Tuesday, August 22, 2017

How to teach phonics



About 20% of children disengage from reading when they are confused. These are the children spoken about in many of the articles in Children of the Code. One such quote is from Nancy Hennessy who was president of the International Dyslexia Association (IDA) from 2003-2005.

“……even if we settle on a middle number, let us say 10%; that still leaves a lot of children who are not dyslexic, whose brains are not wired any different way, who have reading difficulty.

We are not supporting the learning of our teachers in order for them to do what we are talking about

We still don’t have the capacity nor the will to change what it is that we are doing with reading early on and so consequently unless we make those significant changes we are not only going to lose the dyslexics but I am also concerned about these other children; these other struggling readers.”


Most of the “These struggling readers” stated by Nancy above are kids who disengage from reading because they are confused.

I have posted videos here and in LinkedIn on the wrong way of teaching phonics. I hope someone here will take the initiative to disallow such videos from being made available to the children around the world. (See note below) Kids who watch these videos even before they go into kindergarten will have disengaged from learning to read long before entering grade school. AND then we will label these kids as stupid and lazy and classify them as dyslexics.

Here is one of many videos from the internet which I believe is what kids should listen to. The teacher here does not add vowel sounds to consonants. No kid will disengage from reading if phonics is taught in this manner.

I disagree with teacher Belk saying that each vowel has two sounds. Each vowel has more than two sounds as mentioned in my posts. This is an important point as when the kids predisposed to shutting down come across vowel sound that are different from the two sounds taught to them, they may shut-down. However, if sounds of alphabets are taught this way all kids will learn to read well.


The word ‘fox’ was introduced in the above video and this was one of the words my student refused to read out loud as she had been taught the sound of the letter ‘f’ as ‘fuh’. As such, to this kid the sound of the word ‘fox’ should have been ‘fuh-ox’.

You may read about this in my blog at: http://www.dyslexiafriend.com/2010/02/unlearn.html

Please read the comments when you view the above post.

Note: The video by teacher Belk was Published on Feb 18, 2012 but has only 1,486,243 views.

The video where phonics is taught wrongly and will definitely disengage kids predisposed to shutting down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgJ0dJUfglQ

Was published on Jul 29, 2015 and as at 5th August 2017 there were 5,414,893 views

I just checked the web-site above and saw the following: "Endless Reader FULL Level 1..." The YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement.

The following you tube has also been terminated,

I like to believe that these two videos have been terminated because of my complaints. Excuse me for patting myself on my back. I am elated.

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