#study phonics

[rugrats-curious-minds]

The Importance of Teaching Children to Read Through Letters and Sounds

Reading is a fundamental skill that serves as a cornerstone for a child's education and future success. It opens doors to a world of knowledge, imagination, and critical thinking. One of the most effective methods for teaching children to read is through the use of letters and sounds, also known as phonics. In this article, we'll explore the significance of teaching children to read using letters and sounds, highlighting the numerous benefits it offers in their early development.

Building Strong Foundations

Phonics, the method of teaching children to connect letters with their corresponding sounds, helps build strong foundational literacy skills. This approach empowers children to decode words and understand how language works. By mastering the relationship between letters and sounds, children can read unfamiliar words and develop confidence in their reading abilities.

Improved Reading Comprehension

Learning to read through letters and sounds enhances reading comprehension. When children can sound out words, they gain a deeper understanding of the text they are reading. This understanding extends beyond simple word recognition to comprehension, as they can grasp the meaning of the words and the context in which they are used. This comprehension is vital for academic success across all subjects.

Increased Vocabulary

Phonics-based reading instruction contributes significantly to a child's vocabulary development. As children learn to read, they encounter new words regularly. When they can decode these words using phonics skills, they expand their vocabulary effortlessly. A rich vocabulary not only aids in reading but also boosts overall communication skills.

Enhanced Spelling Skills

Teaching children to read through letters and sounds goes hand in hand with improving their spelling abilities. When children understand the relationship between letters and their sounds, they can apply this knowledge to spell words correctly. This skill is invaluable throughout their academic journey and life beyond the classroom.

Encouraging a Love for Reading

Phonics-based reading instruction can help cultivate a lifelong love for reading. When children can read independently and enjoyably, they are more likely to choose books as a source of entertainment and knowledge. This love for reading not only enriches their lives but also supports their ongoing learning and personal development.

Enhanced Confidence

Reading can be a daunting task for children who struggle with it. Phonics instruction provides them with a structured approach that builds confidence. As they successfully decode words and read fluently, they gain a sense of accomplishment that motivates them to continue improving their reading skills.

Individualized Learning

One of the strengths of teaching children to read through letters and sounds is its adaptability to individual learning styles and paces. Each child progresses differently, and phonics instruction can be tailored to their specific needs. This personalized approach ensures that no child is left behind and that struggling readers receive the support they require.

Better Preparedness for Academic Success

The ability to read proficiently is a critical factor in a child's academic success. When children learn to read through letters and sounds, they are better prepared for success in all subject areas. Reading is the gateway to learning, and a strong foundation in reading skills sets the stage for future achievements in school and beyond.

Teaching children to read through letters and sounds, or phonics, is a powerful method that provides them with essential skills for life. It builds strong foundations, enhances comprehension, expands vocabulary, and boosts confidence. Moreover, it instils a lifelong love for reading and prepares children for academic success. As parents and educators, it is crucial to recognize the importance of phonics-based reading instruction and provide children with the tools they need to become confident and proficient readers. In doing so, we empower them to unlock a world of knowledge and imagination through the magic of words.

[fuckingwhateverdude]

$5 to anyone who can decipher a sentence of this diary entry from 2006 when i was 5 😭😭

[fingertipsmp3]

Okay I’ve finally learned to roll my Rs so I think that’s enough studying for today. No achievement will top that

[ahmed5283]

Santa Letter Writing Activity | Santa Craft | Santa Writing| Christmas Writing

[articlesforchristians]

Kindergarten Week 10 out of 36

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[righteousdelusions]

finally returned to my Anki cards and what will ALWAYS shock me is how I sometimes know a kanji reading without knowing its meaning. It's always a shock to me because you'd think my brain will have an easier time remembering the meaning. But no, sometimes I'm looking at a kanji and I know the sounds but no meaning in my forehead. A literacy girlie through and through

[funnygirlthatbelle]

i suspect that a huge factor in the defense of students using gen ai (and academic dishonesty in general tbh) comes from the fundamental misunderstanding of how school works.

to simplify thousands of educator's theories into the simplest terms, there are two types of stuff you're learning in school: content and skills. content is what we often think of as the material in school- spelling, times tables, names, dates, facts, etc.- whereas skills are usually more subtle. think phonics, mental math, reading comprehension, comparing and contrasting; though students do those things often, the how usually isn't deemed as important as the what.

this leads to a disconnect that's most obvious when students ask the infamous "when will we use this in the real world?" they have- often correctly- identified content that the content is niche, outdated, or not optimized but haven't considered the skills that this class/lesson/assignment will teach.

i can think of two shining examples from when i was a kid. one was in middle school when they announced that we were now gonna be studying latin, and we all wondered why on earth they would choose latin as our foreign language. every adult promised us it'd be helpful if we went into medicine, law, or religion (ignoring that most of us didn't want to go into medicine, law, or religion), but we didn't buy that and never took it seriously. the truth was that our new principal knew that learning languages gets harder as you get older, and so building the skills of learning a language while it was easy for us was more important than which language we learned, and that's an answer twelve year old me would've actually respected.

similarly, my geometry class all hated proofs. we couldn't think of a single situation where you'd have to convince someone a triangle was a triangle and "look at it, of course it's a triangle" wouldn't be an acceptable answer. it was actually the band director who pointed out that it wasn't literally about triangles; it was about being able to prove or disprove something, anything using facts.

and so, so, so many assignments that are annoying as hell in school make more sense when you think about the skills as well as the content. "why do i have to present information about something the teacher obviously already knows about?" because research, verifying sources, summarizing, and public speaking are all really important skills. "why does this have to be a group project?" because you will have to work with other people in your life, and learning how to be a team player (and deal with people who aren't) is an essential skill. "why do we have to read these scientific articles and learn about graphs?" because if you can understand them, people can't lie to you about them.

now, of course, there's a lot we could do better- especially we as in the american school system. the reason i have an education minor but am not teaching is because of those issues. there are plenty of assignments that are busywork and teachers that are assholes and ways that the system is failing us.

but that doesn't mean you should cut off your nose to spite your face!

the ability to learn and grow and think critically is one of our most powerful tools as people. our brains are capable of incredible things! however, the same way you can't lift a car unless you consistently lift and build up to that, your brain needs to train in order to do its best.

so yeah, maybe chatgpt can write a five paragraph essay for you on the differences between thomas jefferson and alexander hamilton's governing philosophies. and maybe it won't even fuck it up! congratulations, you got away with it. but by outright refusing to use your brain and practice these skills, who have you helped? you haven't learned anything. worse, you haven't even learned how to learn.

[hopelessromanfic]

it’s nearly five am and i got super pissed at my homework for a linguistics class i’m being forced to take so i deep cleaned my entire apartment and now i have nothing to do but sulk :(

[3liza]

after meaning to get around to it for years i finally listened to almost the entirety of Sold a Story and it is as groundbreaking as everyone says it is. it's also the most confusing, to me, single event in American culture in my lifetime and my reasons for thinking that are pretty complex so im not sure theyre fully formed yet. there's a list of shit in this podcast that made me feel like i was going insane

i KNEW something was going on at a population level, i've been noticing it for years, people kept telling me i was imagining things, but i was RIGHT, two generations of kids have been reduced to barely-literate levels of language function because of this shit and you CAN see it and hear it while talking to people in the world!

the entire adoption of the Calkins programs in the first place were based on the majority of people responsible for American child education deciding basically overnight that "children don't need to learn phonics in order to become strong readers" which is literally and not figuratively equivalent to saying "children can learn algebra without learning what numbers are". it is so self-evidently false i dont even know how to respond to such an assertion. you have to be fundamentally devoid of common sense to think this is true. language is comprised of sounds (phonemes), sounds are represented by letters, letters make up the alphabet, the alphabet makes up words, and words make up sentences. you cant just skip over the parts of this you dont like, it's the basis of our entire civilization. "i dont need to learn individual notes i just want to play to saxophone" okay well. too bad? you cant

american primary education apparently has no communication whatsoever with the scientific fields of human behaviorism, pediatrics, neurology, linguistics, the science of learning generally, and there is next to zero communication between teachers who are actively responsible for educating children and the entire research field of educating children. they just dont talk to each other, at least in huge swaths of the country. in retrospect this is obvious, i just have been assuming incorrectly this entire time that maybe, surely, some aspect of how our public schools are administered is in some way being guided by scientific evidence and research. this has apparently not been the case for 20+ years. Lucy Calkins herself claims she "didn't know" that the research on how children acquire language had been essentially settled by the 1990s, she just wrote her stupid book based on her own self-assurance that what she THOUGHT children were doing when they learned language was correct. she ddin't check, she didnt ask about research or studies, she didn't test her hypothesis, she just told everyone she had figured out how to teach kids to read based on nothing but her own untested assumptions. and everyone was like "okay sounds good". every single person involved in this process is or was in a position of responsibility for educating american children. and almost none of them thought to ask "okay, but have you tested it? does it work?" because they didn't test it, and it doesnt work, and for some reason that was never even brought up

teachers kept being interviewed on this podcast who kept saying things like: "they never taught us how to teach children to read" and "they didn't teach us how children learn so i had no idea how it worked" and then explaining this was why they were so easily hoodwinked by the Calkins program. i don't understand this. what is actually taught during the two year degree programs at teaching colleges? if it's not child psychology, pedagogy, neurology, and actual techniques for teaching children, what are they teaching you to do there? one of my friends who went to a teaching college told me they mostly provided classes on lesson planning.

individual teachers apparently are not reading books or articles or papers on any of these subjects either. so having graduated from a teaching college knowing nothing about children, teaching, or even basic english literacy ("i didn't know how to teach phonics and no one told me" is another thing actual teachers kept saying on the podcast. girl, SESAME STREET can teach basic english phonics, and it does), almost none of them actually do any investigation on their own. they just show up to their workplace (the school) and "teach" whatever admin hands them. ?????????????? how is this possible?

i realized last night in a fugue of post-exertional malaise that the three-cueing method of teaching reading is training children to approach language very similarly to how a large language model does it. they laboriously instruct the children to guess what the next word in a sentence will be, often by actually covering the word with a post-it note and then cajoling and badgering the child until he guesses the word under the post-it, based on the vibes on the sentence he's reading. this doesnt teach you to read, it teaches you to act like youre reading

this isnt directly addressed in the podcast but we used to just teach everyone english like it was an actual system that has parts and rules and structures, because that's what a language is. everyone would start with phonics and the alphabet, then later do stuff like sentence diagramming and grammar, neither of which have been taught in primary schools in decades. i think i was probably the very last generation of kids to get ANY of that stuff unless they went to an exceptional school, and it was only because my 8th grade teacher knew it was important and went against school admin's instructions in order to teach it. the couple days of sentence diagramming and grammar he gave us, out of SPITE, have been more useful to me in reading and writing than the entire rest of primary english education i received in public school, and i didn't even go to a school that had adopted three-cueing stuff yet.

[endawna]

going off more on this : those with a more basic knowledge of tevene can mistake cyrodilic for it. i do think, while cyrodilic was largely changed by tevene when it was once conquered by the imperium, it fundamentally kept its own structure and dialect. not to mention, accents would differ. it diverged further once they retook their independence and reinstated their governing body ( dragonborn emperors & elder council ). still, they are similar enough for communication outside of common.

throwing cyrodiil into da and i think they used to be a vassal to tevinter years and years ago. enough where there’s a lot of overlap in culture and language. cyrodilic using tevene as the root - fantasy latin - and both having ancient greek / roman aspects. enough to where pax, dorian and neve can communicate with each other outside of the trade / common language. enough for them to pick up when pax curses in cyrodilic because he doesn’t like people to know when he is cursing in the first place.

[chavisory]

Watching electoral politics the last couple of years and how little it seems like many, many people understand about how our government works has really had me going "So are schools just noping out of teaching government or civics the same way they've noped out of teaching phonics the last 20 years, or...?"

And then I read this:

"Lawmakers from both parties have put American history and civics lessons under a political microscope. But these subjects can be more difficult than others to control.

"That is because for years, policymakers seeking to improve academic achievement ignored social studies. Over the past two decades, federal and state standardized testing mandates pushed schools to focus primarily on math and reading.

"That meant there was less time and money for social studies education. It also meant more autonomy for teachers of the subject.

"In a recent survey conducted by the American Historical Association, two-thirds of social studies teachers said their districts gave them either no curriculum guidelines to work with or only a rough outline of the topics they had to cover."

And I'm like "....oh."

(And since we haven't been teaching phonics, a lot of the kids not necessarily being taught social studies...also don't have the reading skills to just read about it, either.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/us/public-school-curriculum-freedom-political-pressure.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jk4.tHE9.1VonH5O_yF6V&smid=url-share

[articlesforchristians]

Kindergarten week 1 of 36

Print out this page. As you do the assignments, write down the day that you completed each assignment. This will be your attendance record. Science and Social Studies are only done 3 days a week. Monday Math Lesson 1 Click on the lesson guide and follow the instructions. Science God Made Me Cut & Paste Printables Choose the page that you want your child to do. Review the parts of the body…

[sarasa-cat]

Highly recommending this podcast series because I first learned about this story some years ago via:

Informative investigative journalism exploring the declining literacy rates among children through a podcast series. It’s not just the lack of phonic in reading lessons but the intentions for why such a thing has been going on for decades.

[dostoyevsky-official]

could you elaborate on your most recent comment on that post about college students struggling to read entire works? because you frame an excerpt from the article as "it's the phones" but the entire excerpt is about teaching-to-the-test pedagogy that prioritizes small sections of texts etc rather than giving students practice in the classroom with reading a whole book. clearly that's a different issue than phonics, but I'm just not sure why that was the excerpt you chose if your point is that it ISN'T about poor pedagogical choices.

the excerpt is about how phonics isn't the issue, responding to someone who was saying that phonics are the issue. i don't think it's phones in isolation, but it's the biggest root cause, by far. the piece spends quite some time on it.

we could approach the problem like good economists, asking if it's possible to isolate phones as a variable, ceteris paribus. and it is. out of curiosity, i read a few books related to the 1990s "closing of the american mind" phenomenon earlier this year, including hirsch's cultural literacy. he, like others, bemoans television and loosening standards for lower reading rates and poor retention of basic cultural information you learn in humanities classes that are necessary for a coherent society—if any information was retained to begin with. but kids were still reading.

i graduated an extremely intensive, extracurricular-focused, top college prep-aimed high school in 2014. i had an iphone since 2012, a facebook, twitter, instagram, and tumblr account each since ~2008, but this was before the psychological abuse of each was maximized through streamlined app design. a lot of classes in this high school were also geared "towards the test," in this case, APs, and a chunk of it was devoted to polishing SAT scores and college essays. some classes focused on excerpts, and by far not everyone was Doing the Reading (one skill you learn in college and certainly in grad school is how to gut a book, not reading the whole way through—nobody does the entire reading). yet enough students were still reading the whole of the book for enough books, even if sparknotes was ubiquitous. phones, by the way, were confiscated on sight.

many issues were already destroying students' ability to read, including poor pedagogy. but something happened between the early 2010s and now that made the problem much, much worse. what was it?

there's a lot of anecdotal evidence from professors and other articles on phones as the issue, including some academic research on psychological effects—i don't know why this particular article is gaining traction here and on twitter, maybe because it's well-written, in the atlantic, concise—and it seems pretty unambiguous that phones and social media are destroying attention spans, not matter whether child or adult.

an interesting, just-published study, " Library in the Palm of Your Hand? A Randomized Reading Intervention with Low-Income Children" looks at what happens when you direct children's attention towards reading, providing them with easy access to books, instead of phones:

...

...

this happened in germany, by the way. i don't know about german school pedagogy, but i'm not sure they abandoned phonics.

it's phones. it's 100% phones.

[dearclickclack]

Deer Mr. Bnuuy,

Momy sed I shuld rite you a ledder to ask for helb wifh my spelging! How shoulb I stard? Fank you!

- Suzy

Dear Suzy,

[INTERIOR: HobbyHoo Studio. A large CHALKBOARD sits in the center of the room; the usual office chair, trusty typewriter Georgia, and stacks of books having been moved to accommodate it. On the chalkboard is the sentence, "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain."]

[Enter CLICK CLACK, the ever-diligent GOD OF STORYTELLING, wielding a hand pointer and a very dignified graduate cap. He saunters up to the chalkboard, beaming at his young client before he speaks.]

"If you want to improve your spelling, be sure to brush up on your phonics!" He winks at the camera. "For the folks at home, that's the study of knowing which letters make what sounds. Take this sentence here - " The pointer lands on the chalkboard with a resounding thwack! "Notice how all the words that rhyme end with '-ain.' Rain, Spain, plain, et cetera. Ergo, we can assume that most words that rhyme with these also have '-ain' in them. You can apply this practice to other sounds, and once you do, you should be spelling in no time!"

Our god pauses thoughtfully before adding, "And yes, you do have to sit still when you write. I don't like it either, but alas, it's a compromise every artist has to make."

[sapphia]

Can I get more info about what's going on in nz? I watch global news regularly and nothing about this has come up and I find this highly disturbing.

we elected a neoliberal nightmare of a government who are destroying our health system, water system, ferry and rail system, environment and democracy for profit. people are literally dying in hospitals because there is no doctor in hospitals in multiple rural towns and they just have a consultation on an ipad. the government are trying to frame Health NZ as having a budget deficit of 1.5 billion when in reality that deficit exists because they provided like 3 billion dollars with of tax cuts they couldn’t afford. National cuts spending to health every time they get in government and the disjointed DHB system has been unable to keep up financially with the growing population and health needs.

i personally have just been FUCKED by national as for the last two years i have been navigating our labyrinth of a health system, not working due to being intensely suicidal, trying to find therapy to get better and there just isn’t any available. so i payed for a private autism diagnosis to try and access funding for therapy through the ministry of disability and also get under their umbrella because they actually treat you like a person there and also don’t actively seem to want you dead like they do in the mental health system. but the process took so long that by the time i got my diagnosis and through the referral system, national had yoinked the funding and deemed that therapy will no longer be covered by the disability funding system. all therapies. for disabled people.

oh also they’re like trying to start a race war or something as both minor parties in the 3-way coalition government are trying to negate the Treaty of Waitangi in law, and they’re also attacking the judiciary and had to be told to stop by our attorney general, who they ignored obviously.

our prime minister answers every question with “i say to you” followed by just a literal lie, they’re all just lying through their teeth, i literally have an OIA request about when David Seymour, our deputy-PM-in-waiting (don’t ask) said that preschool education needed to be reviewed because they were being prevented from teaching phonics. they’re not. someone just expressed concern that that might be happening to him, and apparently he is basing government policy on that?? or at least using it to falsely justify it to the nation.

their ideas are all bad and disproven by evidence-based studies, despite their slogan being “we’re going to make evidence-based decisions”. New Zealand has hit a funding wall where we’ve kicked the can too far down the road on like everything and it’s all starting to collapse at once and this government are not only letting it happen, they’re actively helping it along because they’ve all got shares in private rival companies or mates they want to give contracts to (our former national PM got paid insane money to write an insanely biased report attacking our ministry of social housing) or they’ve had their careers helped along by lobbying firms or they want to work for lobbying firms after they leave parliament.

the speaker of the house (who is right now being accused of not dealing with racism within his own party because of course he isn’t, he’s gerry fucking brownlee, the most hated man in christchurch) has allowed lobbyists unprecedented unrecorded entry to parliament. the minister for conservation keeps “forgetting” to write his lobby dinners in his diary. one of them told an mp “he’s not in mexico anymore”. no one is getting in trouble for this shit while the left are being raked over the coals. there’s like so much more. no one can keep up. and nothings being done about it.

tldr; help