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Comment by nobodyandproud | Hacker News Reader

“They shifted attention to really focus on teaching phonics, which is good and important…we did too much of that focus”.

Without knowing the before and after, it’s not safe to say it’s still very early. Few additional weeks? Few additional months? Few additional years?

At some point and grade a class should be moving past the time-consuming out-loud reading and pronunciation corrections to timed (and silent, focused) reading; and the ones lagging behind get remedial attention.

Otherwise, most of the students are being held back.

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Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.

I taught my daughter to read when she was 4 and she was reading ~30 page books in kindergarten. Nothing outrageous, but she was pretty far ahead of her class that were still going over ABCs. This was outside of a few other kids who had parents that also taught them to read that were more or less on the same level as her. I didn't bother trying to teach every last freaking phonics rule, I just taught her the different sounds each letter could make and started doing some 2 or 3 letter words each night where we'd sound out different options if the first attempt didn't work. Eventually we talked about "at" versus "ate" and when it mostly made sense to use short and long sounds. I had to relearn some of this myself while going through it. I had to warn her about weird cases a lot, but she caught on super quick. The whole idea though was to get her into those basic 5 page books and then incrementally up the difficulty rather than memorize a thousand rules up front like some poor student taking latin. Phonics is absolutely essential, but I fear that schools go overboard with it.

Done properly, phonics shouldn’t be about memorizing rules per se so much as practicing them deliberately, until they are internalized.

For some kids, phonics mostly comes naturally. That sounds like your daughter, and myself for example as well. Spelling and pronunciation came easily. I was always the kid who had to flip back to find the page the class was on when it was time turn to read.

But our experiences aside, the fact is that if your daughter’s class was doing 3-cueing instead of phonics, many of her classmates simply wouldn’t learn how to read.

> Agreed. Phonics is great and how you learn to read, but there is a limit in my opinion. The below is a little long winded, but covers my recent experience with my daughter.

My experience matches yours: My child is now 5.5yo, and reads books up to 8 pages in one sitting, consisting of 3 paragraphs per page, with maybe 12-20 words per paragraph. No pictures in any books.

Here is the conversation between myself and the pre-school teacher when she brought up that he has trouble reading:

Me: What specifically did he have trouble reading?

Teacher: Some of the numbers, such as "Eight".

Me: I was told you taught reading by phonetics?

Teacher: We do. We teach reading by phonetics only.

Me: You don't teach by word memorisation at all?

Teacher: No, the curriculum is phonetics only until the higher grades. No word memorisation at all!

Me: Did you teach the kids how to pronounce 'ight'?

Teacher: No, that is only covered in grade 2 and above.

Me: So how are the kids supposed to know how to pronounce 'Eight'?

Teacher: We teach that.

Me: How do you teach that?

Teacher: We show them the word next to the number.

Me: Isn't that teaching by memorisation of words?

TBH, that was effectively the end of the conversation even though it limped along for another few minutes. The teacher remained adamant that they don't teach by the look-see (or any other memorised-word method), but continued giving examples of words the kids are supposed to know because they had lessons with pictures next to words like "fox" and "lamp", etc...

That must have been a pretty frustrating conversation. It sounds like your kid is doing great!

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