplyDeleteI agree with you about making sounds that aren't there. It's a bad by-product of the guessing habit that schools inculcate in kids. I can't tell you how many times I've said to YD, "there's no N in there! Don't make an N sound!" Argh.
I found this blog by accident and am very glad I did. I've had many of the same frustrations. My observations in a nutshell are that just enough phonics to be dangerous are taught to kids in kindergarten. They write "journals" which you can decipher and it all seems good until they hit the 1st grade and spell just like they did in kindergarten. You are assured this is all natural even though you protest and know in your heart of hearts that it is not right. Children in first grade are taught to look at pictures to try and figure out a word they don't recognize and phonics is not even the second method (that would be finishing the sentence and seeing if they can guess what the word is.) Spelling correctly is optional (except on spelling tests) and always takes a back seat to creativity in writing. I'm sorry, but 1st and 2nd graders don't have the chops to write the Great American Novel and only a mother can really appreciate their "creativity." More focus needs to be with reading - and reading good literature. Teaching phonics - real phonics - is a must. I went to grade school in the 70s and was totally amazed at how they teach in elementary school today (my daughter is 8.) Like you, I am constantly blindsided by information about deficiencies at the absolute last minute even though I am at the school several times a week. It was at the end of the year that my daughter's teacher said she needed to work on math facts and was not proficient at telling time. All her "class work" came home fine. But then again, not one "quiz" was given throughout the year. The kids do their classwork together (with the teacher on the overhead) and correct it together. Until quarterly assessments, there is no feedback to the teacher about how much the kids actually know. When I brought this up to the principal, she told me that graded work was only for the parents and did nothing to help teachers or students (huh?) My daughter is bright, reads well and is good in math. She is an awful speller because she is a creature of habit. Once a habit is formed, it is impossible (almost) to break it. She has learned so many incorrect spellings they all seem correct. She has learned bastardized phonics and now often uses a consonant to represent both a vowel and a consonant, like the letter "n" for the sound of "short e and n." If your daughter (or son) writes words with few vowels, you might just check that out.
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