I found it interesting, yet somewhat contradictory to our district language arts program, that Kilpatrick outlines the developmental stages of both phonemic awareness and orthographic mapping, and concludes that some students may not be developmentally ready to learn phonics at the prescribed time. We start teaching phonics and encoding very young, but if the student isn't processing all the sounds in the words he/she hears, if the phonemic awareness is not developed, the phonics don't mean anything. I teach many students with speech and language impairments based in phonological processing deficits, and they often don't start making progress with their reading and spelling until 2nd grade - unless they can "hear" the phonemes, they can't read or spell them.

I found this section fascinating because, for years in my psychology classes, we were taught that the human brain is divided into specific regions responsible for different bodily functions and that the neocortex is split into three functional areas: sensory, motor, and association. However, from this reading, I recently learned that this traditional view is incorrect. The brain’s multisensory processing is far more intricate and less compartmentalized. What I find particularly interesting is that the human brain doesn’t have a single, straightforward language system but rather a complex network of language systems.

I also thought the saying "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking" only applies to 45% of the words.

As a former 5th grade teacher, I also think that latin and greek roots are very important to student and there is not enough attention to these.