Consortium Hard Words Article Reflection by

I wonder why we stop teaching reading after a certain grade? I always wondered too how students really learned to read.

2024-08-26 23:58:45 UTC

2024-08-26 23:59:01 UTC

I was definitely struck by how much I related to hearing and sharing in the argument that it was just something we had to accept when many students were struggling to read.

I was shocked by the literacy rates in the U.S.

2024-08-26 23:59:13 UTC

I was shocked by the literacy rates in the U.S.

2024-08-26 23:59:15 UTC

What stood out to me was when the article stated that "Writing is a code humans invented to represent speech sounds". It felt like a lightbulb moment that helped me connect to the author's point about phonics being the cornerstone of kids learning to read.

2024-08-26 23:59:26 UTC

I'd like to know more about the LETRS training the Bethlehem school district sent teachers to and began using. Is that the most promising curriculum for teaching early elementary students reading? Are there others just as good?

Brain

pxc0445 — 2024-08-26 23:59:40 UTC

Our brain needs to get rewired to learn how to read

2024-08-27 00:00:05 UTC

"Children who don't learn to read by the end

of third grade are likely to remain poor readers for the rest of their lives, and they're

likely to ... drop out of high school, to end up in the criminal justice system, and to

live in poverty."

2024-08-27 00:00:13 UTC

The chart on page 2 really caught my attention. I was eye-opening to see how the proficiency remains the same or even drops by 8th grade. I am curious to why so MANY secondary teachers were never taught how to teach reading.

Phonics is key to literacy. This makes a lot of sense, but often overlooked in secondary education.

2024-08-27 00:00:14 UTC

Phonics is key to literacy. This makes a lot of sense, but often overlooked in secondary education.

I remember teaching LANGUAGE! by Jane F. Greene. We taught the science of reading...from phonemic awareness to letters and sounds

2024-08-27 00:00:20 UTC

But then our site cut the Title I program funding and students were left to fend for themselves

2024-08-27 00:01:06 UTC

2024-08-27 00:01:11 UTC

I'd be curious to see 4th and 8th reading levels before Whole Language took hold.

mls0454 — 2024-08-27 00:01:17 UTC

"learning to read is not a natural process. We are not born wired to read."

I have taught reading intervention classes, but I never received any kind of training or proper instruction. The article just makes me think of how at the secondary level we really have very little knowledge of how to teach kids how to read.

2024-08-27 00:01:29 UTC

Matthew Effects in reading like in the Bible...the rich get rich and the poor get poorer

2024-08-27 00:01:42 UTC

2024-08-27 00:01:59 UTC

It's so frustrating that we have the science and the understanding of how people learn to read, but we are not training our teachers or even aligning instruction with this knowledge.

kmetaxas — 2024-08-27 00:02:17 UTC

I think that those of us who were taught "whole language" literacy and were basically successful probably didn't think the idea of balanced literacy was flawed...I am looking forward to challenging that idea.

I remember Phonics in school, and wondered why it had become considered obsolete. struggling readers are products of impoverished homes!

2024-08-27 00:02:18 UTC

Hard Words Responses

2024-08-27 00:02:31 UTC

I don't know if this is beautiful enough for padlet, who asks us to "write something beautiful" but I am struck by how helpless everyone feels until they are trained and even then it feels like this huge mental block.

2024-08-27 00:03:00 UTC

The literacy rates in the U.S. were really shocking. It makes sense that the key to becoming a better reader starts with looking at the brain, not the material.

2024-08-27 00:03:09 UTC

Much of this article and Hanford's journalism is valid and necessary critique. But sometimes the narrative is a little reductive, with experts assumed unfairly to be on one side of an oversimplified binary between "whole language" and "phonics" people. Still valuable to learn from it, though.

What happened to Jane Fell Greene's LANGUAGE! program?

2024-08-27 00:03:29 UTC

gvasquez1 — 2024-08-27 00:03:31 UTC

I also remember using Lang! I was taught whole language strategies in college

Literacy Rates

2024-08-27 00:03:34 UTC

How students who don’t learn to read by 3rd grade likely never will.

2024-08-27 00:03:35 UTC

We have to re-learn how to teach reading.

Hard Word Article

2024-08-27 00:05:06 UTC

What stood out was that is that the article talks about how asking students in elementary school to look at the picture for clues on how to figure out the word. For example, a student struggled to read the word horse and the teacher told the student to look at the picture and the student responded pony and the teacher praised the student to read the word correctly. Of course that is ineffective. As a former elementary school teacher, I have students look at both the individual sounds first, then the pictures.