Conference moira::parenting_v3

I suspect your daughter is being taught that way BECAUSE she is a visual
learner, and not the other way around.  Our daughter is a visual learner
too, and she has INCREDIBLE difficulty when she runs across new words.
What is worse her mind races on far faster than her reading rate, so she
reads words that aren't there, alters the order of the words that are, and
often misreads words because the START of the word has the same shape as
another word ...

e.g.

tortilla chips
tortoise shell

may well be the SAME thing to her!

She guesses at words terribly.  She can pronounce phonetically, but again she
recognizes the phonyms by their SHAPE so it then is a two step procedure and
she then can come up with the wrong phonym because she has misrecognized the
letter shapes that make it up.

If your daughter struggles with phonics / phonetics, then visual learning
approaches may be the only way.  Eventually she will become fluent and fluid
in reading, but it sure can be painful listening to a visual learnere read
new words, or words that haven't been committed to memory yet!

Stuart

re .1:

Maybe things are different in Canada, but in the U.S. it's unusual for children
to be taught with the method that best suited for *them*.  Typically, all
children in a classroom are taught with the same method, which unfortunately
is often the "look-say" method.  Phonics may not be the best method for all
children, but look-say is a total disaster for many.

I suspect that your daughter struggles with phonics because phonics is being
taught wrongly, probably by a look-say adherent.

    re.1
    
    Thanks a lot for your reply.  Your daughter and mine are so similar. 
    It makes me feel so much better and relieved that there are others with
    this type of learning strategy.  
    
    I remain quite curious about the whole subject.  I just never knew or
    realized this method (visual reading, whatever) was a learning tool.
    
    Re.2
    I think I'm going to explore more about this type of learning.
    
    cindy

Interesting topic.

.0, you said your daughter is in fourth grade.  What grade is your son in?

I believe that you've hit on some of the differences between the "phonetic"
system to teaching reading (your son) and the "whole language" system (your
dauthter's school).

My daughter (now sixth grade) learned using a phonetic system and my son (now
third grade) learned under the same phonetic system through second grade, but
now is in a different elementary school in which they use the "whole
language" approach.

While I do think that one style or the other may be better for some students,
I don't think it's possible to say that one style is "better" in the absolute
sense.  The principal at my son's school claims that students taught under
the "whole language" approach do better in standardized tests administered
in junior high than do students who are taught using a phonetic approach. 
But it's a very limited sample, and may be due to other factors.

One reason that I asked .0 her son's grade level is that even in schools that
teach using a phonetic approach, there is a transistion to the "whole
langugage" approach in the later elementary school grades.  Reading is
learned less and less through reading lessons, and more and more through just
_reading_.  If the child hits an unfamiliar word, s/he deduces the
pronunciation by recognizing patterns and deduces the meaning by the context
or by other clues.

Just as an example of one of the differences, by daughter learned from a
reading textbook, in which the vocabulary was controlled.  There were
"reading groups" which progresses through the book at different rates,
dependent on their reading ability.  One of the cornerstones of the reading
program in my son's school is "SSR" (sustained silent reading).  There is no 
reading textbook.  The kids just pick up a book, geared to their reading
ability and interest, and just read for an hour.

While I hope that Stuart's suspicion (that the teaching style is geared to
the learning style) is correct, I doubt that it is.  Teaching under the
different systems requires not only different teaching methods, but also
different training for the teachers, different materials, different
curricula, ect.  It would be very difficult and expensive to teach under both
systems in the same school.

Clay

    To be honest, our school system isn't that adaptive either ... It
    depends on the individual teacher's sensitivities and abilities to
    an individual student's needs.  My daughter has had some sensitive
    teachers who have helped her, and some who haven't.  We do have, in
    our local schools, what we call resource teachers, who specifically
    take some students from time to time to help with visual teaching and
    other special educational needs, and also to help teachers adapt their 
    styles where needed towards those required by an individual student.
    
    The whole language system can actually be taught with any of the
    techniques ... visual, phonics, phonetics.  All the whole language
    programs do is integrate the ideas of reading and writing, and not
    with a great deal of concern in the early stages over spelling.  The
    argument is that spelling comes with use.
    
    One of the trademarks of the whole language system is the "journal",
    where the child is encouraged to write  free-flow ideas.  In the
    youngest years, the journal looks like gibberish and gradually it looks
    better and better.  The child reads the journal to the teacher, so the
    child learns to read by reading what he/she has written.
    
    This can be a distinct problem to the visual learner, since the child
    reads what he / she wrote ... from memory ... not from reading the
    words.   Ask a visual learner to read a journal entry written a week
    ago, and it is often as much greek as brand new story book.
    
    The only thing we've really been able to do to help out daughter is
    to encourage her to read ... and read LOTS ... to herself, and more
    importantly, aloud to us.  By slowing her reading down, she has less of
    a tendency to just read the words she knows!  In so doing, she learns
    new words.  Regretably, I think that all one can do for a visual
    learner in terms of reading is be patient and wait for a level of
    maturity.
    
    She needs encouragement and praise for reading well, adn reminders that
    she has misread a phrase.  We don't belabour misreading where the
    misread  isn't likely to affect the meaning of the sentence ...
    but we do pick her up where the misread does change meaning ... and
    show her what the result of her misread has done to the words she read.
    Sometimes we have a good laugh, because she has seen the funny side
    of reading, for example, "the tortilla chip was in the middle of the
    yard" as opposed to the "the tortoise shell ...".  :-)
    
    The only problem with teaching sight or visual reading as a matter of
    course to all students is that when confronted with a new word, they
    don't know the techniques to learn to pronounce the word themselves.
    On the other hand proponents of sight reading say that it is the only
    way to get around many of the pronunciation oddities of English and
    not drive the kids crazy ... after all how many can on sight pronounce
    ghoti as fish ?! Phonics and phonetics both fail on this one, and many
    more!
    
    Neat subject ... I'm glad it has come up ... it gives me a chance to
    think more about it ...
    
    My daughter is also number illiterate for the same reasons, so basic
    arithmetic is a real pain! 4x's (x x x x) take away 2x's (x x) is
    easy ... but 4 - 2 = ? is difficult.  Fortunately, with arithmetic,
    visual learning by rote with a computer makes it easy ... by flash
    cards is a pain.
    
    Stuart
    
    

    I am so glad I entered this note.  You would never believe how
    frustrated my daughter's father and I were.  I wanted to trust my
    daughter, that she really didn't know the word and was trying.  Her
    father wanted to punish her.  
    
    I remembered from childhood, my own father being so mean over learning
    arthimetic, because initially I had a hard time reading numbers,
    believe it or not.
    
    Anyway, I can't thank you guys enough for contributing your comments. 
    I have such a better understanding of how my daughter is learning.  I
    just feel like jumping up for joy.  Now, all I want to do is kiss my
    daughter and give her the biggest hug.  And begin to read like the
    dickens.
    
    thanks,
    cindy
    
    I hope this topic continues.

    re.4
    
    My son is in the 2nd grade.  Thanks a lot for your information.  It
    really helps.
    
    cindy

    Boy, can I relate.  When I was in kindergarten and first grade, they
    were teaching the sound-it-out, pheonetic method, and I just *couldn't*
    get the hang of it.  I remember being soooo frustrated.  I also
    remember being kept after school for what I thought of as punishment,
    but was really to try to give me more help.  
    
    Finally, in second grade, a different teacher took 1 afternoon to show
    the students the visual method of reading.  She drew lines around the
    shapes of the words and told us that each word had it's own shape. 
    It was like a lighting bolt to me.  In that afternoon I actually
    learned to read.  I was thrilled.  I went home and started devouring
    books and everything else I could lay my hands on to read.  
    
    Sometimes I wonder what my school years would have been like if that 
    teacher hadn't given us that one afternoon of an alternative way to 
    learn to read.  

    I'm not sure I understand how the "visual" method works.  Each word has
    its own shape?  Is the technique that you memorize the shape of each
    and every word?  I don't understand how a person who learned to read
    this way would be able to read a word they've never seen before.
    
    I admit I'm not up on theories of learning-to-read, but does this
    technique really work?  This isn't how they taught kids to read 30
    years ago, is it?  Didn't we learn to read by "sounding out" words?
    
    I'm trying hard to come up with an analogy... I think reading music is
    a good one.  When you're playing piano (or whatever), you don't sit
    there and count up the lines/spaces to figure out what each note on the
    paper is.  You sort of just see the whole picture of lines/note and you
    instantaneously know what note it is, sometimes without even saying the
    name of the note... you just "know" where to put your fingers.
    
    Is that it?  Well, maybe it works for music because there are a fixes
    number of possible notes.  There are effectively, though, an infinite
    number of words.
    
    Which technique do most school districts use these days?

    The sight reading music analogy is pretty good.
    
    It really is a case of memorizing not simply the shape of the word
    but its appearance too.  And yes, the only way of learning new words is
    to be introduced to them.  Fortunately, as maturity builds, syllables
    are memorized and they get used as the building blocks, making learning
    new words a little easier.
    
    It really does work ... for visual learners it's virtually the only way
    that does.  For non-visualizers (ie the other extreme those who cannot
    remember shapes and pictures ... and there are lots of people like this
    too!)  visual learning is the same disaster that phonetics is for the
    visual learner!
    
    Visual teaching is unusual ...
    
    Stuart

    This string is giving me a headache....  |-)
    
    For starters,
    
    .10> a case of memorizing not simply the shape of the word
       > but its appearance too.
    
    I'm not trying to be a wise guy here, but I don't understand the
    difference between a word's "shape" and its "appearance."
    
    Second,
    
    Which of us didn't start out by memorizing the shape of each *letter*? 
    Once you have that down, the next step is "what sound does a snake-
    shape make? "SSSSS".  What sound does a circle make?  "Oh."  If you put
    them together what do you get? "SO."  When you see the <shape?
    formation? combination?> SO, what sound do you get?
    
    Sooooo...  :-)  I don't know whether you call that sight-recognition,
    building syllables or phonics.  Seems to me that complete-word
    *shape* memorization, without the sounding-out of discrete letters
    and/or syllables, would result in a wretched soul who has difficulty
    distinguishing between "housing" and "boozing".
    
    Argh,
    Leslie

>    I admit I'm not up on theories of learning-to-read, but does this
>    technique really work?  This isn't how they taught kids to read 30
>    years ago, is it?  Didn't we learn to read by "sounding out" words?

If you used "Dick and Jane," you were probably taught using the look-say
method.  When I started school thirty-odd years ago, it's what was used.
I'd already learned to read using phonics, so it didn't affect me (except
insofar as it shaped my view of great literature).

    OK
    
    "will" and "mill" have nearly the same word shape ... i.e. its outline
    but have a sufficiently different *appearance* to make them
    distinctive.  (Although there are a few visual learners who might have 
    difficulty with them).
    
    Now, the visual learner does learn the shapes of letters ... like
    S is s and O is o ... but they cannot put them together to make "so".
    Until the letters are brought together to make "SO" they are just the
    letters S and O.  That's hard to comprehend, I know.  Just to give you
    an idea
    
    SO    So   sO   so
    
    these are all the same word, right ?  WRONG!   To the visual learner
    they are 4 different words that all need to be learned!
    
    Phonics and phonetics (similar but different) work on the construction
    of sounds.  The phonetic reader can take the S (sound s) and the O
    (sound o) and assemble them sss-ohh ss-o so.  The visual learner can't.
    
    Can you imagine the hell of having to learn suffixes and prefixes when
    you learn this way ?  A plural is a whole new word!  A past tense noun
    is a whole new word.  BOX  BOXES  BOXED ... these are three separate
    words.  There is no such thing as a root word and different endings!
    
    As the visual learner matures, they have a way of overcoming this part
    of the problem ... BOXED is two recognizable chunks BOX and ED ...
    which is ok because they discover that when an ED is stuck on the end
    of a word the ED becomes just D.  Now apply the same rule to NOTED.
    NOTD.  That is exactly what they will try to do to it.  So they then
    have to relearn that word as NOTE-ED.
    
    
    If you had a headache before ... how is it now :-)
    
    Dick and Jane were usually accompanied by flash cards with the words on
    them. I remember it well!  Shortly after starting Dick and Jane though,
    we were introduced to the wonderful world of phonics!  For me, the
    non-visual learner, this was great ... because I could read Dick and
    Jane long before I ever went to school --- I was bored stiff.
    
    
    Stuart
    

    Owwww....!
    
    Thanks very much, Stuart, for entering .13--I'm getting a lot closer to
    understanding what visual learners have to go through (hell is right!).
    
    I don't know which system was used on me (but don't tell my mom, who
    swears that she remembers exactly how she was taught in 1932!).  I do
    know that we used the "Dick, Jane and Sally*" books, but I don't
    remember any flash cards; all I remember about the actual process of
    learning was having mastered the enormously long word "something"! 
    This was in Mrs. Mann's class at Hunnewell School in Wellesley, Mass., 
    1956.
    
    Leslie
    
    *Mom says that in her day, Sally was "Baby"!)

    I talked with my son's teacher about the process for teaching reading. 
    She said many kids (now adults) were taught phonetic reading (I know I
    was), but there seems to be as many words that follow the "exceptions"
    as there are the "rules".  She uses a combination of phonics and sight. 
    She currently makes up flashcards for the words they learn and sends
    them home for practice.  I think my son is learning to read using both
    - I tend to tell him to sound out the words that "follow the rules" and
    help him with the ones that don't.  Hopefully he will get used to both
    methods of learning.
    
    -sandy