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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]They didn't.  It's a urban myth propagated by companies selling programs to "fix" dyslexia.  Your school teaches  phonics. [/quote]

Some actually don’t. I’m a teacher and I’ve seen schools that don’t. Part of the problem is Lucy Calkins Units of Study used to completely leave it out and many schools only use her for ELA (reading and writing). I guess in 2017 she started selling a phonics component. I have seen some schools use Lucy and then do phonics separately with Fundations. A lot of older kids in this country truly never got phonics instruction which is critical in k-2nd. Now these kids come to high school struggling to read and especially to write. Whole language was a trend for a while I guess and then balanced literacy came to combine whole language and phonics instruction. But Lucy Calkins used to call her curriculum balanced literacy and it very obviously left out any phonics prior to 2017.

Every school is different so PP can’t say that all schools teach phonics. Trust me- I’ve worked in schools that don’t and don’t want it taught. I think most are starting to slowly realize it’s necessary though. [/quote]

The Fountas & Pinnel curriculum is another source of balanced literacy curriculum.  The government actually had a huge reading panel that determined whole language was less effective that direct, structured instruction and then the whole language curriculum publishers tacked on a bit of phonics and rebranded as “balanced literacy”.

But there is a philosophical issue of constructivism.  Many topics are best learned through student exploration and discovery.  Whole language folks generalized from the way humans learn to speak, to how they learn to read.  Unfortunately, the 2 are not analogous in terms of brain processes at all.  Text and mathematics are both relatively modern inventions and so require direct, systematic instruction to master the basics.

Humans can absolutely engage in stories before they are able to read and write. But somehow the whole language folks extrapolated to we shouldn’t bore children by explicitly teaching them the sounds of the letters and the rules of how they work together.

If you are interested in learning more, use the term “Science of Reading” there is a lot of cross-discipline integration supporting structured instruction and it is more than just phonics. It starts with phonemic awareness and continues through morphology.[/quote]

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