Universal screening

 

This morning I read a comment on my blog and answered it as below. 

This comment made my day. She said, 'I appreciate your philosophical approach'. 

May God bless her for such appreciative words. 

The comment was on my post on ‘An Ounce of Prevention - Benjamin Franklin’.

Anonymous

Thanks, Luqman. I appreciate your philosophical approach to how to best approach reading instruction. Do you think that universal screenings will help in prevention?

 

Luqman Michel

Thank you very much for your comment and question.

I don't know what universal screening is about.

However, I have asked, several times, all over social media how we can decide, at the beginning of grade 1, the kids who will most probably leave school as illiterates. I am still waiting for someone to answer that question.

 

That is the screening I am talking about. Children shut down/disengage from learning to read due to confusion when they are taught letter sounds incorrectly.

If schools have started teaching letter sounds correctly (that is without extraneous sounds) then why would kids shut down?

 

This is where initial input comes in. In addition to what Thorndike said in 1913 about the importance of Initial Input and what Charlie Munger said about the human mind being like the human egg, I have also mentioned a quote from much earlier. 'It is what we know already that often prevents us from learning.' (Claude Bernard 1813 - 1878)

Kids will come into grade 1 having learned the sounds of letters incorrectly from shows such as Charlie and the Alphabet and many other videos on YouTube as well as from their Kindergartens.

We can screen and find out how kids pronounce the letter sounds. If they pronounce letter sounds incorrectly, intervention can be provided immediately.

Then, what George Bush said in 2001 about 'No Child Left Behind' will come to pass.

Note now added:

1.     If the purpose of universal screening is to determine which students may be struggling with reading skills then the simple test above should suffice. 

     Put aside questions on comprehension, vocabulary and fluency and first address the foundation of reading which is decoding and blending. If a kid hasn't started walking stop talking about how to run faster, jump higher, dance better etc. 

2.     I read a post by David (Dyslexic) Chalk on LinkedIn yesterday. I have a few thoughts on that post and will write about it before returning to continue my posts on the puppeteers.