Early Childhood Reading – Why It Went Wrong

May 26, 2016 1:24 pm Published by Alonah Reading Cambridge Leave your thoughts

My family was spread out. The youngest, Kerry, is 20 years younger than myself. When Kerry was 8 years old I was a trained teacher with 6 years’ experience. When I helped her with her spelling one day and insisted, like for my own class, that the spellings were correct, she burst into tears and said, ”Mrs Plum says we only have to get the words nearly right!” That was 1964 and that year began the rot in education. From then forward hippy, creative, avant garde thinkers began to change education. Phonic reading was dropped in favour of reading books with 4 or 5 words relentlessly repeated, ‘Look, come, go,’ etc, until the child could ‘read’ the book from memory and almost without looking. Further words were added in further books interspersed with link words, ‘and,’ ‘because,’ ‘these’ all learnt by heart. As the child grew, what he didn’t know he guessed at from illustrations or from context – and both those methods are still being used by less effective teachers today.

Next time the slide of grammar and punctuation.

Categorised in: early childhood reading

This post was written by Alonah Reading Cambridge