18 questions parents should ask themselves

Being a Wise Owl - 18 questions parents should ask themselves:

1. What does success for your child mean to you?
2. Who is the best teacher for your child?
3. Do you have to have a teaching certificate to teach your child to read?
4. How can you help your child be his or her possible best?
5. How can you increase your child’s capacity for learning?
6. When is your child’s best window of learning?
7. If you could prevent dyslexia, what wouldn’t you do to guarantee that?
8. Are parents the problem or the solution to educational problems?
9. What do bright, successful children have in common?
10. What if teaching your child to read can easily fit into your family routine?
11. Who can reverse our downward educational trend? Who can fix the government’s mistakes?
12. If you could help your child to learn to read faster and easier, would you do it?
13. Did you know that speech problems may be the precursor to dyslexia?
14. Did you know that phonics improves speech problems?
15. What parent doesn’t want his/her child to do better than s/he did?
16. Will your child be ready for the technology jobs of the future?
17. Do you want your children to still have to live with you when they are 30? 40?
18. What if the foundation of your child’s success could cost less than what you’ll spend on snacks & soda this week?

(You’ll find the answers to all these questions with The Godfrey Method...)

        Children don’t know what they don’t know (just like the rest of us). None of us were born knowing everything. Child-led discovery is the worst way to teach, especially in the elementary grades. It is causing children to “re-invent the wheel” over and over. Why leave children to flounder on their own?

        If I hadn’t been taught about the works of those who came before, on my own I never would have developed calculus, and I love math! Thank you Aristotle, Galileo, Newton (father of calculus), Fermi, Heisenberg, Einstein, Piaget (child development), my parents, and so forth. This is true of all subjects, your favorites as well as mine.

        Without being directly instructed about the findings of the past, and building upon them, there is no progress for the future. Parents need to give children a solid foundation in the basics with DI, so they can soar. The benefits of early phonics the right way are that they strengthen the mental, emotional, and social health of children. What could be better?

The characteristics of direct instruction:

        In Vol. 5 of It's Not Rocket Surgery! we discuss the 21 destructive bombs of Project Follow Through (PFT). The only good "fallout shelter", the one that worked, was and is phonics by Direct Instruction (DI). A quick review of PFT is:

~ For almost 30 years (1967-1995), educrats experimented on U.S. kids in over 200 schools nationwide, with 22 different learning/teaching models.
~ University education PhDs developed 21 of the models. They all failed.
~ Paradoxically, the method that worked and worked well for all academic subjects, phonics by Direct Instruction, was developed by an advertising-agent-turned-preschool-expert – a non-university, non-educational, non-PhD, father at home – Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann. 

The components of DI are:

• DI is the explicit teaching of a skill-set using lectures or demonstrations of the material, rather than exploratory models such as inquiry-based learning.
• There is usually some element of frontal instruction (an adult) and a general concept of the skill or lesson, usually with a formal lesson plan or scripted teaching.
• With DI we can accomplish optimum results with any child, whose cognitive growth is accelerated by carefully engineered instruction, rather than waiting for him to learn through random experience.
• It crosses all social, economic, ethnic, and gender strata with success.     

        Why do some parenting magazines mistakenly say that early reading is not good for children?

        They are holding children back on purpose to make life easier for the teachers. A bright child may be a problem for a teacher if he is bored in school. The magazines seem to support the schools’ political agenda to dumb the curriculum down to the slowest child. In trying to have ‘no child left behind,’ they are leaving all children behind. This is a travesty. (Common Core increased the damage exponentially.)

        Another possibility is - schools realize that early sight-reading can be hazardous to a young child’s academic health. So why use it at all?

        Teachers and schools need to step up to help bright children, not hold them back. How else will they be ready for the technology jobs of the future?  Most ‘bright’ students come to kindergarten already ahead because of their parents’ efforts. If parents don’t get their children ahead of the game, jobs will continue to go to China and India (because of a lack of qualified workers in the United States). Most parents don’t want their children still living with them at 30, 40, 50 years old. Help your child start school ahead of the game to launch a successful life.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/BeingaWiseOwl18questionsparentsshouldaskthemselves

Dress your child's mind for success

Being a Wise Owl - Dress your child's mind for success!

Dress your child's mind for success! Direct Instruction with parent involvement is the key:

                We’ve all heard of “dress for success.” My motto is, “Dress your child’s mind for success.” How can I explain the emotions of watching my children learn and succeed? For me, many of the benefits of early reading the right way are heart-felt. My concern and love for my children are the reasons that I created The Godfrey Method and wrote A Funny Boy Was Prince River.

                Think of your closets and cupboards. Are things easier to find with or without shelves in there? Are things on the shelves easier to find in orderly stacks or jumbled on top of each other? It’s the same for children’s minds. Children need structure and schedules of some sort. Now, all you free spirits out there are disagreeing with me. But as a foster mom for many years, I can tell you what happens to children when their parents have no set schedule for regular meals, regular nap times, regular hugs, regular bedtimes, etc. The children suffer.

                Besides the neglect, they feel fear and uncertainty about their needs being met. They don’t learn self-control. (Some ADHD comes as a child’s coping mechanism in an unstable environment.) They don’t cope well with change. The rage can build up. The tantrums are worse. These are just the facts.

                It’s the same with educating their minds. Children actually learn better and grow mentally faster with some sort of structure. They can retrieve information better if it is presented in an orderly fashion. Child-led discovery is a farce and a disservice to our children. I’m not saying that they have to sit at a desk for hours. There are many ways to achieve direct instruction in a way that is enjoyable and interesting.

                But there are also times that we all have to knuckle down and accomplish things that we don’t want to do. If children are to cope in society and function well, they need to learn this (in age-appropriate ways). I’m not just saying this to home-schoolers. Home should be a learning environment regardless of public, private, or home school.

                In the article, Parents Make THE Difference, by Joan Ruddiman, she reports intriguing results that, “validate what we’ve always known – in the contest of life and learning, parents are the major influence in getting their kids to the head of the class.” And they should start early the right way.

                As mentioned in Vol. 5 of It's Not Rocket Surgery!, I struggled with the idea of Direct Instruction just because I used to be a home-schooler years ago, and again more recently. Some in the home-schooling movement believe in freer philosophies. Many of us are concerned about what is being taught and/or how it is taught. The best thing about home-schooling is the ability to work at the child’s pace and interest. As a scientist, I have to accept the data over the dogma. The proof for Direct Instruction in every area of academics is overwhelming. Keep it simple for success (KISS your child) with TGM.

                Currently my youngest son is home-schooled, while my two youngest daughters chose to attend public school. (My other 13 children are grown and gone.) However, my youngest daughter - age 12 - was assigned regular math instead of algebra this year. The school district has a ridiculous policy - no doubt the new effects of horrid Common Core - that wouldn't allow her to take pre-algebra in spite of her excellent grades in math last year. Why? Because she didn't "test well" on the state-mandated MAP tests at the end of the year.

                 So I bought an online algebra curriculum from Switched-On Schoolhouse by Alpha Omega Publications. My daughter is learning algebra at home. I will not allow her to be held back because of some ill-formed philosophy about where a child should be pigeon-holed. SOS provides the structure she needs, yet she can work at her own pace. We parents are the key.

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/BeingaWiseOwlDressyourchildsmindforsuccess

Changing what we're forcing the teachers to teach

How state legislatures are tying teachers hands: first it was the Project Follow Through fall-out that changed our educational laws for the worse; now it's Common Core to magnify the damage even more.

                Too many of Project Follow Through’s faulty models have been legislated into mandatory curricula by state governments. Even good teachers who want to teach with better methods are stuck by law to use the worst. In the words of Bonnie Grossen, editor at the University of Oregon, who wrote:

                “Perhaps the ultimate irony of the PFT evaluation is that the critics advocated extreme caution in adopting any practice as policy in education; they judged the extensive evaluation of the PFT Project inadequate. Yet 10 short years later, the models that achieved the worst results, even negative results, are the ones that are, in fact, becoming legislated policy in many states, under new names.

                “That these curricular organizations can be so successful in influencing public policy, in spite of a national effort to reach world class standards and the results of scientific research as extensive as that in PFT, is alarming.” This was back in the 1990s, and it has been downhill since.

                Now add the Common Core disaster to our already mutilated educational system, and our children don't have a chance. It's up to parents to supplement at home, even if their children attend public or private school. Common core pigeon-holes a child's future at a young age, denying opportunities to those who don't test well. It is socialism and communism at its worst. Just say NO to Common Core!

                Mom, Dad, Grandma, Auntie, please help your children with early reading the right way - The Godfrey Method of phonics. It's also a good idea to supplement math with a good curriculum that is based on the classic, proven methods. Anything that says "reform" math - isn't. None of these changes to math and reading in our educational system have been beneficial, as proven by the continuing educational decline. The fact that legislatures have mandated the faulty methods into law is appalling. You, family, are the key for your child's success!

Just say NO to Common Core and Whole Language (sight reading)! 

http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/SeeingtheEmperorsNewClothesChangingwhatwereforcingtheteacherstoteach