Lucy Caulkins was wrong about reading
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Anonymous
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This isnt news. Maybe i am late to the party but just wanted to share anyway.
And has now incorporated phonics in its revised curriculum. But its too late for the students who struggled because of her. It’s appalling that our kid’s education is just a money making business and mcps continues to pick sub par curriculums over and over again. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curriculum-phonics.html |
Anonymous
| NP. In addition to the article, I recommend listening to the Sold a Story podcast. It gives a little more background into how this whole thing started, and spoiler alert, Lucy wasn't the only one making money off of it. Nor was MCPS the only school system that got suckered in. |
Anonymous
| Can you explain this a little bit more. The link takes you to A page that you can only read if you sign up for the new York times. |
Anonymous
| Phonics works for sone kids and not others. It did not work for my kids. |
Anonymous
Focusing on phonics made me struggle. I think it may be helpful to some but not everyone. |
Anonymous
Dropping Lucy Caulkins isn't taking anything away as the model basically assumes that kids will teach themselves by looking at the pictures. Some kids can manage that and those kids will still teach themselves with or without the Lucy Caulkins curriculum. For the rest of the kids, it's essential that we actually teach them to read. The best way to do that is through phonics. |
Anonymous
It has to be taught well. I did Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lesson with both my kids and they have excelled. Knowing phonics and how to put together those sounds really does provide a great foundation. |
Anonymous
Did you do the Lucy Caulkins? It was pointing at a picture of a cat and saying "cat" and hoping by osmosis the kid would learn to read the word. Phonics isn't the only thing taught, it's also still figuring out the words. Whereas when Lucy Caulkins was taught, no phonics at all was taught. |
Anonymous
If you Google, it's been covered ad nauseum in the press. Not a new story. |
Anonymous
I LOVE that book. I wish my school taught reading the same way I did with that book. It's just such a perfect book. I also liked that it told me what to say as a parent. I am not a teacher and didn't know the right words to use to help and not criticize. |
Anonymous
OP here- yes totally recommend listening to sold a story podcast. Agree mcps wasn’t the only one to adopt this curriculum. |
Anonymous
MCPS doesn't/hasn't used Lucy Calkins Units of Study in Reading in schools. There are some schools that use her writing curriculum, but that is not what the article or the recent buzz it about. |
Anonymous
Pre-pandemic I recall being at a happy hour for the moms of the kids in my daughter's girl scout troop. Eight of the ten moms were desperate to find a reading tutor because they'd just been informed that their end-of-first-grade daughters were woefully behind in reading. At the time I thought something had to be wrong--there was no way so many smart kids from engaged parents could be that far behind. The next year the Lucy Caulkin's criticism hit the news and it all made sense. One of those kids did turn out to be dyslexic. The rest just hadn't been taught to read and they eventually caught up with the help of very expensive outside reading tutors. |
Anonymous
If you talk to teachers, the writing curriculum is also terrible. It assumes kids already know how to write and if you just give them a pencil and time they'll figure it out themselves. APS used both the LC reading and writing curricula. |
Anonymous
NP here. I cannot link to the article so I will try to answer your question. Lucy Calkins was never an expert on reading. She got into the field by way of her writing program, which was influenced by a workshop-based approach she observed in progressive English schools. As I observe it, she let the philosophy - not the science - dictate the curriculum content she produced. She was quoted at a conference Q&A once saying that she was skeptical that dyslexia existed. She used the Ken Goodman's "three cueing system," which encouraged young students to look at context and the pictures, etc. to tackle unfamiliar words, rather than "sounding them out". Goodman's work has essentially been superseded by about 25 years of neuroscience and other reading research. Lucy's philosophy included a print-rich environment and developing a love of reading through giving students choices and interesting texts. Her detractors argue that in fact, ignoring reading science (including, but not limited to phonics) leads to lower outcomes later on, less love of reading, and diminished ability to read complex texts. In the NYT piece, she admits that she was wrong to discount so much reading research for so many years. If you're interested in three-cueing, here's an article with more info. https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/is-this-the-end-of-three-cueing/2020/12 Lucy's influence in MCPS is more indirect than direct. Some schools use her writing workshop, which has a similar feel: exciting and rich for kids who pick up skills "by osmosis" but insufficient for the majority who need to be explicitly taught. If you look, you can still see evidence of three cueing in MCPS. It's found in the Fountas & Pinnell system that the county uses to determine students' "reading level". |