These 7 questions answer why phonics first for your child:
1. How does early reading by phonics increase my child’s IQ?
Several studies show that a person’s intelligence quotient (IQ) is only about 50% genetic. The other 50% that affects IQ is environment. Any child’s IQ can be raised by what mom and dad do at home. And the more they learn at younger ages, the more they are able to learn for the rest of their lives. Of course, part of the nature-nurture mix is the child's own inner motivation. Give your child the chance to be his or her best self. My dad taught me to read when I was only 3 years old.
How to be an exceptional parent without spending a lot of money = early reading the right way. Intelligence is not completely genetic. Almost any child can become much more intelligent with the proper phonics method early in life. The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our reading-instruction approaches the better.
2. Why is phonics reading better than sight reading?
Scientific research shows that phonics wires a child’s brain properly for efficient, excellent reading. Learning sight-words first wires a child’s brain in the wrong place for reading. Dyslexic children read with a different part of the brain than do normal readers. Reading is hearing with your eyes. The Godfrey Method wires the child’s brain properly for a sure foundation. It makes a mental connection between letters and sounds like no other. Prevention is much better than remediation. If a child learns sight-reading first, he may have trouble reading later as an adult.
3. How will learning to read early affect my child’s school years?
Children who start kindergarten ahead of the class usually stay there for the rest of their school careers. They have more confidence and self-esteem, too. They get to skip the embarrassment of going to remedial resource classes, too.
4. What about children needing to be taught using the most efficient method according to their personal learning style?
What may be efficient or seem easier in the early years, such as sight-word flash cards, will often bring trouble later in life, when there are no more flash words, no more teacher to tell you when your guess is right, and no way to decode a new word. Teens and adults aren’t prone to ask for help with reading when they are stuck on a word. It is embarrassing.
Personal learning styles - whether visual (seeing), audio (hearing), kinesthetic (body movement), and/or musical - that actually involve phonics-instruction work best for a child. Sight-reading should NOT be considered a child's learning style. If your baby can read by sight-words, s/he may struggle with reading later. Always put phonics first.
5. How is the Godfrey Method different from other reading methods?
It uses an innovative picture-letter phonics system that even young children can grasp, woven into an enchanting stories, A Funny Boy Was Prince River, for one. The Godfrey Method is able to start children younger, which increases your child’s capacity to learn for life. It is affordable, time-saving, prevents dyslexia, provides quality parent-child time, helps children learn faster and easier than other phonics methods, improves speech, and helps boys catch up to girls in school sooner.
The Godfrey Method is simple yet effective, and the child never forgets. Our motto is, Keep it Simple for Success (KISS). All children do not learn the same. The Godfrey Method involves several senses and learning styles.
6. Why doesn’t the Godfrey Method use a lot of electronic devices?
Studies show that too much TV, radio, video games, and computer time may trigger autism or dyslexia in young children. The Godfrey Method focuses on books for 2 reasons, to keep flashing lights and noises away from young, developing minds, and to provide nurturing interaction between parent and child. Holding your child on your lap or next to you, reading A Pretty Girl Was Alpha Bette and doing the phonics cards, is much more beneficial than plopping a child in front of the TV with a DVD and walking away. What may be more convenient for the parents may be devastating to the child’s mind. Why take the chance?
7. Did you know that sight-reading can cause reading problems? Proponents of this method try to solve the problem (that they created) with some strange remedial methods.
Which brings me to miscue analysis. Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld said it best, so I will quote parts of his article, Miscue Analysis (ibid.), here:
Frank Smith and Kenneth Goodman knowingly mislead the public. “Frank Smith explains the concept of the miscue in Understanding Reading (p. 151): The prior use of meaning ensures that when individual words must be identified, for example, in order to read aloud, a minimum of visual information need be used. And as a consequence, mistakes will often occur. If a reader already has a good idea of what a word might be, there is not much point in delaying to make extra certain what the word actually is. As a result it is not unusual for even highly experienced readers to make misreadings that are radically different visually — like reading “said” when the word is actually announced or reported but which make no significant difference to the meaning. Beginning readers often show exactly the same tendency... The mistakes that are made are sometimes called miscues rather than errors to avoid the connotation that they are something bad (Goodman, 1969). Such misreadings show that these beginning readers are attempting to read in the way fluent readers do, with sense taking priority over individual word identification.
“One could write a book about the utterly perverse reasoning in that paragraph. In the first place only a sight reader could make the kinds of errors Smith illustrates. A phonetic reader will make entirely different kinds of errors, perhaps something on the order of scanning hastily and reading deported for departed, but then correcting himself because the sentence doesn’t make sense. On the other hand substituting “said” for “announced” is the kind of error that Schmitt found that defective children made even though they had been taught to read by a phonetic method.
“I can confirm this tendency on the part of retarded individuals to read as Schmitt observed from my own experience as a tutor. For ten years I tutored a retarded young man and taught him to read by intensive phonics. Yet, he often made the kinds of errors Schmitt observed. Whenever he came to a word he could not read, he substituted a word which made no sense phonetically. In other words, sounding out the word was not his first means of word attack, even though the word might have been one he had previously read correctly. Whenever he did this, I had him spell out the word, and suddenly his phonetic knowledge came to the fore, and he read the word correctly.
“When Frank Smith tells us that normal beginning readers make the same kinds of mistakes that defective children make, what he should tell us is that normal beginning readers taught to read by the whole-word method make the same kinds of errors that adult sight readers make! It is one of the dishonest tricks that whole-language advocates play, by not telling the reader when speaking of miscues what kind of beginning reading instruction was used with the individuals being examined. The very fact that the word “miscue” is used instead of “error” is a good indication of the intellectual dishonesty at work, the fancy sleight of hand being used to confuse the public.
“Apparently, the idea of “miscue analysis” was dreamed up by Prof. Kenneth Goodman and his wife, Yetta, two of the leading founders of the whole-language movement. In my opinion, miscue analysis is probably the worst form of educational malpractice ever invented. What they do is take a poor sight reader — a victim of the whole-word method — and try to improve his guessing “strategies.” After all, it was Ken Goodman who defined reading as a “psycholinguistic guessing game.” In other words, no attempt is made to train the poor sight reader to become an accurate phonetic reader. As long as the sight reader's word insertions, omissions and substitutions relate more closely to the meaning of the text, they are acceptable.
“In short, the purpose of miscue analysis is to make sure that the pupil remains permanently crippled as a sight reader and never becomes an accurate phonetic reader. Ken Goodman writes in The Whole Language Catalog (p. 100): “Miscue analysis helps people to realize that many of the miscues kids are making are sensible, even remarkable sometimes, in what they reveal about the language processes that the reader would have to go through to have produced them.”
Yetta Goodman writes in the same article:
“Insertions and omissions can give you tremendous insight into whether a reader is proficient or not. Proficient readers tend to make insertions more than less proficient readers; certain kinds of omissions tend to be things that are acceptable to the syntax and semantic structure of the text, and good readers make them all the time. Other kinds of omissions indicate kids who want to leave out words that they are afraid to try and identify.”
“Can you believe it? A reader is more proficient if he or she reads something that isn’t there — that is, inserts a word in the text — than a reader who doesn’t! Of course, the Goodmans have no intention of teaching these sight readers to become phonetic readers.”
Ken Goodman writes:
“The concept I put in the place of ‘remedial’ is ‘revaluing’; that is where the intent of the teacher is to help the child to revalue himself or herself as a reader and to revalue the process; to help the child move away from the process of sounding out and attacking words, and toward making sense out of print and legitimizing the kinds of productive strategies that the kids have been using and had thought were cheating. These kids are often their own worst enemies in that their beliefs about themselves and their ability to learn get in their way constantly; they're very easily discouraged. So a lot of patient time taken to help them revalue themselves is the most essential thing.”
“In other words, the main therapeutic purpose of miscue analysis to convince the defective reader that it’s okay to be a defective reader, as long as the miscues make sense. But, of course, in the workplace such nonsense does not hold water. An error is an error no matter what else you may call it, and to try to convince a child that an error is not an error will not serve him well when he is an adult confronting the demands of a technologically advanced economy that requires accuracy and precision in thinking and performing and reading.”
“The quest for truth requires a respect and appreciation for accuracy and precision of thought. If, to begin with, you denigrate accuracy in reading, you denigrate the pursuit of truth… Miscue analysis is the crudest hoax ever perpetrated on unsuspecting children. To convince a normal child that it is perfectly all right to read as if he had a defective brain is so heinous a form of miseducation as to be nothing short of a crime.” This article was taken from The Blumenfeld Education Letter, Vol. 7, No.12 (Letter 76), December 1992. Editor: Samuel L. Blumenfeld, reprinted on www.donpotter.net
The newsletter masthead reads: “My people are destroyed for a lack of knowledge.” [Hosea 4:6] The purpose of this newsletter is to provide knowledge for parents and educators who want to save the children of America from the destructive forces that endanger them.
“Our children in the public schools are at grave risk in 4 ways: academically, spiritually, morally, and physically – and only a well-informed public will be able to reduce these risks. “Without vision, the people perish” [Proverbs 29:18]. Notes by Donald L. Potter, May 20, 2005, Odessa, TX.
Yes, we CAN make reading easier by pulling the process apart and teaching phonics reading skills. To a phonetic reader, reading is NOT a “psycholinguistic guessing game.” It is accurate and precise. No wonder the U.S. is falling behind as the technological giant. Many of our young adults now were taught by these faulty teaching models.
By the way, remedial classes mushroomed since Project Follow Through because the methods were, and still are, creating more learning disabilities than ever before. Private (commercial) tutoring has mushroomed too, because parents are desperate to fix what the schools have done. But many parents cannot afford to pay for good (not the school’s) remediation. TGM is something anyone can afford to do at home, the earlier the better.
