Teaching Again

While our daughter, Tif and her husband, Ed were staying in Waikiki alone for a couple of days we got to babysit our granddaughter, KC.  Tif asked me to work with her on word families and brought some paint chip cards that she'd (ummmm...) collected from several hardware stores.  Good thing there's a lot of hardware stores in Illinois.

The paint sample cards already have a nice little square punched out in them from which you can see the beginning consonants or consonant blends and digraphs.  I dug out my 1st grade lesson plans and pulled out appropriate word families.

At first, KC enjoyed sounding out words that I created for her by sliding down the paint chip word family on each beginning sound.  Then she said she wanted to do it on her own, which she did.  She had the most fun creating her own nonsense words.  Why stick to box, fox, pox when you could have mox, zox or gox? 

We then worked on handwriting.  Tiffany told me that handwriting is no longer in the public school curriculum.  What?  Yes... yes, I know the kids need to learn to keyboard.  But are they never going to need to write properly?  What the heck?  So she asked me to work on handwriting also.

Let's see, I used to work on handwriting for half the year when I was teaching.  Could I do it in 1 week? 

Sigh... I suppose not.

Not to worry, we'll be visiting them for a month in fall.


Just kidding.  Please don't worry about us pushing her.  KC has a very strong personality and she comes by it naturally.  If she doesn't want to do something, she won't do it.  I can't even get her to taste a 1/8" slice of lychee.

KC is definitely ready for kindergarten and I'm remembering the joy of opening windows for young minds who are eager to understand their ever expanding world.

Whole Language vs. Phonics

I saw something in the newspaper a few days ago that made my hair follicles perk up. I wish I kept the article. I wasn't going to post about it, or I would have kept it. However, since I have nothing else to post about...

Some expert was saying that for autistic kids whole language was a bad way to go and is a bad way to go for most kids. The Phonics approach and the Whole Language approach to teaching reading has always been mired in controversy from the start. It made me crazy.

When I went back to teaching first grade in the early 80's we taught using phonics with basal readers (sort of like the Dick and Jane series) that had controlled vocabulary. You would introduce new words slowly so children could feel successful from the start. You also taught a LOT of phonics to help children decode new words.

Then came whole language. Basal readers became taboo. They felt that basal readers with its controlled vocabulary was boring for children and not true literature. Ummmm... for first graders? The district wanted us to teach it so badly that they threw out the basal readers and we were forbidden to teach with it. The younger teachers were all for it. The ...ummmm... older teachers (maybe I should say veteran teachers) like me (I wasn't THAT old, by the way) hid our basals and taught with them anyway. I find it humorous (hilarious) that several years later the district was asking if any of the schools had kept their basals. (Nope, I refused to give them mine. I needed it for my class. I actually passed it down to a new teacher who wanted them when I retired.)

My teaching friend and partner said she would actually have the kids reading with it in her small group and if the principal came in, she would tell her students to lay the book (politely) on their laps under the table (so that the principal wouldn't be able to see it). It was the craziest thing to think we had to resort to that. I just told the principal I will use the new whole language series but I would continue to use my basal readers for the more challenged students. Actually, in first grade I considered all my middle and lower performing kids challenged since they were just beginning to learn to read. The few top performers could start off with the whole language series. I also refused to stop teaching phonics and it was a fundamental part of my reading/writing curriculum.

In whole language we were told that you could only teach a phonics lesson if it had something to do with the story because everything in whole language needed to be meaningful.

Teachers really took sides with the whole language versus phonics approach. I am proud to say my team of first grade teachers used phonics and our kids did exceedingly well. The 2nd and 3rd grade teachers used to tell us that our kids went up well prepared.

When you get right down to it, this is what my teacher friends and I believed as far as true first grade literature went. It's all in how the teacher presents it. If the teacher uses her/his own excitement of reading to introduce each story for their students and show them a way to relate it to their own experiences they will love it. Mine did, and it didn't matter if the language was controlled. In fact, they found success in being able to decode more words on their own and not having to struggle with difficult ones before they were ready.

Don't even get me started on the math (Everyday, traditional or otherwise)...

Gosh! It's only Monday and I'm on a rant. Please forgive me.

We're going to clean out our garage tool shed today and I have to paint it. Yuuuck!

POSTSCRIPT: From the comments I'm getting, I have a feeling people are thinking that teaching phonics means not teaching comprehension. Yikes!!! Far (far, far, far) from it! We definitely taught children to comprehend and analyze what they read. How could you not? We also taught them to write about what they'd read to relate their own experiences to what they were seeing in books.