First, don’t worry. I think, as others have indicated, you are misinterpreting what the teacher said.
You heard, “We make children write words phonetically.”
She probably meant to say, “We allow children to write words phonetically when we’re working on larger verbal skills.”
The idea is to let kids learn about reading and writing, as **LHOD **so eloquently described, without getting them hung up on perfect spelling as a prerequisite. Which would you rather have - a kindergartner learning reading comprehension, basic narrative skills, how to give details, etc., while slowly bringing spelling up in a parallel way, or a kindergartner who spends a year learning to rote memorize spelling, but doesn’t learn anything else about English?
My kid just started first grade. In kindergarten, they did phonetic spelling to allow them to write in their journals and such. Now they are continuing to do that, while also having lists of spelling words and quizzes, and the teachers correcting key words in their writing. It’s not necessarily exclusive of spelling, or “whole language” approach.
Also, my parents dug out one of my stories from when I was 6 or so, and it has the exact same crazy spelling. Yet, I spell very well* and have always excelled in language arts.
*of course now something in this post will have to be misspelled.
It does, and its the compromise you need to make. And, in the end, it works out ‘well enough’ the vast majority of the time. The bigger issues, according to my teacher friends, is making parents understand that this is the compromise you need to make. On one hand you have the parent of the scribbler wanting his kid to get extra attention so they catch up, go to college, hold a ‘real’ job. The parent of the gifted child wants extra attention so they can live up to their potential (which in a parent’s eyes is limitless - their eight page story writer is destined to be Michael Chabon). And you have the kids whose parents seem to be non-existent - and those are the ones where a lot of parents want to stick the resources because they KNOW they aren’t getting help on the home front.
Yes, I often help him spell complex words, and unfortunately am completely aware that his teacher is unable to provide that sort of one-on-one attention; and that’s one of the things that bothers me. He went to Pre-K at a franchise day care/learning center where there were 12 children in his class and 2 teachers. At the public school where he attends kindergarten, there are 22 children in the class and 1 teacher. If the teacher is really lucky, she gets a Teacher’s Assistant 2-3 days a week for a couple of hours at a whack.
Yeah, he understands what he’s reading. He reads on his own frequently, picks the books he wants to borrow from the library or wants me to purchase at Barnes & Noble, and can re-tell any story he’s read (and often discusses them ad nasuem).
His writing/spelling skills are nowhere near as developed as his reading skills, but he does understand a number of important writing/spelling concepts; words with non-English origins sometimes look much different that how they sound, some letters are silent, etc. He even understands the various elements of sentences (courtesy of watching old Schoolhouse Rock segments on DVD), and some punctuation.
He knows that “was” is spelled “w-a-s”, not “w-u-z”; he knows that “time” is spelled “t-i-m-e”, and not “t-y-m”.
I worry that he will have to un-learn eveything he already knows just to fit in with the rest of the class, and institutionalized dumbass for the sake of conformity just seems like a silly idea.
My wife and I have always believed that we’d send our son to a private school later in the educational process; probably for Junior High and definately for High School. We always assumed that Elementary School wasn’t all that important…
[Gen-X mode]And of course, the lone adult in charge of 60 students in an over- or underheated classroom always had sterling judgment and never punished a kid for little or no reason, or punished the wrong kid. And parents never asked their kid for their side of it, because all adults were always right, and all kids were always wrong. Yeah, the good ol’ days.[G-Xm]
I’m a public school fan, myself…for a number of reasons. Ours aren’t bad. They are free (I’d rather send my kids to college and grad school). Around here, anything remotely secular is very expensive - and neither Brainiac4 or I will tolerate a religious curriculum. And I happen to be a believer that most success comes from talent and application, not how you are taught.
But, if you are going to go the private school route in high school, sooner rather later makes a lot of sense. School has a much bigger social component to it - and friendships are made in younger grades. If you get your kid into the private school “system” that they will go to high school in, they won’t reach middle school or high school and be thrown into a class where they don’t know very many people. And they will be familiar with the rhythm of private school - which IS different than that of public school.
Crappy situation. The 6:1 ratio is, IMO, just about ideal for education, but it’s so rare to get it.
Excellent! Sorry to doubt, but like I said, a lot of parents overestimate their children’s reading ability by not really understanding themselves what real comprehension looks like.
Check again with the teacher. I’d be astonished if she’d discourage him from spelling any word correctly. Most likely, when a student says, “Ms. Harshbarger, how do you spell ‘time’?” the teacher will ask the student to listen to the sounds in the word and write them down. It’s tremendously unlikely that the teacher would say, “John, you wrote t-i-m-e. Don’t you mean t-i-m?” If she does, I agree with you that her approach is horrible. But I strongly doubt that’s what she meant.
Elementary school is hugely important, although of course I’d say that. I will say that I’ve seen kids enter public school after a few years in Montessori or something, and come in completely clueless about some of the mechanics of reading and writing that we teach early on. I’ve had to do some serious remediation with ex-private-school kids myself. Just because something is private doesn’t mean they know how to teach mechanics. One kid, for example, went to a school where I think his writing time consisted of copying paragraphs from the board. His handwriting was pretty good, his word-decoding was decent, but his retell skills were nonexistent, and he couldn’t write more than a page-long story to save his life. By the end of the year I had him doing a pretty good job in the latter two categories, but it was lots of work for everyone involved.
Which is an important point - not all private schools are going to offer a superior education. If you look into private schools, you may discover that this sort of teaching is what is being taught in all the nearby schools - or that something you equally disapprove of is.
And I agree, elementary school is the foundation of all future learning. Its where most kids learn to read. Its where most kids learn computational math. In some ways, its possibly easier to take a kid with an exceptional elementary school education and let them self learn through high school and be successful, than to expect someone to get through a poor elementary school education and be equipped to handle a highly competitive academic high school.
Personally I’m horrified to see that thye don’t teach kids how to sound out words anymore. If my son doesn’t know a word he skips over it. What is THAT doing to his comprehension I have to wonder.
Free education? what fairy planet are you living on?
A) Respect for Left Hand of Dorkness, because if you put me in a room full of 30 grade-school kids, I’d staple them to the ceiling and sit drooling and rocking in a corner. I could not handle being a teacher. Or they’d have me tied to my chair and covered in fingerpaint, but either way, bad Idea.
B) My kids were taught this way in kindergarten and first grade. Like the OP, both boys could read already (and could tell you about the story). I never had issue with the teacher telling them to spell something WRONG. She just didn’t expect them to spell it RIGHT, as LHoD is saying. So just some support here, from another anecdotal perspective.
My daughter is taught to sound out words. I had to explain to her last week that she couldn’t figure out how to spell plain versus plane by saaaayyiiiing iiiiitt sloooowly and listening for a difference.
As for “free education” how about this: you don’t have to pay anything over and above the taxes you’ll have to pay in any case.
Ahhh then all that money I paid the school last year for textbooks, lab fees, a freaking EIGHT bucks for postage (they mailed TWO things to me) was over 100 bucks of my imagination?
They DO teach kids to sound out words. What they don’t do is correct spelling until late third grade - except for those words that they are expected to know - which is an ever building list. i.e. UC’s “plain” is “fine” for a first grader spelled as “plan” or “plain” or “plane” or “plaan” or “pln” - the idea being that in first grade, using words, particularly in writing, is more important than spelling words.
In first grade they start getting spelling words (they get some in kindergarten - but they are really more simple “reading words” - is, am, on…etc. That if you can read you can spell.)
And around here, education is part of your tax dollars - we don’t get charged for books, lab fees, etc. We do need to provide school supplies, but if you show up without them, the school has donated supplies.
Well SOMEONE didn’t teach my son, because I had to do that. And my neice in Washington State looked at me like I’d asked her to produce an elephant when I told her to sound out what she was reading…
shrugs My son’s supposed “free” education costs me as much or moreout of pocket as the local private school… and they wonder why more people are going to private schools with smaller classroom sizes.
Anyway, I’ve said all I plan to on the subject and am finished hijacking this thread.
Shrug…then private school sounds like a good deal for you. Here, my kids are getting taught “well enough” and we aren’t getting nickle and dimed by the public school system.
I will say that I’ve seen kids enter public school after a few years in Montessori or something, and come in completely clueless about some of the mechanics of reading and writing that we teach early on. I’ve had to do some serious remediation with ex-private-school kids myself. Just because something is private doesn’t mean they know how to teach mechanics. One kid, for example, went to a school where I think his writing time consisted of copying paragraphs from the board. His handwriting was pretty good, his word-decoding was decent, but his retell skills were nonexistent, and he couldn’t write more than a page-long story to save his life. By the end of the year I had him doing a pretty good job in the latter two categories, but it was lots of work for everyone involved.