New podcast about reading instruction

[Clemsondana]

Something that I was reading recently linked me to a new podcast called Sold a Story about changes in reading instruction and how some kids struggle to learn to read.  I've seen assignments that I couldn't understand the purpose of during my volunteer work, and this explains what they are trying to do.  Unfortunately, the assignments seem to flow from theories not supported neuroscience, which could explain why I'm seeing them when I work with struggling students.  Sigh.  Anyway, I thought I'd share in case anybody is interested. 

[KSera]

Was the article that linked you worth reading? Faster for me to read than listen, but I’m interested. 

[Clemsondana]

24 minutes ago, KSera said:

Was the article that linked you worth reading? Faster for me to read than listen, but I’m interested. 

It was part of a twitter thread so I don't know that I could find it again.  I'd rather read than listen, too!  This is my first podcast and now I know why...it's good, but it's been a struggle for me to be able to listen to it.  

[forty-two]

2 hours ago, KSera said:

Was the article that linked you worth reading? Faster for me to read than listen, but I’m interested. 

I was able to find links to the transcripts here: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ 

[Clemsondana]

I cross-posted this in chat and it's gotten some comments about how it relates to speech, if anybody is interested.  

[daijobu]

This is such a heartbreaking report.  For more installments here are some more episodes that pre-date the Sold a Story compilation:

At a Loss for Words

Reading instruction in the US

Reading instruction battles

Reading curriculum is failing kids

NY Times article

I'm eager to hear the next episode of Sold a Story.  

[Not_a_Number]

Thank you! I'll have to take a look. 

[Clemsondana]

1 hour ago, Not_a_Number said:

Thank you! I'll have to take a look. 

You'll yell at your phone.  If you want to chat about it, there have been more posts on the thread in the chat forum than here.  

[daijobu]

You know I wonder, who are the kids who never watched Sesame Street or Electric Company?  Those programs are full of phonics instruction, how did students miss that?  

[ElizabethB]

The problem is that they get a bit of phonics instruction, but they get sight words, they get predictable readers, so they learn to guess. A bit of phonics but not enough to read well enough to sound out anything.

Today's episode is enlightening and infuriating--the amount of taxpayer $ spent on systems that are proven not to work, kept being pushed by the people getting rich off of it.

It's hard to undo the guessing habits--I use nonsense words. I have a free program with phonics to the 12th grade level, it is designed for older students who guess, in includes nonsense words.

http://thephonicspage.org/On Reading/syllablesspellsu.html

Also, many of the students are "functionally literate," they can read some things but guess and are below grade level, many parents do not realize their children are behind. I hand out reading grade level tests to parents with children in schools that use balanced literacy and then point them to my program and other phonics resources.

Grade level test:

http://www.thephonicspage.org/On Reading/Resources/40L Test.pdf

Edited November 10, 2022 by ElizabethB

[Clarita]

21 hours ago, daijobu said:

You know I wonder, who are the kids who never watched Sesame Street or Electric Company?  Those programs are full of phonics instruction, how did students miss that?  

The kids who watch a ton of TV when they are younger almost feels like they learn or are conditioned to zone out in front of the TV. Unless a parent or adult nurtures the interaction between the things going on on the screen kids will tend toward not actually processing information presented to them on the screen (especially little kids). 

It's a shocking (to me anyway) number of parents who put their kids in front of a screen for long periods of time and don't even ask their kids a simple "What happened in that episode?".

[Not_a_Number]

6 hours ago, ElizabethB said:

t's hard to undo the guessing habits--I use nonsense words

I love the nonsense words. I wound up using my own to target what DD6 ws having trouble with (my kids read early, so we were doing this a couple of years ago.) I know from DD6 that some kids just wind up guessing naturally, even if you teach them entirely using phonics. 

[ElizabethB]

2 hours ago, Not_a_Number said:

I love the nonsense words. I wound up using my own to target what DD6 ws having trouble with (my kids read early, so we were doing this a couple of years ago.) I know from DD6 that some kids just wind up guessing naturally, even if you teach them entirely using phonics. 

My son was prone to guessing, I didn't teach him single sight word or anything even remotely whole language or balanced literacy. He would guess if there was a sentence to guess from until late 2nd or early 3rd grade, I had to limit his sentence reading until then.

[Malam]

On 11/9/2022 at 9:42 PM, daijobu said:

You know I wonder, who are the kids who never watched Sesame Street or Electric Company?

If I’m anything to go by, they’re part of the silent majority who learn to read regardless of school instruction

[EKS]

On 11/9/2022 at 6:42 PM, daijobu said:

You know I wonder, who are the kids who never watched Sesame Street or Electric Company?  Those programs are full of phonics instruction, how did students miss that?  

Kids who have trouble learning to read aren't going to absorb it by passively watching a screen.  They need to practice reading with a person who can scaffold the process.

I was part of the original Sesame Street/Electric Company generation--I was two when Sesame Street came out and four for the Electric Company.  I did not learn to read by watching either show.  I have been informally diagnosed with dyslexia by the person who diagnosed my son.

I also never really got instruction in advanced phonics.  I got reasonably good at reading by reading along when my father read to me in the evenings, but I only met my potential by reading aloud to my kids over the course of 24 years, going from Goodnight Moon all the way to complex college level material.  Also teaching them to read, and thus learning phonics properly myself, was extremely helpful.

Edited November 12, 2022 by EKS

[KSera]

Did Sesame Street even really teach phonics beyond letter names and maybe simple sounds? I don’t recall very well but I feel like I remember a bigger focus on naming letters. I watched it growing up, but my kids didn’t.

[GoodnightMoogle]

There is also a Facebook group that has a lot of good information called “Science of Reading.” It’s where I first heard about this podcast. There are a lot of great anecdotes where teachers share about the successes and failures of various curricula. 

[Clemsondana]

15 hours ago, KSera said:

Did Sesame Street even really teach phonics beyond letter names and maybe simple sounds? I don’t recall very well but I feel like I remember a bigger focus on naming letters. I watched it growing up, but my kids didn’t.

Sesame Street was more preschool-focused, with basic letter and numbers, although there was some sounds = C is for cookie, that G-Grover, G-George song talking about the 2 sounds for G

The Electric Company and Zoom were for slightly older kids and one of them had more phonics - they had Letterman and those head outlines that would do 'b-ox-box' for sounding out words.  I remember those when i was a kid, but they were gone by the time our kids were around.  I think Word Girl (maybe - we didn't do much with this) and Superwhy (my kids liked this one, and we had the board game that had some phonics practice) had some phonics, and my kids liked those better than the newer Sesame Street skits.  I would sometimes pull up old Sesame Street sketches on youtube and they liked those - the ones about crayons being made or Aretha Franklin or other musical ABCs.

[GoodnightMoogle]

Does anyone else remember a show called Reading Between the Lions? That one had phonics. It was also very cute and old school puppet based in a Jim Henson sort of way. I think it was on pbs in the 90s? I’m not sure where else I would have watched it. 

[cintinative]

5 hours ago, GoodnightMoogle said:

Does anyone else remember a show called Reading Between the Lions? That one had phonics. It was also very cute and old school puppet based in a Jim Henson sort of way. I think it was on pbs in the 90s? I’m not sure where else I would have watched it. 

It was awesome. I think you can still find it on Youtube maybe.  It was called Between the Lions.  https://www.pbs.org/show/between-lions/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF3vH15xsvE

 

[Heartstrings]

On 11/9/2022 at 8:42 PM, daijobu said:

You know I wonder, who are the kids who never watched Sesame Street or Electric Company?  Those programs are full of phonics instruction, how did students miss that?  

With streaming you have to actively seek out PBS shows. It’s actually kind of hard to watch those shows even if you are the type of parent to seek them out.  I’m sure I’m not alone in having no real way to watch over the air TV and wouldn’t know where PBS was anymore.  Netflix  has some good preschool shows but none as good as Sesame Street. 
 

Edited November 14, 2022 by Heartstrings

[Clemsondana]

I remember reading something years ago that said that PBS shows were meant to help underserved kids, but it was middle class kids whose parents limited TV exposure that did most of the watching.  One fascinating thing when I volunteered at an inner city program was that the kids didn't know the same characters that the kids in my circles did. I took in a bunch of books that my kids had outgrown - Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora the Explorer, etc - thinking that the kids would take the Nat Geo kids stuff for themselves and the preschool stuff for younger siblings.  But, they didn't associate Thomas or Elmo with preschool because they'd never seen it before.  In our world, elementary school kids thought of those as preschool characters.  On the other hand, when asked to name a favorite character, one kid named Chucky (the horror movie doll).  Others were fans of The Fast and the Furious.  Meanwhile, my kids were working their way through the Disney movies.  

[Heartstrings]

On 11/15/2022 at 11:30 AM, Clemsondana said:

I remember reading something years ago that said that PBS shows were meant to help underserved kids, but it was middle class kids whose parents limited TV exposure that did most of the watching.  One fascinating thing when I volunteered at an inner city program was that the kids didn't know the same characters that the kids in my circles did. I took in a bunch of books that my kids had outgrown - Thomas the Tank Engine, Dora the Explorer, etc - thinking that the kids would take the Nat Geo kids stuff for themselves and the preschool stuff for younger siblings.  But, they didn't associate Thomas or Elmo with preschool because they'd never seen it before.  In our world, elementary school kids thought of those as preschool characters.  On the other hand, when asked to name a favorite character, one kid named Chucky (the horror movie doll).  Others were fans of The Fast and the Furious.  Meanwhile, my kids were working their way through the Disney movies.  

I’ve seen this too.   I did after school babysitting for a couple of kids for awhile, a kindergartener and 1st grader, and I had to explicitly tell them they weren’t allowed to tease my 2nd grader about not being allowed to watch the Walking Dead.  At the time my teenager wasn’t allowed to watch it and my husband watched it at work on his lunch so it wasn’t accidentally caught by the kids.  

[FlyingSack]

On 11/14/2022 at 4:23 PM, Heartstrings said:

With streaming you have to actively seek out PBS shows. It’s actually kind of hard to watch those shows even if you are the type of parent to seek them out.  I’m sure I’m not alone in having no real way to watch over the air TV and wouldn’t know where PBS was anymore.  Netflix  has some good preschool shows but none as good as Sesame Street. 
 

I know our library has DVDs of Between the Lions. That would be a good place to look.... assuming you have a DVD player.