Readings

I am probably in a different category than most of my classmates in that I am a true proponent of the Phonics method of learning the Alphabet and reading. I started school in first=grade at the age of seven in 1959 in a Catholic Parochial school and we were taught with Phonics. We were taught to "sound out the letters" if we had difficulty with q word. Later when I became the mother of two daughters, the oldest took quickly to the whole-word recognition they were teaching because she pretty much memorized the words with a photographic memory and was able to read books at a young age because she simply memorized what she had heard me say. They placed her in a gifted class by 2nd grade. The second daughter was totally lost, and I went over the phonics method with her myself and tried to help her with spelling, but spelling was very hard for her. So no one method fits all students. Most can get the "whole word recognition" of "cat", "dog" and "the", but the more letters you add to a word, the more valuable knowing how to "sound it out can be".

I also was amazed when reading a TIME Article on line from 1955, Education: Why Johnny Can't Read" to learn that Phonics only came back into fashion in the late 1950s after they had started using whole word recognition in the 1930s and realized it was not working. The quote from the TIME article (Monday, March 14, 1955) opening reads:
When Best selling Author Rudolf Flesch (The Art of Plain Talk) offered to give a friend's twelve-year-old son "remedial reading", Flesch discovered that the boy was not slow or maladjusted; he had merely been' exposed to ordinary American school.'"

In another article dated Friday, 11 February, 2011, entitled "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" by Sam Blumenfeld, he addresses the fact that in the 1930s they there out the alphabetic-phonics method, in which one sounds out words, and replaced it with the new "sight-whole word" or "look-say method. on page two of the article he mentioned a 1944 LIFE Magazine article on the epidemic of dyslexia in American children, and mentions the case of a little girl with an I.Q. of 118 who was examined for Dyslexia. After tests, doctors concluded she needed thyroid treatments, removal of tonsils and adenoids, exercises for eye muscles, but no one suggested trying to teach her using Phonics. So sad hat the school system thinks every student can learn to read the same exact way.

LiteracyWeek1.1.pdf (244.94 KB)

LiteracyWeek1.2.pdf (489.52 KB)

Attached are my thoughts and notes about the video and reading

My notes on the video and Johhny Can't Read are below. I ended up finding this www.historyliteracy.org/newsletters/histlit.2005.28.2.pdf article on Johnny can't read and got an interesting history of how reading has been taught and the reactions to the book. The whole-word versus phonics debate got me wondering how other languages teach reading and whether it is actually harder for English speaking children to read than for children learning a language like Spanish where every letter makes the same sound in every word with very few exceptions. I wonder if the highly irregular nature of English would mean that solely using phonics would not be as effective as it would be in other languages? 

Literacy notes 1 (372.67 KB)

I found this quote from the Brozo video intriguing: "To use literature with positive male archetypes as entry points into active literacy." The part I found the most interesting was the positive male archetypes which Brozo says are not limited to being macho or a buffoon. I was thinking about the book that was my entry point (Harry Potter) and if it represented a positive female archetype. "Masculinity" or "femininity" tend to be classifications that put individuals into boxes and so I wonder if this would be limiting to young boys. As kids are developing, I feel like they should be free to explore who they are outside of a gender classification. I wonder if it would be better to use a book that centered around a topic that was of interest to a particular boy. I am curious as to why Brozo thinks that literature that contains positive male archetypes should be used as an entry point.

In addition, I read an article that dealt with literacy messages found in young children's TV programs and if positive or negative messages had an effect on children's attitudes toward reading. Previous studies have supported the notion that positive messages in TV positively impact how children view an academic area. For example, after watching a math oriented educational program, 8 to 12 year olds attitudes toward math significantly increased. However, this current study did not find that television literacy messages impact children's literacy attitudes but that this might be due to the experiment not uncovering the effects that exist. These mixed results from research make me wonder the impact that television, not only in young children but in adolescents as well, has on how children view literacy and how we can use that in a positive way.

attached are my annotated reading for why Johnny Can't Read: 50 years of controversy.

Why Johnny Can't Read blog.

Made a thread for all our notes related to the Brozo video and Johnny Can't Read, so we can all post them here (I could not recall if we only wanted to do them for specific sides of the classroom, but if so this can simply be The Right Side's thread. Otherwise everyone's welcome to use this).


 No clue how to actually insert images into the post, the "Insert Images" button did not distinctly show an image prior to making the thread, so I just saved mine as images on an image-sharing site since I didn't want to make them attachments to download. Their links are provided below.

imgur.com/EkLhEiW

imgur.com/oDMUeS6