Reply to Things public schools no longer teach and why?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Things public schools no longer teach and why?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Why don't kids read at grade level? Here are a few reasons.

1) Many school districts don't teach students HOW to read and write. My district uses Fundations for reading but there is no actual curriculum for writing. Soooooooo, kids don't know HOW to write. Our ELA curriculum wants kindergarten students to be able to write a paragraph but there is no actual instruction on HOW to write. Oooops! Major oversight there.

2) Once students are accurate and fluent readers, they have to have enough background knowledge and vocabulary to be able to understand what they are reading. Most districts don't have any background-building curriculum and therefore, these students suffer on tests where there are random passages that basically measure background knowledge. Years ago, at a PD, the teachers read a 3rd-grade passage released by the state of MD that was a reading passage on the PARCC assessment. I had my students read the passage and underline anything they didn't understand (vocab, etc). It was a passage about sea turtles. We read it together and talked about their highlighted words/passages, etc. Nearly 100% of my 4th graders did not know what the word "sea" meant. Most of them also didn't pick up its meaning from other vocab like "seaweed" and "driftwood." I asked my son to read it and he understood it. Why? Probably because he had been to the beach, had maps in our kitchen, loved looking at his children's atlas of the world, etc. He knew what the word "sea" meant and could figure out a lot of the underknown words.

3) Students don't read as much as they used to. I bet if you measured the number of words students read now compared to when I was in school or when my mother was in school, you would be shocked at the difference. Students use laptops/ipads during school and a lot of time, they are playing various games. My students rarely read at home because they say it is "boring." I bet it is compared to video games. If nobody at home reads either.... They also have no reading stamina because they aren't used to reading for long periods of time. So much of what they read in school is brief passages that are similar to what you find on assessments.[/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