Phil Robbins
Success in high school and later college begins in the first and second grades. It is not only important that the child learns to read to TO READ WELL. And herein lies the problem. It is not easy for the average parent to determine how well his child is reading because there is little consistency between benchmarks or standards for measuring achievement in different schools, different schools districts, different states or on state and federal tests. It is better to train your child to read well on all types of non-fiction material than to depend on test results.
To accomplish this, one should first make sure that this child is well grounded in phonics, an important part of the English language. In fact, in Parade Magazine's article dated September 23, 2007, "Can Bill Gates Fix Our Failing Schools?," Gates argues for using phonics to teach reading. "When we gave up phonics," he says, "we destroyed the reading ability of those kids."
So what's the situation now? The schools are teaching phonics along with the whole language approach, but often not very effectively. In computer jargon they are teaching what we might call "Phonics Lite." Most schools do not use a comprehensive, structured program. Using this approach, if the child does not learn to read, they can blame phonics and not the way it is taught.
What can parents do? First, get a good phonics program to teach their children. There are a lot of commercial programs on the market--Hooked on Phonics (lots of songs), The Phonics Game (card games), Zoo Phonics (uses animals for learning), Jolly Phonics (more traditional), Frontline Phonics (claims to be fun and exciting), and scads of others.
Then we have all the phonics materials produced by the major textbook publishers. These are usually complete programs that include workbooks, flash cards, specially designed books to read, sets of overhead transparencies, all kinds of computer software, and more. Of course, the whole idea is to put together colorful packages of expensive printing that they can sell to schools for tens of thousands of dollars. Even the commercial products often include special reading materials to justify the cost of the programs. The sales pitch is that your child is at risk in learning to read unless the experience is fun, exciting, entertaining and probably takes place in some type of Fantasyland. But when the kids grow up and fail to function in Realityland, everyone in the education system has a long list of reasons why things went wrong.
Parent's Guide to Teaching Phonics. This is the program that I would recommend, not just because I developed it, but because it has a lot of advantages not found in others. Let's take a look.
- It is comprehensive and highly structured. It comprises 16 units covering all aspects of phonics--short and long vowel sounds, initial and terminal double and triple blends in combination with vowel sounds, word families, digraphs and diphthongs (vowel combinations that make a variety of sounds), two-syllable words, common endings, unusual sounds and combination, words with silent letters, irregular combinations, and more.
- The course provides instruction using either written or sound files that walk the parent and child throughevery exercise so no prior knowledge of phonics or teaching is required. Simple to use--just open the unit that you are studying; then open your media player and click on the appropriate sound file; finally, bring the visual unit back on screen while the sound file plays by clicking on the task bar on the bottom of the screen.
- Vocabulary lists including definitions , arranged by phonics unit and exercise, are another important part of the course. What is the point of the child learning to read and pronounce words if he doesn't know what they mean? A typical example of a vocabulary entry is:
fad (f²d) n. A fashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time; a craze.
The list for Unit 1 starts out with ant, apple, bad, bat, cab, cat, dab, etc. Unit 2 starts out with add, Al, am, an, at, Bab, ban, gap, etc. The same thing is done with the other short vowels: e,i, o, and u. Unit 3 starts out with bump, camp, damp, dump, lamp, lump, etc. Needless to say, as the child progresses through the course, he learns thousands of new words far faster than he will in school.
These vocabulary lists serve two other purposes: (1) The child can reinforce what he has learned just by reading the words in blue. (2) Children can be tested for their knowledge of phonics by having them read the works in bluue. Parents can quickly tell whether their children need this type of training.
The parent and child can complete the entire course of 16 units in about 4 months spending 20 to 30 minutes a day. The entire course comes on two CD's complete with visual course files, sound files and vocabulary files. You can also teach the course without a computer by printing out the visual files and playing the sound files on any inexpensive CD player.
Proposal
The purpose of the following proposal is to give every student in Oregon, kindergarten through the second grade, and their parents as well as others an opportunity to try out the first three units of Phonics for Parents on CD for $7.00. This is to cover the cost of manufacturing, packaging and mailing. The CD includes the complete visual materials, sound files and vocabulary files for the first three units. And if parents decide to purchase the whole course, we'll even subtract the seven dollars from the special promotion price of $50.00. To order send $7.00 check, cash or money order to PAR Publishing Company, 8964 SE Bristol Park Drive, Happy Valley, OR 97086.
