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Develop your child's mind with the 'best practice' of several millennia - phonics
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Private school options for phonics
To understand why teaching phonics early is the best enhancement for a child’s giftedness, we need to take a look at the historical perspective. In fact, the phonics method is the reason the alphabet was invented.
The earliest writers used pictures- hieroglyphics and pictograms- to record information, which was a highly inefficient system. Scribes would have to memorize thousands of pictograms to be proficient, which is analogous to our current whole-word (sight-reading) method. Sight-reading is a tedious chore that often leads to illiteracy. (It is also the method employed by the ‘Your Baby Can Read’ series, which is causing digression not progress.)
Luckily over 4000 years ago, the Phoenicians made a great break through that revolutionized the Biblical (Middle East) and Greek worlds. They developed symbols representing sounds, so that any word could be written. It was much easier to learn an alphabet of 20 to 30 sounds, instead of thousands of complicated pictograms, and so literacy, and therefore civilization itself, thrived.
Sight-reading is essentially looking at whole words as if they are pictograms. Children would need to learn at least 2000 flash cards to build a basic English vocabulary. What a ridiculous, backwards idea! This argument was settled back in ancient times, and the phonics method of reading has been world’s best practice for thousands of years.
Unfortunately, rational argument and scientific evidence will not move the educational status quo. The whole-word method is clearly inferior and must be rejected. As children continue reading phonetically, they begin to recognize whole words which they have previously sounded out, but this is practicing words, not learning them.
“The child who has been properly grounded in phonics will recognize words as patterns of sounds, not patterns of funny strokes on paper. He or she will also be able to decode words not previously encountered. This is what it actually means to be able to read. The child taught by the whole-word method cannot do this, and is therefore not truly literate.
“Phonics instruction is not limited to [the 26 letters of the alphabet.] In fact it teaches 40 sounds, the 75 ways these sounds are represented on paper, and the rules that need to be followed. The alphabet is extended by 2 letter combinations. The consonants, such as ‘ch’, ‘ng’, ‘ph’, ‘sh’ and ‘th’ are known as diphthongs.
“Then there are the compound vowels such as ‘ai’, ‘ea’, ‘ee’, ‘oa’, ‘oo’, ‘or’, ‘ou’ and ‘ow’. The letter ‘e’ on the end of a word turns a soft vowel into a hard vowel. And that’s really about it. It’s not that hard! I had no trouble mastering this as a 6 year old in 1960. It is a pity that since then so many children have been disadvantaged by a politically correct, but ineffective, approach.
“It is surely time that logic, scientific evidence and the needs of children be put before the sensitivities and reputations of our educators.” Alan Marshall, B. Sc. (Mathematics), Dip. Ed., The Antiquity of the Phonics Method, Submission to the (Australian Government) National Enquiry into the Teaching of Literacy, 19 January 2005.
One way to guarantee that your children learn phonics instead of sight-reading is to find affordable private schools. One of the secular private schools in the Kansas City area is Accelerated Schools of Overland Park. Check it out at http://acceleratedschoolsop.org/ They provide full-time classes for grades 4-12.
The great thing about Accelerated Schools is that they also provides after-school and summer tutoring for all grades 1-12.
In the Kansas City area, many of the private schools are provided by a church or religious organization. One possibility is the Faith Christian Academy. For more info: http://www.fcaclassical.com/academics/elementary-scope-of-coordination
Another place to look for private schools is: http://www.local.com/results.aspx?location=kansas+city+ks&keyword=private+school&cid=662&gid=US_-_Explicit_3&gclid=CNa72r2_zpwCFSMeDQod1W_CJQ
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