Reply to Why are people so upset about Common Core?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Why are people so upset about Common Core?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Skilled readers use multiple types of cues, integrating them, and switching back and forth between them effortlessly.  They have large sight word vocabularies, and also use a lot of syntactical and meaning cues.  They often use the sounds in words to check and monitor accuracy rather than to figure out the words in the first place.  However, skilled readers definitely need to have phonics skills as part of their arsenal.  Without phonics skills, readers can't figure out new words, or connect new words to verbal sources of information.  In addition, strong phonics skills can help a student develop strong spelling skills, and later on, to learn a new language.

Research supports phonics instruction for beginning readers. It tells us that curricula that incorporate phonics produce better results than those that don't, and that struggling readers often have deficits in phonemic awareness and phonics, and benefit from direct phonics instruction.

That doesn't mean that reading instruction should be all phonics all the time.  In the school where I teach, a public school in a state using the CC standards, our first graders get about 2 1/2 hours a day of literacy instruction.  For most students, this includes about 15 minutes of direct instruction in phonics, where they practice sorting, reading and writing words outside of the context of a story or an informational text.  In addition, students are giving opportunities to practice noticing patterns and applying skills in context. Teachers might select a poem for shared reading that highlights rhyming patterns, or show kids how to generalize a phonics skill during a mini lesson or strategy group.  Kids get practice with the sounds in words in Writer's Workshop, as they stretch out words and represent the sounds they hear, and use tools like word walls that are arranged alphabetically.  Similarly, kids get practice with sight words and meaning cues in isolation, and in context.

Having said all of that in support of phonics, kids follow lots of different paths to reading.  Some kids excel at learning phonics in isolation, and apply these skills early to their work in context.  In the beginning, some of these kids might show the kinds of errors that are common to kids whose phonics skills are a relative strength.  For example, they might get tripped up by a word like "come" which should logically be pronounced "Koam", or fail to use meaning or syntax to notice and fix errors.

Other kids will experience early success with sight words or meaning cues, and will make other kinds of errors such as reading "no" for "on, or "pony" for "horse".  Many of these kids will come to phonics via memorizing large numbers of words, and then noticing the patterns within those words and applying those patterns to new words.

Either way, a child who is progressing well in reading should be able to demonstrate the skills listed in the Common Core.  [/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