Glued Sounds: The Exceptions
I have always felt teaching reading should have explicit phonics instruction. I believed that while teaching in schools that had other programs. At that time, I taught phonics and kept my mouth shut about it because shamers were certainly out there.
Now I feel teaching phonics can be a slippery slope. Here's why. So I had fifth grade students (low first grade reading level Swahili speakers) who got "kill and drill" instruction through their homeroom teachers and tutors about digraphs. When I asked them to say words with the digraphs they could NOT. When I read words with digraphs they couldn't tell me the meanings. This is how teaching of phonics can go off the deep end in my view.
There must be a balance. I am certainly not a "kill and drill" teacher and never have been. It's incredibly boring and mostly useless unless the context is there. Not only is context important, but a student's personal experiences and knowledge base is crucial. In fact all of their experiences are unique to them so somehow in the teaching of these kids there has to be a way to bring the content to be comprehensible and relevant to each of them. I included short selections here that my students would understand and that would be relevant to their experiences (excepting very new ESL learners).
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| Glued Sounds: The Exceptions |
