I had a little extra time this morning (plus I'm too huge to move with this giant baby in my belly) so I googled DI to learn more about it. I first noticed "100 easy lessons" here in the ADI homepage store.
http://www.adihome.org/Apparently DI was created for students with developmental disabilities to get them up to par to be able to learn from regular curriculum
This cross-over from disabled program to the general public is not unusual. I've heard that
Montessori was first used here for disabled kids and then it was discovered that it works well for some gifted students. I heard a rumor that "your baby can read" was designed for down-syndrome people. They decided if "someone with half a brain can learn using this program, why couldn't a normal baby?". And it worked.
Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons is a compressed version of DISTAR's direct instruction for teaching and remediation.
http://www.startreading.com/. �Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons� is a book published by Simon and Schuster, not by the SRA Division of McGraw-Hill, which publishes most of the DI materials.
http://xypt.org/read.htmlAnd here's a list of DI books which includes "100 lessons" and their new computer program "Funnix".
http://www.specialconnections.ku.ed...p;section=main&subsection=di/readingWow, sometimes I even bore myself, but I can't stop collecting useless trivia. It fascinates me. I also just read somewhere in these links that the reason the public school systems prefer phonics to whole word reading is purely aesthetic not functional.
"The underlying premise of reading instruction by means of Direct Instruction is that written English is not a set of hieroglyphics, like the ancient Egyptian, nor ideograms, like written Chinese, but is a system of phonetic spelling, which in general follows definite rules. That English orthography follows rules means that reading and writing can be systematically taught...
The language has a great many more, somewhere estimated as over 500,000 words. It would be wholly impractical to have a written form of the language, which depends on ideograms, or even on �sight words.� Teachers, who stress �sight words� without teaching how the language is written and spelled, are limiting reading to a set of written-out ideograms."
So we learn phonics because it's the structure of our language. (even though your baby can read is sight words and works a lot faster). Maybe there's no good reason to teach children the hard way and phonics is just used because that's what we've been using since we found it.
But this system is in place to educate large masses of kids simultaneously. Homeschooling can be much more flexible in it's approach because the student receives more one on one attention than the school system can afford to offer. I think the point of this thread was to reconcile large-scale mass education with the flexibility of homeschooling, unless I missed the point.
