Right to read - Movie Review – Part 2

 

At minute 10.24: Let’s see what happens when we take away the pictures.

There has been a lot of opinion about how children learn to read.

The above part of the movie shows a girl reading with pictures and the same words being read (wrongly) by the same girl when the pictures were removed.

What does it prove? It only proves that the teacher did not know how to teach that kid and nothing more. 

My lessons are accompanied by pictures. The lessons start with the word family which is mastered by the kid before reading the text with pictures. The last page, of each lesson, contains all the sentences learnt without the pictures. 

One of the many tools I use in my lessons is video for the purposes of tracking. Using the video, my student sees and hears the words simultaneously. Their brains retain the words they see and hear simultaneously.

The student is then told to memorise the Dolch (HFW) at the end of the book by rote memory (Not by using flash cards). Here is a LINK to the first lesson in my book.

As mentioned in my post on 'How the brains learns to read', no one in the world knows how a kid learns to read. I know for a fact that kids shut down from learning to read when they are confused. Remove that confusion and they become readers within a short period of time.

At minute 13: Emily Hanford - I think it is because balance literature is more appealing. If the basic idea is that if exposure is enough; if only kids will figure out how reading works on their own. But it doesn’t work that way. This is a problem that we have to nip in the bud early.

Fortunately, most kids figure out to read on their own. I taught my first student, who graduated in 2021 from the University of Southern Australia with a double degree, using the Peter and Jane series. I did not know about phonics when I taught him to read. It was only when he read the word rat as mouse and the word house as home that I began to start Googling and found out how to teach using phonics which I used with all subsequent students.

I then began to use all the ‘tools’ available to teach my students to read. These American educators who tell me not to ask my students to memorise Dolch words using rote memory are stupid, arrogant and evil.

Minute 20: 45 There have been a lot of studies from Neuroscientists and cognitive scientists about how a child learns to read and what the brain does during this process. Children already have this phonological processing system where they can hear the sounds and words. Once children are able to hear sounds we move to the occipital lobe. This is the area of the brain where students are able to transform what they hear into what they see. Students are able to make out that the squiggly lines on a page are actually letters. Connecting those pathways from the phonological processing system and then being able to match those sounds to letters is not occurring in whole language classrooms because they are teaching memorisation or they are teaching students to look at pictures. It doesn’t allow for those areas of the brain to connect with those pathways that they need in order for students to become skilled readers.

I asked one of those scientists direct questions and have tagged him, Stanislas Dehaene, several times but have not received a response from him or from any of the other educators.

These SoR advocates quote what such ‘scientists’ say to mislead the general public.

‘Connecting those pathways from the phonological processing system and then being able to match those sounds to letters is not occurring in whole language classrooms because they are teaching memorisation or they are teaching students to look at pictures.’

What a load of nonsense? How did Diane Ravitch and her schoolmates learn to read and write as well as they are doing? How did the millions of those who learnt during the whole language period learn to read? Why are the masses so gullible to read the nonsense being propagated by these SoR proponents?

Children already have this phonological processing system where they can hear the sounds and words.

Yes! That is what I said for 5 years before some researchers did a study and produced some research reports. Unfortunately, most educators rely only on research reports and can’t use their brains to think.