Whole Brain or Power Teaching - for real?

[newbetx]

Whole language, where instead of learning the alphabet and sound blending kids look at a book and deduce the story from the pictures. Then instead of building words then sentences, they work in reverse. It works for some kids but I found it a failure for mine.

I recall helping out in the classroom in February of my older son’s year in grade 1. At that point the kids didn’t all know the alphabet. The teacher asked me to listen to their reading and when I commented that the 3 I’d listened to had done poorly she was surprised because those were her best readers. When I asked what she had as criteria she replied “If they look at the picture and can tell you the story…” Oh-K fine. Not exactly what I was doing with DS at home at that stage, no wonder he looked at me funny when I wanted him to do sound blending. He could read in his second language (English) before he could in his mother tongue (French) because he had learned phonics from Sesame Street.

We got in trouble for saying we would use different teaching methods to assist different cultures at our school. We were already doing different methods independent of cultural diversity… Minorities didn’t want to believe we would do something for them and most of the parents wanted to know exactly what we were going to do differently… like we might cater to someone else and not their child. It’s a no win. There is no one perfect system. All children are different and so are teachers. Mix it up and modify as needed.