Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Reading with Phonics...

Interesting that "Dick and Jane" are smack-dab in the middle between sound and meaning! And the only method in the middle like that.

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing that!

I remember my mom telling me that one of my older sisters taught me to read around 4; she showed me the first book I read: Kalumi the Brave - I am still trying to figure out how that could be the case. It is a really beautiful visually stunning picture book, but definitely not a first reader.

I loved loved loved diagramming sentences; especially the bit where you do the gerunds - up on that little stilt-platform. (what a dork! )

I might have to check out the Dick and Jane books for dd, I know I've seen them at the Borders, I wonder if they have them deep in the library somewhere...

Interesting website OHG. Thanks for finding it. It really answered my question about phonic method.

And I also ponder the amazing things my grandmother saw in her life. She was 94 when she passed last year. She grew up in a share cropper community and used transportation of horse and buggy. I have some amazing pictures of the extended family usually around the new car since it clearly was a luxury that not everbody could afford. Then fastforward to not only cars being the main transportation, but planes, sputnik leading to the race in space. Also the technology world and the wars that drove it. What an amazing time to have lived.

And the Dick and Jane books have made a come back of sorts. Last year I made DD a summer halter dress using the Dick and Jane fabrics. It is absolutely adorable with the text on the bodice and the pictures for the skirt. I really am hoping that she can still wear it this year. Also I was able to find a little dick and jane set at Half Price books for hardly anything. I don't think I have seen the books at Barnes and Nobles but you probably could order them online.

this is the one I started my girls on "A Treasury of Dick and Jane" It has lots of stories and is almost 200 pages long.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/A-...f-Grosset-Dunlap/e/9780448433400/?itm=77

Hope this helps

I cannot remember learning how to read or a time when I could not read. But I do remember the Letter People from Kindergarten. I can still see those inflatable characters sitting around the room. I think they were trying to teach us phonics with it and teach us some simple words like CAT. I did not learn anything, but the songs and characters were kind of fun. (And so was the sand table.) I recently saw that they have revised the Letter People to be more PC and that they are still being used in some private schools.

My father has mentioned that when he was in first grade (early 40s), the teacher would not let the class move on in reading until every single kid could read whatever they were learning. He said they went over it and over it until everyone was completely bored. I think he still has bad feelings when he thinks about it. What a great approach to education!

I was taught to read with phonics as a child. I really didn't know there was another way until my cousin, a teacher, told me about whole reading. It seemed bizarre to me since it was so different from what I had learned. I also wondered how are you were supposed to read a word you had never seen before since you could not sound it out. When my children were ready to learn to read, I taught them using phonics since that is all I knew and they were not in school yet. One of my friends let me borrow a set of Dick & Jane books while I was teaching my youngest to read. Though she had learned the basics of phonics and was already reading, her reading fluency improved dramatically once she started using the Dick & Jane books.

These days the newest rage is balanced literacy which is essentially a combination of phonics and whole reading.

I dug around on the net, and it appears I was wrong about the McGuffey Readers having the phonetic markings. The first books I read at home were very old, at least my mother's first books, posssible her mother's. Those books had phonetic markings. I'll have to look around and find them. I inherited a bunch of old books when mom & dad passed on a number of years ago.

I wonder if whole word reading comes back in fashion as they see some of the brightest kids pick up reading that way at first? I found this in the website I linked,
I wonder if that's why so many teachers think the kids "all level out about 3rd-4th grades"?

I'm like lily -- I don't remember before I could read -- I know I was reading well enough in K to read directions on the worksheets and work ahead! And I zoned out and didn't pay attention when they *were* working on reading, and was subject accelerated over first grade reading ... I'm almost positive I learned to read with whole words.

I'm pretty sure they did phonics, but I'm not positive. I'm one of the younger parents on here, I'm pretty sure (I'm 26).


In my experience this is completely *not right.* Aren't thousands of examples intuitively enough for sounding out new words? Ds6 was an early self-taught whole-word reader, was never "taught" phonics beyond "b says buh" (until K when he was already reading longer chapter books) but made the leap to being able to decode unfamiliar words by the time he was 3.5 or so. He just internalized the rules from the words that he knew by sight, no phonics instruction necessary.

He may have used sight words as training wheels (and adults read using whole word recognition!), but it certainly wasn't "only the illusion of reading"! If a kid is reading Beverly Cleary without overtly being taught phonics, I'm pretty sure he was really reading.

I guess ND kids have a harder time making that leap when they do whole-word instruction? Well, obviously, I guess ... I'm not trying to sound snotty, it just seems odd to me! It doesn't seem like that much of a leap, with thousands of sight words under your belt, to not internalize many phonics rules without the overt teaching. Say, you recognize the word "apple" without sounding it out. Well, you know a says "ah", p says "puh", l says "ll" ... can most third or fourth graders really not make the leap from "apple" to, say, "apply"?

I guess I don't know. My "normal-dar" is a little skewed.

ETA: Oh. I see that this quote is from a website called "The Phonics Page." Maybe a little skewed, ya think? I should check sources before I go on rants!

I agree, Mia. Maybe it is a difference between how GT kids read and how ND kids read, but I don't necessarily think that phonics have to be drilled into kids or that whole word reading is so limiting as all that.

Fluent readers read whole word. Phonics always seemed to me to be a way to get kids to the point of being able to read whole word. If a GT kid starts at whole word on his/her own and is able to apply that knowledge to new words, I don't really see any reason to belabor phonics instruction. I also don't get why an ND kid couldn't internalize the rules of pronunciation when taught whole word.

I think some combination of phonics and whole word instruction is probably best, but I also don't buy the "they just memorized 1000-2000 words and couldn't really read" statement about whole word instruction. That seems loopy to me. If the kids knew the alphabet and "B says buh," how could this be?

Me too! That is one of the few activities from school that i remember, and i remember loving it! Dorks unite!