Reply to Is teaching reading no longer school’s responsibility?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Is teaching reading no longer school’s responsibility?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I teach kindergarten in a different state.  Every school I know teaches reading intensively.  Yes, we teach about 50 sight words in kindergarten.  The reason is that some words cannot be sounded out and must be memorized.  Also, at least the first most common 100 words make up 25% of all written material any person will encounter in their lifetime.  So it makes logical, science backed research sense to memorize some sight words.  Not doing this would be very, very stupid.  But sight words are only about 5-10% of my reading instructional time.  I spend a large amount of time (maybe 40-50%) on both phonemic awareness and phonics.  A large amount of time.

Then, I spend a small amount of time teaching kids some of the science based methods that some posters refer to as guessing.  Things like cross checking the first letter and the picture or thinking of what would make sense.  (10% timewise) Combined with strong phonics and phonemic awareness, these additional skills are things that all good readers do.  Research supports teaching these skills explicitly so we do.  We also spend time, though less than I'd like because I'm in a half day program, on comprehension, vocabulary and fluency.  (The remaining 30% or so)

When I put all these things together as they are meant to work, not in isolation, but in conjunction, I see about 5-10% of my students who still struggle at the end of kindergarten.  This is in a very low income area with second language also playing a part.  That's a high success rate.  And of the kids who struggle at the end of kindergarten, some just aren't ready developmentally but we catch them in first grade.  The few we don't, typically have special needs and then those kids are served through IEP minutes.

I cannot imagine the heartache involved in having a child with a disability or a special need.  I cannot imagine seeing my own children struggle in school.  That is obviously so painful.  I might lash out at my kids' schools too if I were in that situation.  I wish everyone the best and I do hope every school can reach more kids this year with the help of caring parents.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics