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Teaching's more |
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By SANDRA PRIEST ROSE |
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Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein are using this week to give city school teachers a crash course in the new math and reading curriculum. I wish everyone - especially the children - good luck with this innovative approach. As someone with 40 years' experience in teaching kids to read, I'd like to point out that teaching practices are as important as any curriculum. � For example, in a typical elementary school classroom, every inch of wall space is decorated with charts and pictures, and the desks are placed in clusters facing each other so children can work on reading and spelling together. These well-meaning but misguided practices can impede learning. Here are some good teaching practices: � � Have some of the children's work displayed, but avoid overdecorating classrooms with pictures, maps, posters, artwork and dangling signs on strung lines. The visual chaos confuses the children and makes focusing on books or papers doubly difficult. � � Have children face the blackboard for reading, writing and spelling. Being seated in groups facing each other forces the children to look at the board sideways or even backwards, which contributes to letter and word reversals. � Sitting in groups also means that some children are supposed to work with or teach other children reading, spelling, etc. This is time-wasting for the student-tutors and humiliating for the children being taught. All children want their teachers to teach. � The optimum time for having children sitting in groups is for social studies or group research projects in history, geography or science. � � Show children how to hold a pencil properly in kindergarten and first grade, because it's less tiring than grasping it in a clumsy fist. � � Teach children to form the letters of the alphabet properly, because it helps train eyes in the correct direction for reading and allows students to read their own writing. � � Teach children to spell accurately, because once a word is written incorrectly, it is imprinted on the brain and hard to correct. Seeing, saying, hearing and writing a word correctly puts it in the child's memory bank from the beginning for future use. � � Teach the letters "b" and "d" weeks apart, and likewise "g" and "q," because children confuse them visually. The vowels should be taught separately, because they are too similar in sound. Teachers should be trained to teach one vowel until it is learned, then six consonants, then another vowel, then six consonants, etc. � English is 87% phonetic. Most of it can be taught in an organized, step-by-step approach, simultaneously using all the pathways of learning - seeing, saying, hearing and writing. Then the student can put the sounds immediately into words. Writing and sounding out should precede reading. � For beginning reading instruction, all children - no matter from what social or economic group - thrive on good, systematic, phonetic instruction that makes use of all the sensory pathways. � Comprehension begins with the word, proceeds to the sentence and then to the paragraph. As words are written, their meanings can be discussed. Teachers can help students examine words closely for meaning from first grade on. For example, Sunday means the day of the sun, Monday means the day of the moon. Children are fascinated by this, and it is the beginning of a wonderful intellectual journey. � Teachers should be able to spend their time and money on courses that teach effective practices. They want to do a good job but often cannot because they are not exposed to the sound practices that have been developed from decades of research. � It is the birthright of every child to be given the tools with which to read myths, fairy tales, history and science and about the arts and music. Let children's interests range from the subatomic to the intergalactic, and their powers of analysis will soar. Rose is a reading consultant for the
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