Reply to APS - Which Phonics Program did your school adopt?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Reading Specialist here...  at a Title 1 school

1. Lucy Calkins is not a program. She is a person who leads the literacy think tank at Teacher's College in NYC. There are hundreds of staff developers that write the Units of Study.

2. The UOS are not a scripted program. They are a transcript and a resource to teach reading, writing, and phonics.  All teachers have the ability to make the lessons their own by editing parts of the mini lesson.

3. The PhUOS is not just something Lucy thought up. They consulted the best of the best in word work ( Patricia Cunningham and many, many others) to build a program that is engaging, research based and developmentally appropriate.

4.  It is laughable that you think the UOS teach students to "guess at pictures". Have you seen every single lesson k-8? In the early developmental stages of reading, teachers teach students to use strategic actions to word solve and yes in very early readers, one thing students do is use pictures to help them cross check to make sure a word looks right, sounds right, and makes sense.

5. Yes, phonics instruction is vital to reading development AND it can not occur in isolation. In order to transfer to reading and writing- you need both- explicit phonics instruction AND authentic reading practice. This is why they developed the Phonics UOS. Teachers all across the country were noticing that they were teaching phonics and word work in isolation and there was no transfer to writing- same with spelling lists. Reading and writing should compliment each other.

So here is the thing- Inmost counties here, everyone uses the workshop model- why? Because students need to want to read and be given long stretches of time to read- centers and other previous ways of teaching reading look cute but don't always= reading growth. Workshop is all about responsive teaching. A short focus lesson and the rest of the block is for teachers meeting with kids one on one and in small groups.

In my title 1 school, the increase in reading engagement has been incredible using the workshop model and the UOS. To say this program is just for advanced readers is incorrect. Adding the phonics program last year was what really supported a lot of our lower readers who needed that foundational base. We have never seen more growth than we saw last year using all three UOS. Yes, only one year but we had not seen that level of growth before.

And no, I don't work for TC.  But I will say that in my 19 years of teaching reading, it is the best proefssional development I have ever attended . How many of you have sat in your student's classroom during a UOS Phonics lesson? Before you crucify a resource, perhaps don't believe everything you hear on an annonymous message board.

Have a great day![/quote]

Thank you. I suspect the poster with the biggest bee in her bonnet over this is the same one, NOT a teacher, who posts things like this on AEM:

“If you are a teacher, in APS or anywhere, please read this so that you  can understand why phonics is so important as a foundation for all readers and that strategies like 'guessing' or figuring out the word from pictures or context is NOT the way we want our kids to learn to read.  So many resources on the market today have adopted the WRONG approach for teaching our kids to read.  Please don't contribute to passing along strategies that aren't grounded in the science for how people learn to read.”

If I were a teacher it would REALLY rub me the wrong way to be lectured like this. [/quote]

DP.  That would irk me too. So what?

If you're a teacher, just don't do that. Don't teach guessing. Not educated guessing, not wild guessing.  Teach reading.[/quote]

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