Recently, Loving Literacy Authors has been invited to participate in Educator Resource conventions at the Phoenix Children’s Museum, The Phoenix Art Museum, and the Phoenix Humane Society. The authors take turns staffing our information booth, and we’ve shared the common experience of gaining confidence in, and a great respect for, the teachers who’ve attended to peruse educational aids, services, and resources.

Education has notoriously been a roller coaster ride of best practices for teachers. Influenced by politicians and superintendents who don’t have a background in teaching children in a classroom, oftentimes will dictate what and how a subject will be taught, particularly kid’s literature and approach to reading. A report in Sage journals (Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics?) summarizes the current dilemma of two main schools of thought on how best to teach children to read. First, Phonics starts with the alphabet and the sounds of letters to build words. Second, the Whole Language Approach (WLA) focuses on figuring out an unfamiliar word from sentence context and pictures. Proponents of WLA felt that Phonics was boring, and those who advocate Phonics consider WLA to be ineffective, condoning readers guessing at words in lieu of sounding them out.
Because these two approaches are being hashed out in legislative meetings instead of collaborating with professional educators, they’ve become politicized. It’s puzzling that in other careers, like medicine or law, legislators depend on the expertise of certified professionals, not politicians.
We’ve seen recently that literacy education theories are evolving toward a middle ground called Balanced Literacy Instruction. This method embeds Phonics and WLA in a program that provides varied exposure to text through multiple means. It fosters language and vocabulary development, comprehension, prior knowledge, creative writing, individualizing for different students’ needs, and reading for fun.
Meeting dedicated teachers at these conventions assured us that these well-informed professionals are quite capable of teaching our kids to read.
What are your thoughts on the best practices for teaching children to read?
Thank you for reading our blog.
LLA Authors
Reference: Sage Journals Legislating Phonics: Settled Science or Political Polemics?
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