Ideas for my blog - A reply to Lucky Earther

                                                                  

While waiting for HeyMrsBond to respond to some of the tweets yesterday, I would like to respond to one of the tweets by:

Lucky Earther @WreckaCenter

Maybe you could come up with your own ideas for your blog instead of poking around on Twitter to see if someone will write something for you?

For the information of Lucky Earther and the others in the thread I will explain so that they know that most of what I write is based on my own ideas. This is specifically for those who have not been following my blog.

Disinformation by SoR advocates

 

I saw the following image on LinkedIn and commented on it. I then happened to see that that image was liked by 83 members and was re-posted by 42 of them. I then decided to post this on my blog hoping to get some comments from those who re-posted. Will any of the 42 educators have anything to say? It will be an interesting discussion.

 

The following are my comments on the LinkedIn post. 

Learning to Read - Richard Gentry - Part 2

 

Here is the article referred to in Karen Vaite’s tweet.

The following are extracts from the article.

 

It takes time—grapheme by grapheme from left to right; Dehaene says, “Beginners need to be told how it works.” Here's an example. Effortful analysis of a word such as rat, along with active engagement and feedback from the teacher, might require the first grader’s teacher to employ modeling and prompts in word study lessons,

Teacher: “Today, we will be learning and listening to our new words for this week. Listen to all the sounds, and then you say the word after me. Ready? The first word is rat. Rrraaat. Rat.”

 

Yes, this is how I teach my students. Listen to how my son pronounces the sounds of the letters in the first lesson found here.

My question to all the educators is why many kids in classes teaching sounds of letters without extraneous sounds as illustrated by Dehaene, Sue Lloyd and Stephen Parker still end up with kids being unable to read like the majority? 

Learning to Read Changes the Brain - Richard Gentry

 

This morning I read a Tweet by Karen Vaites which had a link to the article here.

Here are some excerpts from the article and my thoughts. 

 

“How Learning to Read Changes the Brain”.

 

Yes, brain imaging will show a difference in the brain before and after a child learns to read. But it does not show how the brain learns to read. No one has discovered how the brain learns to read. 

Dr. Sam Bommarito's tweet on common sense and my response (Part 1)

 

The following is a tweet by Dr. Sam.

What works for one child doesn’t always work for another child.

In the history of reading MANY have claimed to have found the answer – in the end their answers worked for some not all the kids.

“Let’s use common sense to find common ground.” Let’s recognize that what works with one child doesn’t always work with another.

Luqman Michel @luqmanmichel May 4

Dr. You are asking for something that does not exist in most people - common sense.

If common sense is common, then why have we been debating for decades without reaching a consensus?

I have said this before and say it again that Dr. Sam is one of a handful of educators that I have high a regard for.

Here is my explanation of why I said that common sense does not exist in most people.

Can a deaf person learn to read

 

How does a deaf person learn to read just as well as one who can hear?

Read the comment section of my post on ‘How the brain learns to read' – Dehaene Stanislas.

Here is another account by another deaf person who is able to read. This should put paid to Dehaene’s theory which says the following:

Reading requires specializing the visual system for the shapes of the letters, and connecting them to speech sounds.

Teaching letter-sound correspondences is therefore essential.

I have repeated several time for you to think rather than accepting whatever is said by so called experts such as Sally Shaywitz, Dehaene Stanislas, Andy Johnson, Timothy Shanahan, David Boulton, Sharon Vaughn and many others.