Symbol-Brained

[Bekah]

Dr. Seuss is excellent for the affective appeal and the phonics! 
:) I love those books,  especially the ones for early readers.

Many of the books on the market with limited vocabulary and 
sound-able words are totally boring for everyone and incredibly 
difficult for non-native English speakers to comprehend.  Dr. Seuss 
is great.   (There are some newer phonics oriented books which are 
better than the old ones were.)  But you have to make sure the child 
has a sense of phonemic awareness.  That he hears the rhymes and that 
he is able to rapidly reproduce three sounds in a row.  (about age 4 
or 5 usually,  lots of difference in this development.  It happens 
all year long in kindergarten,  not just in October!) (lol)

But  many sight word have to be taught specifically basic 
phonetically accurate word families; these are words like:  I see, 
the, said, look, oh.   But if you can get them going while teaching 
some basic sounds,  m, s, l, t, r, p, n, h,  you can write sentences 
like "I see the cat in the hat."  "The cat has a red hat."  and so on.

There are three components to reading;   phonics,  sight words,  and 
context (including syntax).  Some kids will get some parts better 
than others.   Some kids are very bright and put the components 
together to make sense on their own.  Other kids are slow and have to 
be taught almost everything.  The brighter kids can do with less 
phonics because they're using all the clues;  the slower kids have to 
rely less on context and more on sight words and phonics.   But 
middle kids will need some of one and some of the other at different 
times and the teacher just has to pay attention to what they are 
"getting."

I had one boy who read his sentence and then said,  muttering,  to 
himself,  "That doesn't make sense," and read it again.   Great 
cognitive skills there!   He's thinking!    (lol!)

But other kids will read,  "The cat can jet."  and have no idea it 
doesn't make sense until you point it out to them.   They just aren't 
putting things together analyzing  and evaluating and so on.  These 
guys need good teachers who pay attention.  And then,  some of them, 
one day,  just click into place.  It was developmental and now, 
suddenly,  they know what to do and how.  Other (a very few)  kids 
never get there.  :(

I'm a long time kindergarten teacher in the public school system. 
We used to paint and develop social skills.  Now we have 
"first-grade-on-the-floor" (no desks)  with reading and writing and 
way too much academics for these guys.  I love doing it.  (I love 
learning theory and early childhood development.)  The kids love 
learning it and the parents are real impressed!    But I worry about 
the costs.

Bekah
sorry for the ramble

At 6:49 AM -0700 8/13/05, Dave Monroe wrote:
>Well, what I find most interesting about learning to
>read from Dr. Seuss is that, while The Cat in the Hat
>was written with the limited vocabularly of a specific
>theory of reading in mind ...
>
>http://www.newyorker.com/critics/atlarge/?021223crat_atlarge
>
>... most of the rest of that Seussian ouevre features
>a not inconsiderable amount of non-words, involving
>both working out phonetics (at least insofar as Seuss'
>"nonsense' words as often as not are constructed as
>part as a rhyme/rhythm sceme as well as part of an
>allusive network) and recognizing the function of such
>words regardless of meaning (i.e., knowing that
>there's SOME sort of animal or machinery or whatever
>being, well, not to much refrred to as implied).
>Structure before content.  The grammar before the
>dictionary ...
>
>The Cat in the Hat was never nearly the favorite that
>Bartholomew and the Oobleck or If I Ran the Circus or
>The Sleep Book were.  I wish I'd been taking notes on
>my youngest brother (b. 1980), who's since gone
>dangerously schizophrenic, but ...
>
>And then there wre the globes, maps, atlases ...
>
>--- Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>>  You may have memorized the books as well as been
>  > learning some sight words.  The comprehension may
>>  have been there to retell stories.  But accurately
>>  sounding out a new word, like cart, and putting it
>>  into comprehensible context is not going to happen
>>  until the child is 3 at the earliest and sometimes
>>  never happens.
>
>
>
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