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by geuis
5764 days ago
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I think teaching your kids the alphabet isn't asking for too much. And whatever you do, don't mix up the letter order. I was unlucky enough when I was a young kid (5 or 6) to be enrolled at a school for a few weeks during the start of the year while my parents were moving. (We were staying with family in a different town than the one we were moving to). The teacher started the year by helping us learn to read. I could already read a little at this point, some of the other kids couldn't yet. She went through this process by teaching random letters from the alphabet. x, b, and k one day, and g, p, s the next. This confused the hell out of me. It also did no service to the other kids who were trying to learn. After a couple of weeks of me telling my parents about it seeing my reading comprehension actually getting worse, they pulled me from the school for the last week until we moved, if I remember correctly. And to put this all in perspective, I have always been a voracious reader. There was barely a moment growing up that I can remember not being with a book. In school I was always at least 2-3 years ahead of most of my peers when it came to reading, language, etc. I'm lucky I didn't have to keep that one backwards teacher. |
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I agree. I was doing a little thought experiment, though, to analyze why that is. I don't like believing something without knowing the value of believing it ;-)
And whatever you do, don't mix up the letter order.
This, though, I am unsure about.
I appreciate hearing your experiences but I'm not convinced one teacher's approach invalidates the technique. With the synthetic phonics approach that's common here in the UK, the focus is typically on learning letters in relation to their use in simple words (like 'cat'). The order of the alphabet isn't ignored, but this is left till later when the names of the letters are covered (this comes after learning all of the "sounds").
I still need to do a lot more reading into this, but my own daughter's approaching the stage where she'll be interested in specific letters and I was planning to focus on the sounds she takes an interest in and their associated representations and worry about the "alphabet" somewhat later on. Phonics is not without its detractors though so, as I say, I need to do more reading ;-)