Lucy Calkins alarmists

[Anonymous]

Pretty this thread is astroturfing by LC’s publisher.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:In response to the person who posted that science of reading does not allow for kids to enjoy reading at school, please note that most curriculums don't allow for enjoyment of science or social studies either. That is because school is for learning and exploring your outside interests is for home. Educators, as professionals, are there to guide your kids in what they should know. You can take your kids to the library to guide them in enjoying reading.

I’m sorry, but I am pretty sure the entire idea behind the science of reading vocabulary development is that the learning and reading IS interesting and gives kids solid background knowledge about topics so they can develop interests. They give solid facts that kids can develop true interests around. I completely disagree with the idea that first grade should be boring. I find it pitiful that you think reading and learning shouldn’t be enjoyed. Learning about science and social studies can be absolutely fascinating and the science of reading can really facilitate that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kids public has 400 kids who all come from educated and middle to upper class families. If Why hasn’t there been a peep about curriculum concerns, let alone an uproar? Is it possible that the entire teaching staff, district admin, and parents are ALL clueless? I find that hard to believe. They use F&P balanced literacy and writers workshop. I don’t know about upper elementary, but so far there’s been no homework except a weekly set of graded readers in K and 1st, and 1 math worksheet per week in 1st-2nd.

I will say virtually no students coming out of our “award winning” top high school go to top 20 colleges. A big 10 state school is the end all be all of coveted reach.

What are you talking about? There's been a nationwide uproar for several years about this. It's been huge in the educational world. If you don't know about it and have a kid in elementary school, then you have your head in the sand. Listen to the Sold a Story podcast to catch up and then read some news.

Right, my point is why haven't any of the 400 families in my area said a WORD about any of this? Our balanced literacy curriculum was just implemented in 2019, AFTER a lot of this news and studies came out. I'm not sure what the school district used prior to 2019. But there's been ZERO grumbling about how reading, literacy, writing are taught in my school. There are NO people moving to private schools except for a couple of families who opt for Catholics due to religious reasons. I'm literally the only non-Catholic looking at Catholic school, because every other person is fine with the local public. That's why I'm wondering if this Lucy Calkins / Balanced literacy bashing is really most present in our little DCUM echo chamber and among educational circles in certain areas, and the vast majority of even wealthy/educated professionals are not aware of this at all. Many universities teaching educators are still teaching methods based on Caulkins and F&P.

It is not a DCUM echo chamber at all

Entire states have banned balanced literacy, whole language, and Lucy Calkins. Mississippi was first and when their literacy test scores on NAEP rose dramatically a few years later, many other states followed.

Virginia has banned Lucy Calkins in all public schools state-wide by a bi-partisan law overwhelmingly large margins in favor in both houses of the legislature and then signed by the Governor. It is unusual for VA to adopt any law with overwhelming bi-partisan support. Virginia, like Mississippi and many other states now requires all public schools state wide to adopt an approved Science of Reading curriculum, such as CKLA.

Your families and neighborhoods have had other priorities and/or those that have heard about this do not want to upset the tables. People also don’t want to accept and worm to address the inequitable outcomes their schools have because it’s easier to dance around equity issues than solve them.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I don't ever remember writing more than a sentence until 2nd grade and I went to a top private school. We were taught the letters, then the words then how to create a sentence. When I had to write a paragraph, it was the natural next step. Then, in middle school maybe, 5 paragraphs for an essay. All completely structured. My kids were supposed to write about whatever in 1st grade and what came home was a mishmash of words. Stayed that way too, until covid, when I realized that my daughter could not write at all.

As a writer, I was floored when she had no idea how to even structure a paragraph.

What grade was she in? I think it’s important to understand what the class as a whole has learned. Was your daughter one of only a few who couldn’t grasp the concept or was the whole class doing poorly.

I have one child who is not a very good reader. She’s slow and it’s hard for her to retain what she read. As a result she doesn’t read that often for fun. She does get reading help in school and she knows how to read, she just will never be as strong a reader as most of her classmates.

My son was always more than a few grade levels ahead of his class. It’s because of the reading material he chooses. He starting reading books in 2nd grade written by comedians, their biographies, adult graphic novels, most books that involve comedy. He got the clever nuanced comedy and the big words.

I don’t fault the teacher’s style for my daughter’s inability to read well and I don’t give credit to the teaching method used for my son’s skills.

Reading above grade level doesn't always translate to writing well. Mine is reading way above grade level and spends hours reading every day. He keeps his own notebooks with notes on geology and other weird facts. He writes stories and today wrote me a menu so I could order lunch. The advanced reading shows itself in his interests and his oral language, but not in his writing. His written syntax and spelling are awful, though it's gotten a bit better since we started doing word ladders at home. I may have to find him a writing workbook or tutor for the summer. He's only in 2nd grade, but they use the work shop approach where basically all you do is freewrite on a topic or book of your choice, and that work gets "edited" by other 1st and 2nd graders, you "conference" with the teacher if you're lucky, and if you work really hard and are lucky, at the end of it you come home with a 3 page piece full of errors but at least each sentence starts with a capitol and ends with a period.

I don’t know too many 2nd graders who can spell words like receipt or beautiful. They will learn that’s “I before E except after C”. They will learn there are exceptions to all these rules they will learn, but not in second grade. That’s why I can’t understand anyone thinking 2nd graders should be spelling better. They aren’t there yet.

This isn’t a response to you but based on quite a few parents who think their first grader is gifted I would be annoyed having a know-it-all 7 year old picking through my work.

The only reason my 7th grader knows "i before e except after c" is because I taught it to her. The only reason she knows any phonics rules related to spelling are because I taught them to her. Same with grammar, other than briefly learning what nouns and verbs were in second grade.

Did your kids actually get explicit spelling and grammar instruction in a Writing Workshop school? Because Lucy says not to bother, kids will learn by reading. Except they don't. My 7th grader is a voracious reader.

Since we're now at private school with both a spelling curriculum (Houghton Mifflin) and grammar curriculum (Easy Grammar), my elementary aged kids are learning these rules.

When do spelling and grammar instruction start? DD is in 2nd and next to none so far. Spelling errors do not get marked. No spelling lists.

[Anonymous]

DP, PP-

I honestly think that even educated professionals frequently assume that the schools know best until they discover unexpected gaps in their kids' abilities.

That was me. Even though my mom had a master's in early child development.

We did some of our own phonics training and lots of nonspecific enrichment just to be proactive. But not enough math prep/remediation. I can also tell that my school district must have added some elements onto the Calkins stuff. There was paragraph construction training in 1st grade. And a little bit of spelling and grammar in second grade.

I don't hold people outside the field responsible for detecting and remediating deficits that can only be really seen holistically across large populations of students. And there's certainly been other contributory causes...the devices, the pandemic, etc.

Because of my mom's professional background, I was aware that there was a long-running phonics movement (for decades). But that's it. It wasn't until that Sold A Story podcast came out that I heard the Calkins curriculum was associated with severe underperformance. Normally I'm a bit of a news trivia person and I was pretty involved in PTA meetings and knew the curriculum supervisor because I lobbied her to fix other issues. I am surprised to have been so in the dark. So don't blame your neighbors...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't ever remember writing more than a sentence until 2nd grade and I went to a top private school. We were taught the letters, then the words then how to create a sentence. When I had to write a paragraph, it was the natural next step. Then, in middle school maybe, 5 paragraphs for an essay. All completely structured. My kids were supposed to write about whatever in 1st grade and what came home was a mishmash of words. Stayed that way too, until covid, when I realized that my daughter could not write at all.

As a writer, I was floored when she had no idea how to even structure a paragraph.

What grade was she in? I think it’s important to understand what the class as a whole has learned. Was your daughter one of only a few who couldn’t grasp the concept or was the whole class doing poorly.

I have one child who is not a very good reader. She’s slow and it’s hard for her to retain what she read. As a result she doesn’t read that often for fun. She does get reading help in school and she knows how to read, she just will never be as strong a reader as most of her classmates.

My son was always more than a few grade levels ahead of his class. It’s because of the reading material he chooses. He starting reading books in 2nd grade written by comedians, their biographies, adult graphic novels, most books that involve comedy. He got the clever nuanced comedy and the big words.

I don’t fault the teacher’s style for my daughter’s inability to read well and I don’t give credit to the teaching method used for my son’s skills.

Reading above grade level doesn't always translate to writing well. Mine is reading way above grade level and spends hours reading every day. He keeps his own notebooks with notes on geology and other weird facts. He writes stories and today wrote me a menu so I could order lunch. The advanced reading shows itself in his interests and his oral language, but not in his writing. His written syntax and spelling are awful, though it's gotten a bit better since we started doing word ladders at home. I may have to find him a writing workbook or tutor for the summer. He's only in 2nd grade, but they use the work shop approach where basically all you do is freewrite on a topic or book of your choice, and that work gets "edited" by other 1st and 2nd graders, you "conference" with the teacher if you're lucky, and if you work really hard and are lucky, at the end of it you come home with a 3 page piece full of errors but at least each sentence starts with a capitol and ends with a period.

I don’t know too many 2nd graders who can spell words like receipt or beautiful. They will learn that’s “I before E except after C”. They will learn there are exceptions to all these rules they will learn, but not in second grade. That’s why I can’t understand anyone thinking 2nd graders should be spelling better. They aren’t there yet.

This isn’t a response to you but based on quite a few parents who think their first grader is gifted I would be annoyed having a know-it-all 7 year old picking through my work.

The only reason my 7th grader knows "i before e except after c" is because I taught it to her. The only reason she knows any phonics rules related to spelling are because I taught them to her. Same with grammar, other than briefly learning what nouns and verbs were in second grade.

Did your kids actually get explicit spelling and grammar instruction in a Writing Workshop school? Because Lucy says not to bother, kids will learn by reading. Except they don't. My 7th grader is a voracious reader.

Since we're now at private school with both a spelling curriculum (Houghton Mifflin) and grammar curriculum (Easy Grammar), my elementary aged kids are learning these rules.

When do spelling and grammar instruction start? DD is in 2nd and next to none so far. Spelling errors do not get marked. No spelling lists.

You might not see much. It depends on your school. Ask the teacher. See if you can find an app that has a good spelling game and reward performance with stickers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Is any public school actually using a curriculum with student workbooks? Ours does phonics, secret stories, heggarty, but from what I can there is no set textbook or workbook. They do literacy exercises on the tablet or Chromebook, and whatever writing or phonics work I see on paper is clearly just printed off from a TPT type of website. Same with math! Aren’t kids supposed to be working math on paper in a student workbooks? Our school send home a photocopied sheet of homework once a week and there’s no textbook to go over material or explain anything if DD struggles (which she hasn’t so far, but should there be something available at home for me to help her if necessary?).

Do the Benchmark packets count as workbooks? I think they do, I've been really impressed by them and all the worksheets that come home with my 3rd grader. A lot of parents think it's too hard for their kids, but I think it's necessary. Very impressed, and I hope they stick with it and parents stop complaining - it's only hard because their children weren't taught properly until now.

Benchmark is pretty awful. I’m glad schools are moving toward structured literacy, and there are some good programs out there, but Benchmark is not it.

-O-G Tutor