Does your child enjoy Dr Seuss Books some of the most famous children’s books of all time?

I shared them with my sons and still enjoy sharing them with children. In fact we had a set of the 15 or so Beginner Books and many other titles.

Millions of copies have been sold all over the world.

Titles such as:

• The Cat in the Hat
• One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
• Hop on Pop
• Green Eggs and Ham and many others.

Dr Seuss is the pen name of Theodore Seuss Geisel.

Dr Seuss wrote his books by being given a list of sight words from the publishers.

His first book, ‘The Cat in the Hat’ had to be written by him using only 236 sight words.

This was to provide material with the words children could memorize. I still find it amazing that people willingly taught children to read this way. 

The damage done to the baby boomers from whole language is immense.

We still have a huge number of people with literacy issues that could have been avoided.

I learned to read using a phonics based graded reading series. Thanks to the internet I have found the whole series including the teacher’s manual. Using 6 graded readers over two years I was a fluent reader at 7.  The stories were so interesting I was amazed at how many I remembered.

As a result I assumed this is how all children learn to read. I was wrong.

Dr Seuss had a wonderful quirky imagination and as a result his stories are fun, productive and

exciting with unique illustrations.

Dr Seuss himself, 30 years after publishing his first book, says how he regretted his association with the “look and say-whole word movement”

In June 1981 he said “……………..I think killing phonics was one of the greatest causes of illiteracy in the country”

I agree. I have sat with hundreds of children all having reading problems and all unable to decode written words.

There also seems to be evidence that the whole word way of teaching young children to read is even connected to such disorders like ADD and Dyslexia. I am not sure of this but I have experienced numerous students reacting emotionally to being taught. I think this means the learning issue is  subconscious and the student is unaware of it.

Something happened to the person when learning to read and this is blocking learning.

The aspect of learning to read (phonics) that I am discussing is not difficult to learn of itself.

I have anecdotal evidence from my own experience.

I still remember the severe pain suffered by a middle aged man I was tutoring. He could barely read and was a whole word memorizer. When I introduced decoding principles to him and he began practising he could not go on. The mental anguish and emotional pain was too much for him. He excused himself and left. His distress was painful to see.

If your child is having reading issues check out their phonemic (sound) awareness and level of decoding skills but also look to see whether there are underlying emotional issues first.

There are tests and phonics programs for you to review at www.phonicsforkids.net to help your child when they are ready.

I know the whole language approach to literacy teaching has many positive aspects but please don’t let your child miss out on learning phonics as soon as possible.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

This entry was posted on August 28, 2010 at 6:21 AM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in phonemic awareness phonics phonics for kids by Marilyn Martyn No Comments Yet