Teach your children phonics

Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld has long encouraged parents and teachers to use phonics to teach children to read. Kim at Life In a Shoe found a great article Dr. Blumenfeld wrote in 1993. In Dyslexia: Man-Made Disease he explains why phonics is so effective and why other methods are destructive. He draws a connection between teaching children to memorize how words look and dyslexia. He compares the method most schools use today of reading by memorizing words and reading by using phonics:

"In other words, there are two ways of looking at our printed or written words: holistically or phonetically. If you are taught to read phonetically from the start, you will never become dyslexic, for dyslexia by definition is a block against viewing words phonetically. Phonetic readers become good, independent readers because they have developed a phonetic reflex. To them literacy is as natural and effortless as breathing. A holistic, sight reader, on the other hand, must rely on memorization of individual word forms and use all sorts of contextual strategies to get the word right."

I was taught to be a sight reader. I struggled for years. It wasn't until about fifth or sixth grade that I become a reader, laregly by memorizing how words look. I never had the foundation of phonics and was a bad speller for decades. A couple years ago I bought my own copy of Phonics Pathway and have greatly improved my spelling ability.

Dr. Blumenfeld tells of an interesting experiment by an Edward Miller:

"Edward Miller has devised a very simple word-recognition test that dramatically illustrates the difference between a holistic and a phonetic reader. The test consists of two sets of words: the first set consists of 260 sight words drawn from Dr. Seuss's two books, The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, and the second set consists of 260 equally simple words taken from Rudolf Flesch's phonetically regular word lists in Why Johnny Can't Read. Both sets of words are at a first-grade level.
A child who is already a phonetic reader will sail through both sets of words without any problem. But a holistic reader might sail through the sight words at high speed with no errors, but then slow down considerably and make many errors in the phonetic section even though these are simple first-grade words. "

I had heard that Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) had written his books to help with the whole word recognition movement. Dr. Blumenfeld quotes Dr. Seuss:

"They think I did it in twenty minutes. That d -- ned Cat in the Hat took nine months until I was satisfied. I did it for a textbook house and they sent me a word list. That was due to the Dewey revolt in the Twenties in which they threw out phonic reading and went to word recognition, as if you're reading Chinese pictographs instead of blending sounds of different letters. I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country."

If you have young children, take the time to teach them phonics. The effort will pay dividends for years.


----------
Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, public school, public education, education, reading, phonics