Here are some tweets from 29.11.2020 which I rather not respond on Twitter as the person twitting has not responded to my rebuttals ever.
denyse Ritchie @dejaynjd Replying to @eeharrington4 @NarelleLynch1 and 2 others
Is it ‘decoding’ or reading comprehension the year 4 slump is exposing? Many children can read but it is their lack of vocabulary understanding & spelling/writing skills that is failing them.
Jedlie, in his interview with Dr. Kathryn Garforth, asked the following question:
We teach that ‘c’ is for cat and ‘a’ is for apple. We are not letting them know early enough that ‘a’ is for apple most of the time but there are other times when ‘a’ makes (represents) a different sound. When should we introduce that idea to the kids?
The following are extracts of the Podcast. You may listen to the podcast here.
Dr. Kathryn Garforth:
Reading can be broken down into two components:
i. Decoding words
ii. Understand the meaning / language comprehension.
Some kids guess because they don’t know what else to do. They haven’t been taught phonics or strategies for breaking down multi-syllabic words.
They may not have been taught to rote memorise the Dolch Words as I have done in my lessons. Rote memorisation of Dolch words is an excellent supplement to phonics instruction. Rote memory of Dolch words increases a kid’s familiarity of high frequency words which he will encounter in every book he reads.
We will learn how to figure out new words from the word families we have learned. We will do it in detail in later chapters but keep the following in mind when you read storybooks to your child. Ask them to figure out new words and you will be surprised at what they can do.
In chapter 12 we are learning the word family ‘oo’.
It a Twitter discussion on 15.10.2020 Dr. Kathryn Garforth had said:
I don't have the time to become an expert in Tamil, but it is my understanding that it typically represents words at the syllable level and not the phoneme level which means that, like Chinese, it does not require the same level of phonological awareness.
I do not want to travel down this road as it diverges from my main theme of my blog posts but since it has been twitted I think I should say a few things and hope Dr. Garforth will give us her views once her busy period is over.
Here are two words, ‘baby’ and ‘do’, that you need to explain to your child/student.
Your child has learned the sounds represented by ‘a’ as in apple and ‘a’ as in around in lesson 1. This is the first time he is encountering another sound represented by the letter ‘a’.
I happened to watch a video where kids between 8 and 12 years old spell words backwards - words that are difficult for many to spell even the normal way.
I have said that kids are smart and will have no problem learning all the Dolch words with ease. The people with a vested interest keep saying why should kids learn the Dolch words by rote memory. My question has always been, why not.
If 8 to 12-year-old kids can spell words backwards as per the video below why do educators complain about kids learning a mere 220 Dolch commonly used words most of which are 2 to 4 letters long.
Here is lesson 10 on my YouTube channel. Please share it with your contacts.
This lesson is based on word family -'ut'.
Please ensure your child has memorised the Dolch sight words by rote memory.
Here is the link to lesson 9. I have now uploaded all lessons to lesson 9 on YouTube for your convenience.
Feel free to give you comments or write to me @ luqmanm2002@yahoo.co.uk if you have any questions or suggested improvements to my lessons.
