The Reading Wars & Learning to Read in 2023
Method matters. And that's not all.
Dear Friends,
It’s been busy over here at the Hollow, and I want to leave you with one more piece for the Thanksgiving celebrations rightly take over all of our attention!
Have you ever taught a child to read?
Have you tried to teach a child to read?
Have you observed a child learning to read through school?
With school reading competency scores distressingly low and still dropping, the education world has recently been rocked by a major change in what is sometimes known as the Reading Wars, the ongoing, highly political conflict over reading instruction. The cue-ing or whole language methods that have largely dominated school reading curricula for the past twenty years are now being rejected in favor of phonics.
This is a good development, one more in line with how most children learn to read fluently. But is returning to phonics enough, whether in school or on the living room couch?
As a teacher, a historian of education, and a homeschooling mother, I have my own assessment of this situation.
Read my full essay here at Front Porch Republic:
“Learning to Read in 2023.”
Did you have a good experience learning to read? Did your children (or students, if you are a teacher)?
Share your thoughts and experiences in the comments, and then share this piece with your homeschooling and teacher friends!
Happy Thanksgiving!
I taught my twins to read using Teach Your Child To Read in 100 Easy Lessons which worked very well for us. Now I'm using it for my daughter and it's working fine for her too, though the canned language provided for parents/educators is frustrating to her so we've had to switch it up a bit.
I didn't realize I had such a strong preference for phonics until my twins came home from kindergarten with a list of "sight words" that had words which could be sounded out phonetically on it ("it", "this", and "that" come to mind) My gut response was "NOPE NOPE NOPE!" and I had to take a minute before saying something to my husband that I might regret in front of little ones with listening ears! But upon investigation my children's school does use phonics; my kids learn vowel blends, letter combinations like "ch" and "ph", and all the little rhymes I remember from early grade school ("When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking!") Just as importantly, their school has a strong reading culture. They have a pleasant and well-stocked library that every class visits weekly, teachers who read aloud beautiful stories in class, "Book Talk Tuesday" where kids and teachers get a chance to share books they love on the morning announcements, so overall I'm quite pleased. I truly think you need both; you need to know what letters say and how they work together, but you also need a culture that says reading is worth mastering, for fun as well as for learning.
There’s so much good advice in that piece. I love the bit about sitting with your arm around a reading child. I think I first read about that in a John Holt book. I wrote two posts about how I taught my two to read - or rather, how they learnt to read because in each case I didn’t seem to be able to influence the process much! Except that, in my daughter’s case I decided to prioritise a love of reading over an ability to read at a set age. We’re all ready for new skills on our own unique timetable.
https://howwehomeschool.substack.com/p/how-my-children-learnt-to-read-part
https://howwehomeschool.substack.com/p/how-my-children-learnt-to-read-part-1e9