Reading aloud is one of those things that helps in so many ways, doesn't it? Such a lovely thing to do together, even beyond the assistance it gives to helping the kids learn to read.
Yes. So many parents work on the names of letters. But that’s not how we read. We do letter sounds instead and even that I don’t push it to hard at the preschool age.
Totally. I don't worry about it at all in the preschool years except to the degree that they are interested. Some of my kids have invited academic learning at that age, and some haven't, and all of them do fine.
I used The Ordinary Parents’ Guide to Teaching Reading for all 3 kids. I try to make a book- & Print-rich environment, model a love of reading and read aloud often to them. That all contributes! I view my role as a literary sommelier, once they learn to read, but we don’t stop our cosy evening or mealtime family read alouds.
"Literary sommelier." What a neat way of thinking about it! A reading- and conversation-rich environment is such a great context for developing all language skills. Sounds like you've done well!
“Literary Sommelier” - what a wonderful way to describe the work of parents, teachers, librarians and all the adults trying to enrich the child’s soul without becoming overbearing!
Dixie that link deep-diving into the cueing method vs phonics was fascinating. Has anyone in the phonics world come out against picture books in general as distracting from the de-coding work of reading? I’ve known some children, who, despite being taught phonics, have relied too heavily on pictures for “guessing” and it had never really occurred to me before that they could be more hindrance than help. Just curious, as both children’s literature and picture books are a fairly new thing in history (though of course not unheard of by any means!)
I can see how this would make sense! I haven't seen anything written on it but I don't keep constant tabs on this field so there probably is stuff out there! I've noticed with my own kids that the pictures are helpful for cueing but not generally a hindrance unless the child is essentially guessing most of the time. I think it's more that the picture help them solidify a realization between the visual word and the sound. With my kiddoes, I've started with phonics without pictures (the speller we use is not picture-heavy, although there are some) and then moved into using readers once they have some basic sounds down.
So my guess is that the pictures are distracting or detracting from the process for some children, but probably not for most children.
The pictures also go a long way in making reading attractive to a kid who is having to work hard on decoding.
I can see that, for sure. I also know some kids who are motivated to write/spell because they want to label their own drawings! So I suppose it can be helpful in that direction, too. (I just saw a Montessori thing online [unclear how official] that said children can encode words phonetically before they can decode them, which I thought was really interesting.)
This matches well with the reality that some children write before they read, some read before they write, and some learn both at the same time. With my third, figuring out how to write a word has definitely helped with reading. He was a writer before a reader!
n=3 anecdote: we have used Montessori methods (both at home and in an AMI preschool) and our children have all been able to write/spell words and sentences (using wooden letters, which Montessori calls a moveable alphabet) years before they could read any words or write them with a pencil. Being able to write a "k" for instance (with diagonal lines) takes motor skills that are quite separate from knowing that a "k" is the beginning sound in your drawing of a "kite" - or looking at a "k" printed on a page and being able to independently decode it. Sometimes those skills all go together and reinforce each other, but they don't have to!
Excellent piece Dixie! I really appreciate your added child perspective, as well as free play and gross motor movement. In Switzerland we did not learn to read until age 6/7 and had lots of outdoor play (they even advocate balancing backward on wooden logs to help subtraction).
Last year I wrote a brief post (used for my radio show notes) along similar lines, discussing the changes that the Ontario government was planning in response to a human rights report
"Look at the Forest not the Trees: Abysmal Literacy Curriculum Failure"
"The Province of Ontario has pulled the plug on the ‘three-cueing’ system, which instructs students to guess and predict words using clues from context and prior knowledge. Using context and prior knowledge are helpful practices, but not as the initial step before even trying to decode the word. This is where Erica Meltzer justifiably asks: Who in their right mind would teach someone to read in that way? In The Three-Cueing System and Its Misuses (or: The Biggest Problem in Reading Instruction You’ve Never Heard of), she makes clear how some very basic ideas of using phonics, context, and syntax as a joined system have become warped into a backward pretzel logic where ‘children are taught that reading means ignoring letters that are actually on the page’. The info graphic was originally intended to illustrate how this interlocking system can help students make meaning out of a text, but has instead been misinterpreted by educators and teachers who propagated the idea that this is how text should be decoded. In other words, students are taught to use the text to figure out the meaning of the words. Wow."
Yes! Thank you for this quote and for linking to your post. I look forward to reading the whole thing. This pulling-the-plug has been happening all over in the past year or two and it's fascinating to ponder. I appreciate Meltzer's question as you note here: why did cue-ing become so misused? It's really handy in some ways and should be part of, indeed, a joined system. We all use context in both reading and listening (in conversation). There's nothing wrong with it as a tool...
Backwards on a log! I will have to try that. That makes such good sense.
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.
I agree! I find sight word drills can be helpful after a child is fairly well along into phonics. They reinforce. But prematurely they can definitely be problematic. You can't just memorize all the words in the language!
Lots of people love the 100 Easy Lessons book! It didn't work well for us when we tried it briefly (in part because of the canned language) but many of my homeschooling friends use it. Many of them also find that at some point halfway through the book or so reading just starts to click for the kids, and then they can switch over to readers.
100% agree. There's essentially no other way to teach what we in our family call "tricky words" like "of" and "said" which are pronounced completely differently from what phonics would suggest.
I have heard many people say that 100 Easy Lessons didn't work for them and I admit I can see why; my daughter finds the canned language frustrating/distracting, but as long as I give the same material in my normal voice she is making good progress (yesterday while we were driving she asked me "how do you say L-N" after seeing it on a street sign and that lead to a good discussion on abbreviations!) I do expect we will do the whole book like I did with my twins, but after we finish the book our tradition is to have a little party to celebrate "learning to read" and after that we move onto easy readers with lots of phonetically simple words in them (Frog and Toad, Little Bear, Dr. Seuss, etc) I find after that, they've got the foundation they need and it's off to the races with lots of help on "tricky words"!
Yep, there's a point where you have to essentially say, "Look, kid, I'm gonna level with you. This particular word/sound is one you're gonna just have to remember. English is weird and the rules don't always apply!"
And shoutout to my mom mentor (and homeschooling mom) Andrea who gave me the phrase "tricky words." She said it helped her boys because it put the emphasis on, "The rules you've worked so hard to learn don't help with this word" so they didn't feel so bad or frustrated when they misread it, and when they did get it right they felt SO PROUD!
That is really wise. The cheerleading when kids get something right is also so helpful! It's easy for us to forget that the relationship between sound and letters is not necessarily intuitive at the beginning (although it is for some) and it does take work and we should be so proud of our kids' efforts!
I loved this article so much. I'm currently teaching my 7 year old boy to read and it's been a slow process. But a Joy-Filled one. Thanks for this insight
Great article! We (my husband and I) homeschool our two boys. My oldest struggled to learn to read, but at seven we started listening to audiobooks, and now he loves reading and audiobooks. My youngest is now 7 and still struggles with reading, but he’s getting there. Phonics is definitely where it’s at--I remember my own mom teaching me phonics before I even knew all the names of letters, which probably contributed to me reading at a third grade level at age six.
Indeed. I really do wonder how the lack of phonics instruction affects later reading levels, as I mention briefy in the article. What does it mean to know how to read? Does it mean you can figure out things on a page? Or does it mean you can read with the same facility with which you think or speak? The latter opens a whole world of knowledge and enjoyment to you through books. The former means that you can access written information but makes it unlikely that you will revel in the world of books. Not everyone has to love reading, of course, but not reading for pleasure because reading is uncomfortable is different from not reading for pleasure because you prefer other activities.
When my husband and I were first married, we read aloud to each other in the evenings. It's a wonderful way to relax by the fireside in the winter, especially! When I was super-sick while pregnant with my first baby, he read the Hobbit and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy aloud to distract me. Amazing.
I have no experience teaching a child to read, and I don't remember my own experience in doing so (besides Hooked On Phonics being popular - ha!) I just.... never had a reason to know about all this so am mostly in the dark. But we are coming up on needing to get serious about it in the next couple years. So this essay and the comments have been instructive!
Oh my gosh, the TV commercials for Hooked On Phonics -- they were ceaseless when I was a kid! I'm pretty sure that's the only time I ever heard the word "phonics" until I started learning about other languages (and that some were not phonetic).
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.
I was thinking of John Holt, too, and how personal warmth from the teacher goes such a long way in helping the kid feel safe to be honest as he experiments with reading and sounds!
I look forward to reading your posts, Catherine! Thanks for sharing them. After I get these rolls in the oven...Thanksgiving on Thursday!
I absolutely loved your piece🙌🏼 Completely agree with all the points you made.
When I was a middle school English teacher, I loved Lucy Calkins’ work. Her philosophy and strategies deeply informed my approach to teaching reading and writing. I haven’t delved too deeply into this controversy, but my intuitive sense is that things have probably been overly simplified and polarized, like most things in our culture. People see a philosophy where certain things are emphasized, and assume that the approach is anti-whatever seems to be the opposite of that. It’s lazy thinking, lazy leadership. Nuance is hard and modern people don’t like or want hard. This also feels similar to the way that solutions are sold to new parents. It’s like we want things to be simple that are inherently not. We want things that are complex and relational to be efficient and mechanized.
And yes, of course, money - that part of your article was $o $mart😉
Did you see Ruth Gaskovski's comment above? It speaks a little to this question of application, simplification, etc. I think there are good instincts that can go wrong in all approaches to teaching. I wonder, too, how it differs with older children (middle school) vs. younger children.
I also wonder if meta-level control of teaching prevents teachers from using materials in flexible ways. That is, if teachers are significantly bound by the curricular choices of administrators who are unresponsive to the particularities of teachers' classrooms, then there may be more of a scripted kind of teaching rather than a teacher using different tools flexibly.
My experience teaching in normative K-12 schools was limited to 2 years so I can't speak extensively to this. But it seems to me that teachers' hands are often bound in this sort of way.
Glad you liked my $mart u$e of the dollar $ign! I was delighted that the editor let me keep that in there!
Nov 21, 2023·edited Nov 21, 2023Liked by Dixie Dillon Lane
Yes I did, can totally see that, that something got totally twisted. And yes for SURE part of the problem is the micromanaging of teachers. There's always some new thing they "have" to be doing according to people who aren't actually doing the work lol. I was always that teacher who said "Mmk" to whatever admin wanted but I mostly did did my thing in my classroom, and I did a good job so I got left alone. But that takes kind of a rebel spirit (and the right admin too). And yes, teaching older children is totally different; I was just sharing that I loved Lucy's work as a reading/writing teacher. She was incredibly thoughtful in her approach and I can't imagine that she was against phonics instruction. I'm looking forward to diving more deeply into all this on our drive to Thanksgiving! :)
Yes, I am sure that is the case about Calkins. I have similar opinions about John Dewey, who is the much-maligned bete noir for many conservatives, of course, as regards education. But his ideas -- many of them -- were so beautiful and so focused on the particular needs of the particular children in any given classroom. But that's not really what Progressive Education became.
Such an interesting deep-dive into this, Dixie - and so crucial! We've always read aloud to our kids, not just picture books but also chapter books...and while individual personalities of course play such a big role, I think they ended up adopting the habit of listening to, and loving, longer-form stories. Anything by E.B. White (on repeat, forever!), Wizard of Oz, the Little House books, Winnie the Pooh, Anne of Green Gables, etc.
I think read-alouds are so helpful for increasing attention spans! We love reading aloud, too. It's funny that you mention E.B. White -- we of course love Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little, etc., but my 12-year-old's favorite E.B. White book of all is "Elements of Style!" She refers to it as The Immortal Strunk & White, as in, "As the Immortal Strunk and White says, the Oxford comma is..."
AHhhhhhh that's perfection!! Haha. Elements of Style has been a favorite here, too! Our youngest is named after Fern from Charlotte's Web - a story I still cannot read without weeping!
The classical school I work for (a hybrid of 2 homeschool days and 2 classroom days) uses Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, although my children loved Sing Spell Read and Write. They loved the songs, the games, and the readers. That was many moons ago! My 5 children are now between the ages of 19 and 28 - how time flies! And I read aloud to my children every night - such good memories!
Again, Dixie, you've burrowed into my heart. A copy of this article is going to my daughter for her homeschooling needs. Thank you. Also, the part about physical contact between teachers and students brought up a powerful memory. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Rigby, took her students aside one by one for about five minutes or so each week to sit next to her and just read aloud from the reader. She would casually drape her arm over the back of the chair, forming that comforting cocoon that you talked about in this article. When we got our report cards after that term, we all were surprised to see that our reading grade went up. We all improved in reading. And of course weekly trips to our glorious school library added to the bliss of reading for pleasure. That was the year my own reading problems disappeared. I hope Mrs. Rigby is sitting at the right hand of God now.
Have you listened to the podcast “Sold a Story?” It definitely suggests that money was the overarching factor that drew so many schools into the cueing/guessing/Caulkins-based reading programs that have done such a disservice to kids. Quite an interesting listen.
You’re spot on with plenty of movement and sleep as the base foundations for young children to learn anything, really. To focus and sit still, those two foundational aspects must be in place. Nice article!
I'll have to listen to that! Thanks for the recommendation, Kate! And it's such a joy to have a friend who understands how much our kids need these elemental things :)
Finally reading this and omg Dixie this line was too funny: “That is question I cannot an$wer, except to $ay that I don’t think it ha$ much to do with actual re$earch.”
😂😂😂
But that aside, this was such an illuminating and thoughtful piece. I loved the examples of non-instructional learning support!
Your descriptions of reading while snuggled with your son sound so much like what I'm doing these days! I homeschool my sons, ages 4, 6, and 7. I am reading one-on-one with the older boys every weekday. They are still sounding out and need lots of scaffolding. I am grateful for those moments on the couch, shoulder to shoulder or reclining together. Both of my older boys completed the Reach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons book. I thought it was effective and very user friendly for the parent/teacher. We are also using Memoria Press Classic Phonics and Explode the Code along with plenty of early readers.
Wonderful. Patience and giving them that scaffolding are both so important. It's such a privilege to get to be present while a child learns to read. It's amazing!
My advice to any young parents is: teach them phonics before you enroll them in public school. And read to them as often as you can, from infancy on.
Reading aloud is one of those things that helps in so many ways, doesn't it? Such a lovely thing to do together, even beyond the assistance it gives to helping the kids learn to read.
I gave a much longer reply elsewhere in the thread, but this comment says it all! Exactly what I would recommend as well!
Jo has commented a few times here at the Hollow lately and it is always beautiful advice!
Yes. So many parents work on the names of letters. But that’s not how we read. We do letter sounds instead and even that I don’t push it to hard at the preschool age.
Totally. I don't worry about it at all in the preschool years except to the degree that they are interested. Some of my kids have invited academic learning at that age, and some haven't, and all of them do fine.
I used The Ordinary Parents’ Guide to Teaching Reading for all 3 kids. I try to make a book- & Print-rich environment, model a love of reading and read aloud often to them. That all contributes! I view my role as a literary sommelier, once they learn to read, but we don’t stop our cosy evening or mealtime family read alouds.
"Literary sommelier." What a neat way of thinking about it! A reading- and conversation-rich environment is such a great context for developing all language skills. Sounds like you've done well!
“Literary Sommelier” - what a wonderful way to describe the work of parents, teachers, librarians and all the adults trying to enrich the child’s soul without becoming overbearing!
Dixie that link deep-diving into the cueing method vs phonics was fascinating. Has anyone in the phonics world come out against picture books in general as distracting from the de-coding work of reading? I’ve known some children, who, despite being taught phonics, have relied too heavily on pictures for “guessing” and it had never really occurred to me before that they could be more hindrance than help. Just curious, as both children’s literature and picture books are a fairly new thing in history (though of course not unheard of by any means!)
I can see how this would make sense! I haven't seen anything written on it but I don't keep constant tabs on this field so there probably is stuff out there! I've noticed with my own kids that the pictures are helpful for cueing but not generally a hindrance unless the child is essentially guessing most of the time. I think it's more that the picture help them solidify a realization between the visual word and the sound. With my kiddoes, I've started with phonics without pictures (the speller we use is not picture-heavy, although there are some) and then moved into using readers once they have some basic sounds down.
So my guess is that the pictures are distracting or detracting from the process for some children, but probably not for most children.
The pictures also go a long way in making reading attractive to a kid who is having to work hard on decoding.
I can see that, for sure. I also know some kids who are motivated to write/spell because they want to label their own drawings! So I suppose it can be helpful in that direction, too. (I just saw a Montessori thing online [unclear how official] that said children can encode words phonetically before they can decode them, which I thought was really interesting.)
This matches well with the reality that some children write before they read, some read before they write, and some learn both at the same time. With my third, figuring out how to write a word has definitely helped with reading. He was a writer before a reader!
n=3 anecdote: we have used Montessori methods (both at home and in an AMI preschool) and our children have all been able to write/spell words and sentences (using wooden letters, which Montessori calls a moveable alphabet) years before they could read any words or write them with a pencil. Being able to write a "k" for instance (with diagonal lines) takes motor skills that are quite separate from knowing that a "k" is the beginning sound in your drawing of a "kite" - or looking at a "k" printed on a page and being able to independently decode it. Sometimes those skills all go together and reinforce each other, but they don't have to!
Fascinating!
Excellent piece Dixie! I really appreciate your added child perspective, as well as free play and gross motor movement. In Switzerland we did not learn to read until age 6/7 and had lots of outdoor play (they even advocate balancing backward on wooden logs to help subtraction).
Last year I wrote a brief post (used for my radio show notes) along similar lines, discussing the changes that the Ontario government was planning in response to a human rights report
"Look at the Forest not the Trees: Abysmal Literacy Curriculum Failure"
https://humanitasfamily.net/2022/03/02/look-at-the-forest-not-the-trees-abysmal-literacy-curriculum-failure/
"The Province of Ontario has pulled the plug on the ‘three-cueing’ system, which instructs students to guess and predict words using clues from context and prior knowledge. Using context and prior knowledge are helpful practices, but not as the initial step before even trying to decode the word. This is where Erica Meltzer justifiably asks: Who in their right mind would teach someone to read in that way? In The Three-Cueing System and Its Misuses (or: The Biggest Problem in Reading Instruction You’ve Never Heard of), she makes clear how some very basic ideas of using phonics, context, and syntax as a joined system have become warped into a backward pretzel logic where ‘children are taught that reading means ignoring letters that are actually on the page’. The info graphic was originally intended to illustrate how this interlocking system can help students make meaning out of a text, but has instead been misinterpreted by educators and teachers who propagated the idea that this is how text should be decoded. In other words, students are taught to use the text to figure out the meaning of the words. Wow."
Yes! Thank you for this quote and for linking to your post. I look forward to reading the whole thing. This pulling-the-plug has been happening all over in the past year or two and it's fascinating to ponder. I appreciate Meltzer's question as you note here: why did cue-ing become so misused? It's really handy in some ways and should be part of, indeed, a joined system. We all use context in both reading and listening (in conversation). There's nothing wrong with it as a tool...
Backwards on a log! I will have to try that. That makes such good sense.
I kept this site mostly to organize my talking points for a homeschool radio spot, thus they are not like my usual articles:)
The site looks amazing. What a great resource for homeschoolers!!
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.
I agree! I find sight word drills can be helpful after a child is fairly well along into phonics. They reinforce. But prematurely they can definitely be problematic. You can't just memorize all the words in the language!
Lots of people love the 100 Easy Lessons book! It didn't work well for us when we tried it briefly (in part because of the canned language) but many of my homeschooling friends use it. Many of them also find that at some point halfway through the book or so reading just starts to click for the kids, and then they can switch over to readers.
100% agree. There's essentially no other way to teach what we in our family call "tricky words" like "of" and "said" which are pronounced completely differently from what phonics would suggest.
I have heard many people say that 100 Easy Lessons didn't work for them and I admit I can see why; my daughter finds the canned language frustrating/distracting, but as long as I give the same material in my normal voice she is making good progress (yesterday while we were driving she asked me "how do you say L-N" after seeing it on a street sign and that lead to a good discussion on abbreviations!) I do expect we will do the whole book like I did with my twins, but after we finish the book our tradition is to have a little party to celebrate "learning to read" and after that we move onto easy readers with lots of phonetically simple words in them (Frog and Toad, Little Bear, Dr. Seuss, etc) I find after that, they've got the foundation they need and it's off to the races with lots of help on "tricky words"!
Yep, there's a point where you have to essentially say, "Look, kid, I'm gonna level with you. This particular word/sound is one you're gonna just have to remember. English is weird and the rules don't always apply!"
And shoutout to my mom mentor (and homeschooling mom) Andrea who gave me the phrase "tricky words." She said it helped her boys because it put the emphasis on, "The rules you've worked so hard to learn don't help with this word" so they didn't feel so bad or frustrated when they misread it, and when they did get it right they felt SO PROUD!
That is really wise. The cheerleading when kids get something right is also so helpful! It's easy for us to forget that the relationship between sound and letters is not necessarily intuitive at the beginning (although it is for some) and it does take work and we should be so proud of our kids' efforts!
I loved this article so much. I'm currently teaching my 7 year old boy to read and it's been a slow process. But a Joy-Filled one. Thanks for this insight
Slow and joy-filled. Sounds wonderful. The slow is just fine, and the joy-filled is excellent!
Great article! We (my husband and I) homeschool our two boys. My oldest struggled to learn to read, but at seven we started listening to audiobooks, and now he loves reading and audiobooks. My youngest is now 7 and still struggles with reading, but he’s getting there. Phonics is definitely where it’s at--I remember my own mom teaching me phonics before I even knew all the names of letters, which probably contributed to me reading at a third grade level at age six.
Indeed. I really do wonder how the lack of phonics instruction affects later reading levels, as I mention briefy in the article. What does it mean to know how to read? Does it mean you can figure out things on a page? Or does it mean you can read with the same facility with which you think or speak? The latter opens a whole world of knowledge and enjoyment to you through books. The former means that you can access written information but makes it unlikely that you will revel in the world of books. Not everyone has to love reading, of course, but not reading for pleasure because reading is uncomfortable is different from not reading for pleasure because you prefer other activities.
Yes, I read most of Narnia at bedtime to my older son after he was well established as a reader on his own.
When my husband and I were first married, we read aloud to each other in the evenings. It's a wonderful way to relax by the fireside in the winter, especially! When I was super-sick while pregnant with my first baby, he read the Hobbit and the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy aloud to distract me. Amazing.
I have no experience teaching a child to read, and I don't remember my own experience in doing so (besides Hooked On Phonics being popular - ha!) I just.... never had a reason to know about all this so am mostly in the dark. But we are coming up on needing to get serious about it in the next couple years. So this essay and the comments have been instructive!
Oh my gosh, the TV commercials for Hooked On Phonics -- they were ceaseless when I was a kid! I'm pretty sure that's the only time I ever heard the word "phonics" until I started learning about other languages (and that some were not phonetic).
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
I was thinking of John Holt, too, and how personal warmth from the teacher goes such a long way in helping the kid feel safe to be honest as he experiments with reading and sounds!
I look forward to reading your posts, Catherine! Thanks for sharing them. After I get these rolls in the oven...Thanksgiving on Thursday!
I absolutely loved your piece🙌🏼 Completely agree with all the points you made.
When I was a middle school English teacher, I loved Lucy Calkins’ work. Her philosophy and strategies deeply informed my approach to teaching reading and writing. I haven’t delved too deeply into this controversy, but my intuitive sense is that things have probably been overly simplified and polarized, like most things in our culture. People see a philosophy where certain things are emphasized, and assume that the approach is anti-whatever seems to be the opposite of that. It’s lazy thinking, lazy leadership. Nuance is hard and modern people don’t like or want hard. This also feels similar to the way that solutions are sold to new parents. It’s like we want things to be simple that are inherently not. We want things that are complex and relational to be efficient and mechanized.
And yes, of course, money - that part of your article was $o $mart😉
Thank you, Amber!
Did you see Ruth Gaskovski's comment above? It speaks a little to this question of application, simplification, etc. I think there are good instincts that can go wrong in all approaches to teaching. I wonder, too, how it differs with older children (middle school) vs. younger children.
I also wonder if meta-level control of teaching prevents teachers from using materials in flexible ways. That is, if teachers are significantly bound by the curricular choices of administrators who are unresponsive to the particularities of teachers' classrooms, then there may be more of a scripted kind of teaching rather than a teacher using different tools flexibly.
My experience teaching in normative K-12 schools was limited to 2 years so I can't speak extensively to this. But it seems to me that teachers' hands are often bound in this sort of way.
Glad you liked my $mart u$e of the dollar $ign! I was delighted that the editor let me keep that in there!
Yes I did, can totally see that, that something got totally twisted. And yes for SURE part of the problem is the micromanaging of teachers. There's always some new thing they "have" to be doing according to people who aren't actually doing the work lol. I was always that teacher who said "Mmk" to whatever admin wanted but I mostly did did my thing in my classroom, and I did a good job so I got left alone. But that takes kind of a rebel spirit (and the right admin too). And yes, teaching older children is totally different; I was just sharing that I loved Lucy's work as a reading/writing teacher. She was incredibly thoughtful in her approach and I can't imagine that she was against phonics instruction. I'm looking forward to diving more deeply into all this on our drive to Thanksgiving! :)
Yes, I am sure that is the case about Calkins. I have similar opinions about John Dewey, who is the much-maligned bete noir for many conservatives, of course, as regards education. But his ideas -- many of them -- were so beautiful and so focused on the particular needs of the particular children in any given classroom. But that's not really what Progressive Education became.
Mm, interesting. See, this is the issue! This or that, us vs. them - we love our oversimplified dichotomies :)
Such an interesting deep-dive into this, Dixie - and so crucial! We've always read aloud to our kids, not just picture books but also chapter books...and while individual personalities of course play such a big role, I think they ended up adopting the habit of listening to, and loving, longer-form stories. Anything by E.B. White (on repeat, forever!), Wizard of Oz, the Little House books, Winnie the Pooh, Anne of Green Gables, etc.
I think read-alouds are so helpful for increasing attention spans! We love reading aloud, too. It's funny that you mention E.B. White -- we of course love Charlotte's Web, The Trumpet of the Swan, Stuart Little, etc., but my 12-year-old's favorite E.B. White book of all is "Elements of Style!" She refers to it as The Immortal Strunk & White, as in, "As the Immortal Strunk and White says, the Oxford comma is..."
AHhhhhhh that's perfection!! Haha. Elements of Style has been a favorite here, too! Our youngest is named after Fern from Charlotte's Web - a story I still cannot read without weeping!
Oh, that's lovely! It's a pretty name, too.
The classical school I work for (a hybrid of 2 homeschool days and 2 classroom days) uses Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, although my children loved Sing Spell Read and Write. They loved the songs, the games, and the readers. That was many moons ago! My 5 children are now between the ages of 19 and 28 - how time flies! And I read aloud to my children every night - such good memories!
Yes, 100 Lessons is quite a popular book among the homeschoolers I know in my locale!
Again, Dixie, you've burrowed into my heart. A copy of this article is going to my daughter for her homeschooling needs. Thank you. Also, the part about physical contact between teachers and students brought up a powerful memory. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Rigby, took her students aside one by one for about five minutes or so each week to sit next to her and just read aloud from the reader. She would casually drape her arm over the back of the chair, forming that comforting cocoon that you talked about in this article. When we got our report cards after that term, we all were surprised to see that our reading grade went up. We all improved in reading. And of course weekly trips to our glorious school library added to the bliss of reading for pleasure. That was the year my own reading problems disappeared. I hope Mrs. Rigby is sitting at the right hand of God now.
Oh, my goodness. What a wonderful teacher. I am sure that is exactly where Mrs. Rigby is sitting!
That is a beautiful story.
Have you listened to the podcast “Sold a Story?” It definitely suggests that money was the overarching factor that drew so many schools into the cueing/guessing/Caulkins-based reading programs that have done such a disservice to kids. Quite an interesting listen.
You’re spot on with plenty of movement and sleep as the base foundations for young children to learn anything, really. To focus and sit still, those two foundational aspects must be in place. Nice article!
I'll have to listen to that! Thanks for the recommendation, Kate! And it's such a joy to have a friend who understands how much our kids need these elemental things :)
Finally reading this and omg Dixie this line was too funny: “That is question I cannot an$wer, except to $ay that I don’t think it ha$ much to do with actual re$earch.”
😂😂😂
But that aside, this was such an illuminating and thoughtful piece. I loved the examples of non-instructional learning support!
I was very, very happy that the editor was on board with keeping that line just as I wrote it! 😂
So glad you liked the piece, Sara!
Your descriptions of reading while snuggled with your son sound so much like what I'm doing these days! I homeschool my sons, ages 4, 6, and 7. I am reading one-on-one with the older boys every weekday. They are still sounding out and need lots of scaffolding. I am grateful for those moments on the couch, shoulder to shoulder or reclining together. Both of my older boys completed the Reach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons book. I thought it was effective and very user friendly for the parent/teacher. We are also using Memoria Press Classic Phonics and Explode the Code along with plenty of early readers.
Wonderful. Patience and giving them that scaffolding are both so important. It's such a privilege to get to be present while a child learns to read. It's amazing!
You're right -- it really is a privilege.