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June 17, 1994 - Bill Cooper
59:32
Phonics, Teaching & Reading with Gail
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Welcome to the Hour of the Time from St. John's, Arizona.
I'm Carolyn Nelson.
Our guest tonight will be speaking from this studio on this whole hour to all of you of all ages about the fine art of teaching reading.
Welcome to the Hour of the Time, Gail.
Hello, Carolyn.
Hello.
It's nice to have you here, and I'll let you take over the program.
Well, thank you, Carolyn.
The subject that you've chosen for this program is indeed very important to each one of us and important to the cause of liberty in our nation.
Gail, I'm going to ask you to speak up a little louder.
Yes.
Reading is one of the most important things that we can address because without literacy we have no knowledge of what has happened before us or after us.
I'd like to speak with you about the teaching of reading because I know that your audience contains many people who have children, but this really involves all of us, whether we have children, whether we have grandchildren, or we have no children at all, but all of us know children.
And it involves our whole society because the ability to read is a fundamental skill that we must address.
And there's been a big debate going on about the teaching of reading that probably not many people have known about because it's like a lot of other battles that are going on out there.
It's a small group against a giant monolith it seems.
And the small minority doesn't get much press coverage.
But there are people who are engaged in this battle and it's been going on for some time.
It's easy to see the different sides if we just look at it.
But, I know that probably many people are aware that there are many problems in our school system and that the schools have played a major part in the decline and downfall of our country and our society.
Although, I must say that many people I've been involved in that without even realizing it.
We are in so many areas and many teachers don't realize what they're being a part of.
First of all, I've been a teacher of children for well over probably 20 years.
I've taught at the elementary level and I have witnessed the things that have gone on in schools.
Some good and some bad.
I'd caution your audience and people out there listening to say that you can't really characterize everybody in one system as good or bad because yes the schools are a problem but remember that there may be some good people who are still out there in the schools.
So I'd urge you to judge each person on their own merits perhaps.
I've been teaching children for many years, and I grew up like many people since the 1930s.
I grew up, began to read, learned to read with Dick and Jane, or the sight word method of see dick run, run dick run, look look, come come, see dick.
I was not taught by phonics.
I was one of the fortunate people who could learn to read that way.
I went to college to learn to be a teacher, and I wasn't taught anything about how to teach children to read.
I was taught that there was a Joplin plan, and there was a language experience plan, and there was the basal reader that you could follow the directions there.
But when I got out of college and went into the classroom, I really discovered, I probably already knew, that I really didn't know how to teach those children.
I began teaching in fourth grade, and many children came to my classroom with their nose in a book already, and already proficient good readers and good students, but there also came to my classroom many students who struggled with fourth grade books, who couldn't read those books, and I didn't know how to teach them.
And it was a frustration to me.
And after a few years of being placed in a different situation and beginning to learn other things about reading, I gradually did come across some information about phonics.
became convinced that a child should be taught to read phonetically, although it took several years to ever really get a good understanding of that.
And it took me getting into a school system where I was asked to teach a program that was very disastrous for the students.
It was one that, and it's still used in some areas of the country, it's one that really trains children to be robots, and I saw that happen right before my eyes.
And I began researching that program and knew that phonics was the answer, but I researched until I felt like I knew how to teach children.
Then I requested to teach first grade and taught children by a method of intensive phonics that I put together from different resources.
And those first grade children learned to read, every one of them.
And they were good readers.
And the next year, I am still researching other ways to teach.
I became acquainted with a method called the writing road to reading.
And I began teaching that method, read the book, and started trying to put that method into practice in my classroom and had much better results.
And I'd like to share some of the thoughts and some of the knowledge that I have about that with your audience, if that's all right with you.
That'll be just fine, Gail, and I will ask you to speak up just a little louder.
All right.
And will you tell us a little bit about yourself and the conference you've just come from?
Yes, I've just spent two weeks in training in this method.
I do teach other teachers.
I've taught, oh, several hundred teachers in different classes I've taught, and parents.
Homeschool parents are always welcome, and there are many homeschool parents that use this method.
And I had the opportunity of being with some very fine teachers who also teach this method, other trainers.
And as I said earlier, we need to judge everybody on individuals because I've just been with teachers who are really dedicated to teaching children who really recognize some of the problems that are out there and how important Reading is if we're to continue to have our country that we have.
I saw about 50 brand new teachers who have not been acquainted with this method enrolled in a class learning how to teach it in their classroom.
And that's an exciting thing.
And that's happening all across the country.
In the summertime there are many courses that are taught where teachers do learn this method.
And once they learn it, it frees them to teach in their classroom and be successful with their students.
And I've heard teacher after teacher tell me of success that they've had in their classroom.
Because this book was written by Ramalda Salding who would have been 95 years old had she lived a few more months.
She passed away this past year.
But she's truly a She was a master teacher, truly was a master teacher.
I think she always wanted to be a teacher.
She was not happy with the way her children were learning and went to great lengths to find out how the search led her to New York where she eventually worked with Dr. Samuel T. Orton who is the neurologist who first did the research on the functioning of the brain, the interrelated Pathways to the brain.
He discovered the theory of multi-sensory learning, using more than one sense to the brain at one time.
Learning greatly increased when that happened.
She worked with him in training children, learned many principles from him, and put them to practice in the classroom, and successfully taught many children.
Then when she moved to Hawaii at the end of World War II, She began teaching teachers over there her method.
And in 1957, with the help of her husband, who retired from his job as an architect to help her put her method into a book form, well, she published her book in 1957.
And since that time, from that time up until shortly before her death, she was active in training teachers and parents and tutoring students in her method.
She was totally devoted to helping people learn to read.
And she continued to do that her whole life.
She's been an inspiration to all those people who have known her.
And I was fortunate enough to study under her at two different times.
But let's wait for just a minute before we get into more details about her method.
Let's talk about reading in general for just a moment.
Because I would really stress to all the parents out there that they really become involved in what their children are doing.
I know that many people today are feeling the need to homeschool and take the responsibility for teaching their own children and I think that's great.
Those people who don't feel led to do that often And I think it's been promoted in our society but parents have been led to think that they don't have a responsibility in teaching their children that the school is going to do that, some teacher at school.
But I'd urge parents to rethink that and to be sure that they as parents are taking the responsibility for teaching their children because there is There's many dangers out there in sending your children to school if you're not fully informed about what's going on.
Because while there's ample research that shows that phonics or phonetic-based programs are successful in teaching children to read, there's plenty of evidence that shows that the site method does not teach children to read well.
The prevalent thing, the prevalent method in use today is the site method and has been since the 1930s when the Dick and Jane books were introduced into American schools.
And by the way, I think it's an interesting note to notice.
Mrs. Balding told me that it was real interesting the way those books just Within a short time, almost blanketed our entire country.
And it was during the 30s when there was a depression going on, when there wasn't much money.
And that seems very interesting, that at the time when there wasn't much money, and also communication and the network of interrelated things going on that there are today, that the textbook companies had the power to just blanket the country with their books.
That's almost exactly what happened.
But we should always look at the philosophy and the foundation of what things are based on.
And let's think about reading for just a minute.
Actually, reading, let's go back and think about languages.
There are basically two kinds of languages.
We can have, there are hieroglyphic languages.
Chinese is a hieroglyphic language and by that we simply mean that each one of those little characters in Chinese stands for an idea or a word.
And a person wanting to learn that language looks at each little character, notices the details and the lines and the configuration and he must memorize that and remember the word that it goes with.
And so that's the process of learning to read that language.
Learning to read that language is, um, the person is limited by the number of those symbols that his mind can remember.
And I don't know exactly the limits of what it is, but it's a few thousand of those characters that I think a person is able to learn.
I've also been told that it takes several years what a child taught English the proper way can learn in a year or so.
It takes several years for one to learn it in Chinese.
That's what I've been told.
So that's a hieroglyphic language, and a person learning that language is really learning that language by sight, or by seeing and memorizing the sight and configuration of the symbols.
Now, on the other hand, there are phonetic languages, and by phonetic language, we're talking about a language in which symbols stand for sound.
And English is a phonetic language.
That is, we have 26 letters of the alphabet, and those 26 letters represent sounds.
When you see the letter B, for instance, you say the sound B in a word.
If you see the letter M, you say mm.
And there's a correspondence between the sound and the letter.
The interesting thing comes in is that our language has 45 or 44, it depends on which person you, which authority you quote, has 44 or 45 speech sounds.
These are the minimal units of sound that you can make that go together to make up words But we only have 26 letters of the alphabet.
So those 26 letters all have sounds they represent.
Then there are other sounds from the language that are represented by 2 or 3 or 4 letter combinations of letters.
We call these phonograms.
And by putting the phonograms together, we make words.
And that's the difference in a phonetic language and a hieroglyphic language.
So, it logically follows that if we want to read a phonetic language, we would learn the sounds for the letters.
It's like reading a code.
We're going to break the code, and once we learn what the code is, then we can go on to other things.
We don't have to continually be learning them.
We put the sounds together.
So, it's important that the method that we use fit the language that we're learning.
Now, if we're learning a language such as Chinese or parts of Japanese or languages that are hieroglyphic, it's appropriate to learn those languages by sight.
But if we're learning a phonetic language like English, then the sight method's not appropriate.
And it's appropriate to learn that language by method that fits the structure of the language, and that's by phonics.
If we say to learn it by phonics, we're simply saying that first we must learn the letters, the sounds they represent, and then learn how those letters go together to make words.
Does that make sense?
Makes a lot of sense to me.
Well, it does for children when they're taught that way.
Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld has written several books about education, and he makes the point He said that when you impose the sight method upon a phonetic language, you create a symbol disorder in the brain.
In other words, the brain does not process that information very well.
Some people can do that, but it's not the best way of learning and it causes problems in many children.
Just this past week, A good friend of mine from Arizona who's very, the person who has a Ph.D.
and a very well-educated person was relating to me a story about a friend of hers who had a child at the age of seven who had still not learned to read and was having difficulty.
This child was from a very well-educated family and a family that had a library of And yet the child could not read and the child's teacher wanted to put this child in a special education program and label this child as almost minimally retarded or close to being retarded.
And the parent objected to that and searched for a tutor and found a tutor who was able to teach the child.
After about two or three weeks of training in how the language works, how these letters, the sounds they make, and how they go together to make words, the child looked up at the tutor and said, Is that all there is to it?
And he couldn't believe that it was so simple.
It had been made so complex for him before.
His brain could not process the way he was being taught.
But when he was taught in a manner that was consistent with the language, it was logical to him.
And in further testing, it revealed this child was certainly not retarded, but was closer to the genius range.
And this was a number of years ago, but since that time he's gone on and graduated from a prestigious university and is a very well-functioning member of society.
But that's just one instance of what happens and what can happen to children.
If someone had not intervened, his life would be totally different today.
And many children's lives today are being ruined because they're not being taught to read.
And that's happening every day across this country.
I think parents need to know the reading method that's used in the schools where the children are attending.
Or even if they don't have children attending schools, Every one of us needs to be involved in finding out what's going on in the school district in which we live, whether we have children there or not.
You have a stake in what's happening inside those doors and the decisions that are being made by those people in charge of the lives of those children.
Because there's a movement going across the country today that's really just an extension of what's been going on for a long time.
The reading method in Vogue is called Whole Language and it's sweeping the country.
It's the wagon that all the educators are climbing on.
It's being promoted from the top down and I see all, I see just It's the majority of people who are being swept away by it.
They really don't stop to think.
It's just a new thing coming along and they stop and jump on the bandwagon.
It's occurred to me in the last, you know, observing what's going on in schools, often I think that parents have given the educators too much credit.
They don't really think that educators would fall for the line that they have fallen for.
When you really look and see what these people are promoting as learning, most people have better sense than that, and they don't really stop to think that the people in charge of the schools would not have.
But the basic premise of the whole language approach is that a child learns to read by being immersed in the language.
Yes.
Just like he learns to talk by being around people who talk, or he's going to learn to read by being around lots of books and hearing lots of books read to him.
And that's what's happening there.
Some children do learn to read.
There's always been children who learn in spite of what kind of instruction they have.
Good instruction can enhance that, but even if they have poor instruction, they're going to learn anyway.
And there are many children today who do that.
What we need to look at is the children who have difficulty and see if those children are learning.
Mrs. Spaulding, who wrote The Writing Road to Reading, often said that the measure of a good teacher is whether or not she can teach those children who have the most difficulty.
It's what you do with those children.
And it's a very important thing that we need to consider today.
Thank you.
So, let me stop a minute and see if you have any thoughts or comments about what we're talking about or suggestions or a focus of what we're doing.
I don't want to get off too much into the whole language because I do want us to talk about the positive and what we really want to do.
The best thing for us to do for our children.
But we need to be able to recognize Um, the harmful things and make good decisions about what's going on.
You were talking earlier about how difficult it is to erase wrong habits, Gail.
Yes, that's true.
Um, I teach in a lower grade.
I've taught, I guess all the elementary grades up through about fifth grade.
And I've taught many children who are reading disabled.
I mentioned a few minutes ago that I taught in 1st grade and I did teach there but the last several years I've taught in 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades and it's really sad the children that come to you.
When I was a 4th grade teacher I had many children who were severely disabled as readers.
They came to your classroom for not disliking books.
They didn't want to have a book.
They didn't want to open a book.
They wrote papers that you couldn't read.
You could not read their writing.
It looks like a scroll on their paper, and they have no pride in their work.
There may be a discipline problem because they're not involved in the schoolwork.
When they try to read to you, they stumble and stammer and miss words.
They call words wrong, and they feel really bad about themselves.
They don't feel good about themselves because they haven't been successful in school.
And they know they're not successful.
Children know what's going on.
And they know who the good students are and who the good readers are.
And they know who the ones are who aren't doing well.
And they know if they're that one.
But if you teach them and teach them correctly enough, you can teach those children to read.
More difficult process than it is to teach that first grade child who's had no prior learning and has not been taught the wrong way.
Who doesn't have bad habits in place already.
The fourth grade children I would get who were reading disabled had been taught probably by sight method or by methods that certainly did not reveal the logic and structure of the English language.
They'd not been taught through phonics.
And so they had been trying to learn words by memorizing those words.
And that's the wrong response in the brain.
They had not been taught correctly.
And so it's not a matter of just showing them correctly.
It's a matter of many, many more repetitions to set correct patterns.
First you have to unlearn the wrong patterns, and then you have to put the new pattern in place, and it takes a long time to do that.
And so it's more for some children than for others.
But children, it's not hopeless that children have been taught wrong.
They simply need to be turned around and taught right at times whenever we realize the problem.
And it's amazing to watch the change that occurs in those children.
Gail, would this be the time for you to tell the story about the picnic?
The word picnic?
Okay.
To show you how children can reason and learn to think.
When a child is taught by phonics, he has to use his brain to think and to reason.
But when a child is taught by sight, it's generally a rote method, and he really doesn't have to think.
He simply takes somebody else's word for something.
The teacher tells him the word, he tries to remember it and goes on.
And there are many different programs and methods out there that are strictly rote learning.
And like I said earlier, I was involved in Aspica's methods that really program children to turn off their brains and to answer with a rote response without thinking.
But when a child is taught to reason about the language, then he has to use his mind to think, and he has to put things together.
And one day I picked up the newspaper and read an article by a journalist who was talking about the inconsistencies of the English language.
And he was fussing about the spelling because it's so hard to learn English spelling because he was talking that some words, we just add an I-N-G too, and some words we think a K in there, like the word picnicking.
If you want to spell it, you've got to spell it P-I-C-K.
And he could not figure that out at all.
Why in the world would he put that in there?
I went to school the next day.
I was teaching second grade.
I wrote that word on the board and told my class about the article.
I asked them if they could figure out why that K was added to picnic before we added the N to make picnicking.
They looked at it and thought about it for a moment.
of them came up with the answer, and the answer is that technique ends in the letter C.
If we add an, and the C says, the K sound there, I don't know if you can hear that or not, but if we add an ing, and if we wrote it P-I-C-N-I-C-I-N-G, the I would come directly after the C.
And in English, when C is followed by the letters E or I or Y, it makes the sound C.
Through the English language, and children learn those rules, although they don't learn them by number, but they learn to apply those rules just like that.
They couldn't tell me the number of that rule, but they could apply it to the word.
And they love to think.
They love to think, and teaching a child by phonics is an avenue for them to learn to think and to use their mind.
And teaching a child by phonics is an avenue for them to learn to think and to use their mind.
Thank you.
. .
Call Gene Miller at 1-800-BUY-COIN.
Swiss America Trading. - Okay.
Leave your name on his answering machine if he's not there tonight, and he'll call you back to tell you how to prepare to take care of your family, just as Gail is sharing with us information about how to prepare your child to have a long future ahead in reading, reading books.
Reading wherever a child or a human being may be.
You won't need electricity or video or tapes or radios.
All you need is a book or a pencil and a piece of paper so that you can write a letter that somebody else can read and that you can read back to yourself.
Call Gene Miller at Swiss America Trading in Phoenix 1-800-BUY-COIN and ask him for the newsletter.
There's a new one out.
Ask him for other papers and ask him how you can help your family to be prepared for the future.
You'll remember that Marsha wrote, if you don't know all 44 sounds, phonics, in the English language, learn them.
If you can't take any other reading materials along with you, if you have to go elsewhere for survival, You will have your Bible for teaching the youngest to read.
We must continue to teach our children.
Whatever subjects you're weak in, brush up on them now, along with your Bible-packed copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and so forth.
Learn your phonics now.
There may be new children in the area where you go for whatever we have ahead for survival.
Call Swiss America Trading.
Gene Miller at 1-800-BUY-COIN and ask him for advice about your paper money.
Get rid of it and turn it into gold and silver just as you're turning your children into readers and lovers of books.
They'll have to read maps, books, signs, directions.
They have a long life ahead of them and you don't want to leave them without the skills to meet that life.
You don't want to leave your family unprepared either.
Call Gene Miller at Swiss America Trading in Phoenix 1-800-BUY-COIN. .
Gail?
Yes?
I'll let you continue.
Alright.
I'd like to, along with what you're just saying, I'd like to read you some words from Ramalda Spalding who said... Could you read just a little louder?
Yes.
Along with the desire to read well-written books that expand the student's horizons and knowledge of life is one, if not the major, goal of language teaching.
This interest should begin with the first book in grade one, or even the fourth, and grow with the reading lessons in every subsequent grade.
Teach from the best written books at every level.
Fine books fill the minds of children with a wealth of knowledge of character and philosophy, of history and science, of humor and wit.
And over and over you'll find that throughout her philosophy it permeates her writings, that she wanted children taught the very best literature.
She said teach them from the wisdom of the past and not the nonsense.
Teach them from well-written books and be able to select books that are well-written.
And, of course, we would add to that to teach, to help them find books that teach them about our forefathers and our history and our country and what our Constitution and Bill of Rights means to us and to help them find books that teach them about our forefathers and our history and our country and what our Constitution and Bill
She also points out, she quotes the historian philosopher Will Durant, who says that civilization grows upon the study of the written records of man's past thinking achievements in philosophy.
Thank you.
He rightly says that civilization is not inherited, that its advance depends upon the ability of each generation to fully communicate and teach its children the great heritage from the recorded wisdom of past ages.
Teaching language to children is therefore the highest profession in every age.
So the best teaching method is of vital importance.
And as I said, that doesn't eliminate any person.
I think every person should think of themselves as a teacher and start training themselves to be a teacher.
Because we have really not just, we've been talking about our children, but all around us we have people who are illiterate, who have graduated from schools and still can't read.
And what a wonderful thing it would be to get this book that Mrs. Balding has written.
Read it.
Study it.
Learn the principles that are in it.
And make it your goal to teach someone else to read and to spread the word about reading.
Because we must read and we must have a nation of readers to have a free nation.
We must know this, be able to do that.
Let me, before we forget, I'd like to tell the people how they can get a copy of the book.
The complete title of the book is The Writing Road to Reading, and the author is Ramalda Bishop Spaulding.
It's S-P-A-L-D-I-N-G.
It's published by William R. Murrow.
And I often see it on the bookshelves of bookstores.
A lot of bookstores carry this book.
It's also available from the Spalding Education Foundation, which is located at 5930, that's 5930 West Greenway, Suite that's 5930 West Greenway, Suite 4, Glendale, Arizona, 85306.
And this is an investment that I think each person should have while we have the opportunity for it still to be available.
It's not expensive and as you mentioned earlier you don't have to have a video and you don't have to have an expensive kit The book is less than $20, even with shipping.
Along with the book may be purchased a set of phonogram cards for learning the sounds.
Inside the book, included with it, is a record.
It's a record of Mrs. Balding herself saying the 70 common phonogram sounds.
And you can listen to those or put them on a tape and listen to them on a tape along with the cards and learn those sounds of the language and then you'll be able to help someone else learn them too.
But I wanted to get that information so that people will know where they can get a copy of the book.
And it's not a book that's written just for teachers.
the book that I think I can pick it up and find it very interesting almost anywhere that you open it up to it's not it does not contain any trivial information read the book carefully when you read it because it doesn't contain anything that's not well thought out information
she continually thought about what she was doing and refined her method and each sentence in that book is full of meaning and has something of importance to you one thing I wanted to do was to talk for just a minute about how parents can judge what kind of reader their child is
I know it's difficult to tell sometimes because as I said earlier this attitude that that has been developed among us that says that The parents don't really have to worry about what their children do.
We just send them to school and the teacher is the expert.
It's very damaging and I know their attitude is there because even I, as a teacher, even though I was a teacher, I didn't know how to teach my own children correctly when they were in the very beginning stages.
missed that opportunity I didn't know what to look for and my children but let me tell you have your child if you'd like to know how they're doing have your child read aloud to you and notice to see what happens when your child reads does he leave out words
these are some things that would be indications that there are gaps in his learning or that he's not being taught to read phonetically does he add words to the text that are not there Does he interchange the words like A and B, say A when it should be B and B when it should be A, or B when it should be this?
Does he call words like was or see a word like was and say saw?
Does he read words backwards?
Does he read words like, for instance, when the word is newspaper, he might read neighborhood.
He might get the first letter right, or even the first syllable right, but the rest of the word is wrong.
Does he sometimes read, capably it seems, the big words, but mince the little words?
Is his reading fluent?
Can he read with expression?
Can he make his reading sound like talking?
As opposed to being word by word with a flat intonation.
Sometimes parents notice this.
They'll say, well my child can read the reader he brings home from school just fine.
But when you give him something else to read, he can't read that.
And that might be happening.
If these things are characteristic of your child, You might want to look really closely and see what's happening.
Because a child who's taught to read phonetically and accurately will not be doing this.
We want to be able to develop students who have precise speech, legible handwriting, correct spelling, and accurate and understood reading.
His reading should be accurate.
And I would think that most people would assume that's so, but often in teaching this class, the teachers kind of make the point that we teach specific techniques for children reading out loud and ways to help them be accurate.
One way we do that is when a child is reading along orally, If he misses a word or calls a word wrong, if the teacher or parent will go back and say just the last word the child read correctly, that brings the child's attention back to that word.
And he looks at the next word, and he knows that there's an error in that word, and he can correct it.
But often I have been asked if we should correct every error the child makes.
Thank you.
And the answer to that, I suppose, is we correct them to the extent that we want them to be accurate.
And the thing is, if you, um, if a child is reading inaccurately, if his errors are pointed out to him, um, he will correct those errors.
And then he will get into the habit of reading those words accurately.
Whereas if you don't point them out, he'll simply get more entrenched in making the error.
But we want to, Mrs. Balding taught a great precision, preciseness and accuracy and attention to detail in what she was doing.
So let's see for just a minute then.
Let's talk about the steps in teaching a child to read.
And certainly we could spend many, many hours in this.
In fact, the full beginning course that's in, of course, in training teachers to be able to go into the classroom and teach this efficiently is a class of 45 hours.
And at the end of that 45 hours, teachers are just beginning to feel like they understand some of this.
So, it's not something we can cover thoroughly in just a few minutes.
But we need to know basically some of the fundamental things about teaching children to read.
And as we've already hinted at, it's really not a real complicated process if we understand the nature of the English language.
And remember that English is phonetic, so a fundamental thing is learning that alphabet and the sounds that those letters stand for.
Now one thing, there are several features of Mrs. Dalding's method that distinguishes it from others But one of them is that she does not stress the learning the names of the letters before the sounds.
Because English letters do not very often say their names.
There are only five letters which ever say their names.
And those letters are A, E, I, O, and U. None of the others ever say their names.
And yes, children will need to know the names of the letters.
But your child will get a faster start in reading if you'll first teach him the sounds of the letters and be sure he's associating the sound of the letter with that letter.
And along with the book, there's also printed a set of cards that have these letters and combinations of letters on them.
Mrs. Balding identified 70 common phonograms, 70 that people need to know to read the common English words.
There are some more phonograms, but they're not very common, not common enough to warrant putting them on a card and practicing on them.
But the first step in teaching your child to read would be to begin teaching the sounds of the letters.
Now, obviously, you don't start with all 70.
You start with the simple one-letter phonograms.
In the classroom, in teaching children, we instruct them in writing along with learning the phonograms.
Her book's called The Writing Road to Reading.
And I mentioned earlier that she learned that learning needs to be multi-sensory, which means as many avenues to the brain as possible being used.
So the child needs to see and hear and say and write at the same time.
So when we're teaching them how to make the letters, we're also teaching them the sounds of the letters.
They learn those two things simultaneously.
And once you've taught some of the sounds of the letters, then you teach the child to blend those sounds into words.
And that takes some practice for some children.
It depends on the child as to how much practice it takes.
But from the very beginning, once he's learned some sounds, put those letters together to make words and sound out the words.
Say each individual sound and then blend them together, slide them together to make a word.
And then continue with that process of learning more of the phonograms and Not right off hand.
words as you go along.
And actually you can do that, you know, without any good, but it makes it much easier to have a guidebook to go by.
Do you have questions about that, Carolyn?
Not right offhand.
I tried to remember the method that I perhaps learned from and had a hard time because it goes back a little too far.
Thank you.
Most people can't really remember.
It's not uncommon to not remember how you were taught to read.
Even if you were taught to read by phonics or phonetically, once it's learned, then it becomes automatic.
And once something becomes automatic, we don't tend to remember the sense.
It's like with most people walking.
That's interesting, Gail.
The same thing happens with learning to drive a car, right?
You have to look out all the side mirrors, use your feet, use your hands.
Sometimes people are talking to you at the same time and you wonder if you're ever going to put it all together and then one day you do.
Exactly, it's the same thing.
And since we mentioned that point of automaticity, that is an important thing.
At the beginning stages, the beginning learning is much different from what goes on later on.
And beginning reading is different from reading once, once a person learns to read and does it fluently.
There's a different process going on.
And it takes a patience, being patient with your child and simply being a guide to your child, helping your child learn the things he needs to know.
We might mention also some principles that I think are important in this teaching your child.
I guess I can't say often enough that I think it's really sad what's happened to make people think that they don't have the responsibility for teaching their children because I think we've missed the opportunities as parents.
We've handed them over to someone else and often that other person or institution has not done a good job.
In teaching children, let me go over for just a minute a model of instructional procedures because think first of all what you want the child to do and model that skill for him.
If you're teaching him one of the sounds, show him what that sound is and keep on modeling as long as he needs you to.
Don't expect him to remember it on the first time.
He may and he may not.
If he does, that's wonderful.
If he doesn't, show it to him over again.
I said a while ago, be patient.
Patiently show him as long as he needs you to show him.
Next we could say, children need to be coached.
That's where you show them exactly how to do it and talk about the way it's done.
We could relate it to teaching a child to play baseball.
Where the coach picks up the bat and holds the bat and shows the little fella how to That this is the way we do it.
And also, after that, we have a step called scaffolding.
Scaffolding, just like a painter stands on a scaffold and paints the tall walls, the scaffold is there for support, to hold him up.
Or when a child begins, then he needs the support.
He needs someone there helping him when he needs it.
If he gets up to that and he can't hold that bat right, the coach may go over and put his hands on his hands and show him exactly where to put them and what to do.
That's supporting them when they need the support.
You're ready to step in and help them.
And if they don't need it, you back away and let them do it themselves.
And keep on doing that as often as you need to.
I know some people used to have the idea that you told a child once and maybe didn't learn it.
For instance, if you're teaching these sounds on these phonograms, you show him the card and make him sit there until he can't remember it.
Well, if a child doesn't know it, you're just frustrating him if you're trying to expect him to remember it.
So, show him as often as he needs to.
Give him as much practice as he needs.
And, when he can remember it, then he'll tell you that he doesn't need your help anymore.
I'm jailed with that.
We're going to say goodnight.
And we just may have to show and tell again.
All right.
It's been a pleasure, Carolyn.
Thank you.
We're good to go.
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