Value Bookshop’s Reading Notes

For many adults, reading a book or newspaper seems effortless. Yet reading effortlessly comes from constant use of basic skills learned at an early age. Once children learn these basic skills, they can eventually read complex books like War and Peace.

What are these skills? To read, one must recognize thousands of words. Since all English words are built from only twenty-six letters, the huge task of recognizing letters and their sounds and putting them together to form words becomes greatly simplified. An English-speaking child only has to sound out the letters and then put the sounds together to read the word. This is not games and music, but not difficult.

I do not wish to over-simplify the complexity of our rich English language, however. Like other western languages, English has its peculiarities. For example, many vowels have more than one sound, and many sounds can be spelled more than one way. However, even with these complexities, English is far easier to learn than Chinese, where children have to memorize thousands of word pictures, rather than twenty-six letters and their sounds.

Reading is difficult at first, but, once learned, the process becomes automatic and unconscious. When we can read quickly without sounding out every letter of every word, all the knowledge of the world opens to us. However, like learning to drive a car, if we don’t learn the basic skills, we don’t learn to read, or we read poorly.

Enter public-school education theorists who think otherwise. Don’t adults read without sounding out every letter of every word, they ask? So why teach children phonics? Why put children through the alleged boredom, drudgery, and hard work of learning letter-sounds? How can reading be joyful if literature becomes drills? If children memorize whole words instead of putting together letter sounds, all this pain will be gone. Rather than teaching kids the alphabet and how to sound out M-O-T-H-E-R, teach them to recognize MOTHER and other whole words in a book, like Chinese word-pictures or ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Have the child read simple books that repeat each word over and over, so that they come to recognize the word. Do this for each word, they claim, and the child will learn to read. This is called “whole-language” reading instruction.

The only problem is that whole-language doesn’t work. Most young children are only able to “memorize” a few hundred relatively simple words. Even an adult’s mind can only memorize at most, a few thousand words.

In contrast, children who learn to sound out the letters of words with phonics can read tens of thousands of words, and eventually read ANY word, because they can sound out each letter in the word and put the sounds together.

Author and education researcher Charles J. Sykes describes whole-language reading instruction in one first-grade classroom in his book “Dumbing Down Our Kids”:

“Reading instruction begins with “pre-reading strategies” in which “children predict what the story is about by looking at the title and the pictures. Background knowledge is activated to get the children thinking about the reading topic.” Then they read the story. If a child does not recognize a word, they are told to “look for clues.”

“The whole-language curriculum gave specific suggestions that children: “Look at the pictures,” ask “What would make sense?” “Look for patterns,” “Look for clues,” and “Skip the word and read ahead and then go back to the word.” Finally, if all this fails, parents/teachers are told, “Tell the child the word.”

During the 1990s, when whole-language instruction was in full force, outraged parents bitterly complained about their children’s deteriorating ability to read. In response, public schools across the country then reverted to their usual tactics - they kept the failed policy but changed its name.

Many public schools today say they now teach kids to read with “balanced reading instruction.” What this means is they combine whole-language instruction with a smattering of phonics. “See,” they can say to parents, “we are now teaching your kids phonics.” The only problem is that too often the “balance” is still about 80 percent whole-language, and 20 percent phonics, if and when the teacher thinks phonics is “needed” in “special cases.”

If you were a doctor and were treating a patient for a serious infection, would you give the patient a “balanced” cure of arsenic and antibiotics? That is the moral and practical status of “balanced” reading instruction where whole-language instruction still predominates, because whole-language is the arsenic of reading-instruction methods. This how it is about education.

Parents, don’t let public-school officials fool you with their glib talk of “balanced reading instruction.” You need to personally investigate how your local school teaches your kids to read. The best thing to do is to test your children’s true reading abilities with an outside, independent testing company. You may be shocked by the outcome of the test. The Resources section of “Public Schools, Public Menace,” lists many such independent reading-testing companies.

Learn more about online education benefit - this can make sense to you.

Do you have a child going to preschool soon? Well, don’t wait till school begins before you start teaching them something. Keep your little ones busy with interesting, fun, coloring preschool worksheets. Teaching them the alphabets, numbers, shapes and simple math.

Don’t have to hunt all over the internet for pages like the one above. There are 5 Jumboworkbooks with 50 pages each. They also come with bright, cheerful certificates and die cut stickers like these:

You can always purchase each Jumboworkbook separately. They each cost USD7.95. Buy the whole set, and you only pay USD24.95, which works out to be almost 10cents per page. I think this is a pretty good deal considering you can print as many copies as you want. Definitely a time saver as you don’t have to go hunting for nice preschool worksheets all over the internet. Of course it is nice to get free worksheets but usually you’ll find limited copies to use per website. Your child can’t be using the same free worksheet over and over again. Here you get 1 book with 50 different variations on the same topic. I highly recommend it.

Click below to see more examples of the book.
JUMBOWORKBOOKS

Here in Malaysia, the muslim celebration of Hari Raya Aidilfitri has begun. Hoards of people travel back to their home town or what we call “balik kampung.” If you have a long way to go and are traveling with your kids, I’m sure your greatest hope is that they sleep most of the way. Hahahah. But you know what, car trips is one of the best times to hone your children’s reading skills. You can play phonic games with them.

• The rhyming game — What rhymes with hat? or dog? or man?
• I spy — I spy with my little eyes, something that begins with the sound /b/
• The guessing game — I’m thinking of a red fruit that begins with the sound /a/, or an animal that ends with the sound /t/.
• For those just learning to blend sounds, why not say the segmented sounds and see if they can put it together — /b/ /a/ /t/, what do you think I’m saying?
• Phonics bingo — make several bingo cards but instead of numbers in the squares, write in alphabets. Then, cut up the 26 alphabets and put it into a container or zip lock bag. Draw them out randomly, don’t say the name of the alphabet but rather make the sound. Have your kids check their bingo cards to see if they have that sound. If they do, they color the square that has that particular alphabet. The person that colors an entire row (or entire card) wins the game.

These are just some ideas to make your car trips fun and educational. It’s also a relaxed way to learn phonics. I’m sure if you put your thinking cap on, you’ll come up with more phonic car games.

Image via WikipediaI came across this article by SignOnSanDiego.com titled “Kindergartners urged to learn key languages.” It highlights an elementary school in Fairfax stepping up to the call of Pres. Bush to “teach the youngest students Chinese and other foreign languages considered critical to the nation’s future security.” The program is called the National Security Language Initiative.

Besides Chinese, other languages regarded as “critical languages” are Arabic, Russian, Hindi and Farsi. However, it is reported that Chinese is the most popular because of the booming business in China. The U.S. Education Department encourages teaching of these languages even at kindergarten level and has allocated $26 million in grants to communities around the country.

The reason why this article caught my attention is because I am impressed that the U.S. education department has not only realized the value of learning languages like Chinese but has also taken active steps to make sure the schools provide the learning opportunity to the children.

Here in Malaysia, more and more parents also see the great value and advantage of learning chinese. I’m not just talking about the chinese people. Even the other races (Malays, Indians, “dan lain lain”) in Malaysia acknowledge the benefits of learning this language. Unfortunately, what seems to be the best option is packing our children into Chinese schools. Seeing that there is an exploding interest in learning Chinese, I wish our education department would also take active steps in providing this language development to our children in national schools.

Let’s take a quick look at this business of learning Mandarin in Malaysia. Like just mentioned, many believe the best way is for children to attend a Chinese school. However, Chinese school’s are also famous for their endless stream of homework. Listening to parents talk about their children doing homework till 11pm and losing out on their childhood is heartbreaking indeed. And unlike this school in Fairfax where children play Jeopardy to learn the language, I don’t think anyone has enthusiastically commented how fun it is to learn chinese in our schools. Let’s not forget how crowded it is getting too. One teacher to 50 students is far from ideal. Some parents like the idea of discipline in chinese schools. Unfortunately, it is the same “discipline” that is killing their creative natures.

So, it is really sad to me that Chinese schools are considered the best option for our children to acquire the chinese language. I, for one, believe there must be a better way.

Complaining will get us no where. Finding solutions is better use of our energy. Therefore, I’m calling all parents out there to put on their thinking cap and tell me, what do you think is a good way for our children to learn Mandarin?

Let me start the ball rolling:
1. Give children a choice to learn it in national schools like the P.O.L. (People’s Own Language) classes. My daughter attends a school which is 99.9% malay. The option of learning mandarin is not available to her. However, if mandarin was an option, like part of the school syllabus, I am sure many non-chinese will want to learn too.
2. Play groups. Not those high paying tuition or enrichment centres. Just mothers getting their children together to learn conversational skills, story telling and children songs.

Okay, I would like to hear your ideas now.