Can we get real for a minute….
Today I took my class to a firestation and read some books about it. It is not in the “adopted” curriculum. It is a meaning based activity involving “doing” . It’s actually at everyone’s level, as it is about life. We listened, held the hose, went to the park with bag lunches (100 percent free lunch is us) and brought back 8 lunches uneaten. We wrote basic stories, made fantastic watercolors and used a great many words none in the text design as jig, fig, wig really doesn’t talk about saving lives working in fire stations. And a huge fire is raging up in our mountains-Day Fire- and we are breathing horrible air and everyone is getting ill. Then we read the stories and then we clapped. Jessica , my little student who lives in a garage, with an open infection on her face which a year ago necessitated an operation who needs glasses for the worst strabismis I’ve ever seen, (when will the nurse care?, how many times do I have to go see her on the one day they hire her to be there a week) anyway Jessica lingers after school. I think, oh , she wants to read our FIRE book again. No, I was wrong. Do you know what she wanted? Was it to read the phonics book perhaps, that super great answer to literacy? So “at her level?” So Go Sam Go.
You know it wasn’t either approach. Not phonics driven, nor Whole Language either. Sorry. Wrong debate, my friends on the edge of the world…who think real thoughts and care about children…
Jessica wanted something you really need to UNDERSTAND, it being obscured in this political reading nightmare, (an argument that seems over here by the way the right won it- it’s phonics…hat, sat, cat, bat….)
This child who weighs in at 29 pounds wanted to take home all the leftover lunches so the family would have some food this weekend. Her mom died a couple years ago of a drug overdose. She has a non related aunt at 350 lbs, a very old adeled grandma and her gramps, and two sisters. So basically , fundamentally my job is to listen to all the multiplicity of views and opinions and thoughts and debates, read my scripts from the Central office, get attuned to the Standards, stay on task, and turn a blind eye to the leaving behind of that family who is eating peanut butter sandwiches this weekend- a little old Mexican grandpa carrying home her bag and telling Jessica with the 8 apples he can fix her a frittata. Consultants walk into my school and take $25,000 straight of our very small budget to watch for a week and outline all the shortcomings in our literacy approaches, and outline and underscore our errors in thought and our reading competencies.After all they know what’s best for a Jessica they surely won’t think about for 5 seconds as they cash out that check at Data whatever their NCLB based consulting company… But me…I’m sitting here crying for the first time in a very long time. I just usually can’t access the tears….because frankly I have to feed this child, get better possibilities to bloom.I can’t afford pity, I have to inspire a life.. The next time anyone thinks about warring over reading don’t think about your own child….think about the one in the garage in South Oxnard who has the whole world in her tiny hands. BECAUSE she has to feed her tiny grandparents. And no momma. Do you really know , not doing my job, what in the world you are talking about?
It’s really too hard on those of us on the front line to be pulled around politically anymore. Get over to the ghetto and find out what is going on in literacy. Then you might see why we need to work out of literature. All of man’s existance in times of trouble, pain, difficulty he turned to creation to find a way to make meaning and sustain his soul long enough to find a way to deal with the impoverishment of poverty. We need to rise, and , sorry, pig, fig, jig, is really for those that “have”, , the luxury of being able to fill their cup in libaries, books, language, bathrooms, homes, gardens, museums. I’m not working there. I’m in NCLB jail.

In a good phonics-based reading program with good readers (books), your son would have scooted through the early stuff and moved on to material at his level.
I know all about children who read early. When my parents took my twin sister and I to church as kindergarten children, we used to occupy ourselves reading the hymnary. We just got the code early. I can remember when the lights when on and understood the igh letter combo.
I think the reason why I know how to teach phonics with little invented tricks and games is because I got it early. I have never been taught about phonics or how to teach it. I just know it. I was taught in school using the sight method (Dick and Jane) but that’s not how I learned. Your son was taught using WL. but that really isn’t the way he learned to read.

I belive your argument is completely upside down. These days, advocates of WL encourage parents to read to their children in order to teach them to read and to enjoy reading. As a result, I have seen many parents read little easy books tirelessly to their children who don’t catch onto reading quickly. These books do not particulary help the expansion of a child’s vocabulary to include more complex language. On the other hand, in the phonics program I am referring to (Language Patterns) teachers are encouraged to have many books in their classrooms. The program includes art, drama and all sorts of creative things. But, importantly, it expects parents and teachers to read material to their children that is well beyond the child’s reading level. This is critical for expanding their vocabularies. (My mother read us Pilgrim’s Progress in kindergarten, of all things.) Early WL advocates (Goodman) encouraged kids to guess using the first letter. That’s pretty tough when a child encounters a more complex and non-conforming word and they don’t have the vocab. Of course, lots of kids will expand their vocabularies because their parents are well-spoken, but few parents speak daily in the kind of complex language found in books. Also, WL advocates encourage parents to read to their children in order to encourage a love of reading, considered a building block for reading.
Personally, I have not encountered a learning disabled student who didn’t enjoy being read to, but you could read to them ’til the cows come home and they still wouldn’t learn to read themselves.

Your argument just doesn’t hold water. It is a good phonics program that includes all the nice things that WL brings to the table. (Big books are an exception). It is WL that rejects the sequential and cumulative acquisition of phonics skills that so many kids need because they are not early readers and they don’t get the code on their own. Phonics programs do not throw letter-sound combos at kids that they have not learned, and that they do not know. I does, however, include sight words. It must. It promotes real reading and not guessing at words or memorization, two characteristics of poor readers. Don’t confuse a phonics based reading program with a collection of little booklets that focus on one phonics skill at a time (ex. Dr. Maggies phonics program).
If phonics based reading programs had not been eliminated from Canadian and American schools, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. It is only the fact that Ministries of Ed. went so nuts for WL, and WL advocates were so down on phonics that the reading wars started in the first place. Over the last 15 years or so it has never been a reading war, but rather a phonics massacre. Balanced literacy still means WL. Look at the readers for goodness sake. Phonics teachers like me just want teachers to be able to choose from the best selection of any method.

In the UK, they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and gone to synthetic phonics in the early years without readers. This is like teaching a kid to play piano by making them play scales, chords and arpeggios without letting them learn to play tunes and pieces. That’s the stuff they want to play for grannie. This has come about because, once again, those bureaucrats who have the ear of the Minister are all about edugabble, have probably never taught children to read, and therefore lack good common sense. I’m not part of that movement at all. I know that a child needs to experience the joy of reading from their own book. Therein lies the motivation and the magic.

If anyone responds I will, of course, read your comments. But I’m done.
Leave it alone Christina.