Did you learn phonics in school?

[pip@slrpnk.net]

Since I come from a culture where our alphabet is actually consistent to how you pronounce things with no exceptions:

no.

[arghblarg@lemmy.ca]

Xerox?! In my day we only had those faded-ass mimeographs, stinky sheets of blurry purple letters

...and we learned phonics in Canada in the late 70s.

[confuser@lemmy.zip]

I remember one time thinking about how my grandpa didn't learn this and other related skills as a kid the same way I did in school and so we understand our same language a totally different way, where I saw parts of words, he just saw a whole word.

[over_clox@lemmy.world]

Ah, we actually had those purple mimeographs in gradeschool! Yep, the quality was shit, but it worked.

I just figured more people would remember Xerox. ‍️

[jjjalljs@ttrpg.network]

A lot of kids were taught to read badly. There's this whole "whole word" and "cuing theory" approach to reading that doesn't work very well. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

Apparently 65% of fourth graders aren't proficient at reading (as of the linked source from 2022)

[obsidianzed@lemmy.world]

Where is 'here?' I grew up in Midwest, US, and I absolutely learned phonics.

[davel@lemmy.ml]

stinky sheets of blurry purple letters

Hey now, the fresh ones smelled pretty good!

[southsamurai@sh.itjust.works]

Nah, it was mostly rote. But, I was reading pretty early, and my family did use a looser form of phonics with all of us. When it was a read-along, they'd point out words that didn't fit normal phonic rules, and explain a little. Read-alongs were super frequent for us. Daily, for most of my childhood, though I kinda "graduated" into doing the reading somewhere around 3rd grade for the second wave of cousins on one side of the family.

My mom's family runs high to dedicated readers, so it was always a thing where someone was reading something out loud to share a passage or whatever, even when it wasn't one of the adults reading to the kids as a group. And all our parents were super into reading to us individually too.

In kindergarten, it was straight into it, no phonics involved at all. But it was still mostly group based reading. First grade, it was individual work, with vocabulary, reading, and writing as parts of the language arts section of class. No phonics, and really no sounding things out at all. My first grade teacher was sweet as all get out, but did not play around with lessons.

[fondots@lemmy.world]

I don't remember ever hearing the word "phonics" except in commercials for Hooked on Phonics

That said, the concept of phonics was absolutely part of how I learned to read, even though they never outright told us that that was what we were learning.

[socialmediarefugee@lemmy.ml]

I just had the phonics monkey

[ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Yes, I think so. I also did Hooked On Phonics with my grandfather before starting kindergarten which meant I could already read by the time we started school. This was in Texas in the early '90s.

[ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

She hated the concept of... teaching what sounds letters make? Was she a big proponent of cuing, or something else?

[nigelfrobisher@aussie.zone]

Nope. Never even heard of it until recently, in the context of kids leaving school unable to read.

[bcsven@lemmy.ca]

Well technically that is phonics, you see a new word, as a learner, you know how to sound it out. Compared to the Whole Word learning method where somebody has to teach you what a word says. English is a nasty mess of both.

[vext01@lemmy.sdf.org]

I agree. You can't loose.

[rebekahwsd@lemmy.world]

She disliked a lot of the newer methods of teaching, so I'm guessing she preferred whatever was before that. The only one she named really was the New Math and I'm positive the New Math was pretty old by the time I was taught it. Have you ever watch Lehrer's song New Math? That's what I was taught, and if it was new then, it was ancient when I got to it!

[ryven@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Oh phonics is the old one (although it's making a comeback). The "new" one that they've been promoting for a couple decades (and have recently realized isn't very good) is cueing, the one where you just show kids words and encourage them to use context clues to guess what they mean, and hope that they eventually learn to read by doing that. Phonics is the one where you start with letter (and letter group) sounds and learn to sound out words by reading out loud.

[rebekahwsd@lemmy.world]

It was new at the time! Or maybe. While the education I got was pretty good, it was eclectic. I only remember learning math. I picked up language before solid memories form. I also sort of have some brain uh. Problems.

I liked moving the tens to the ones place. I think these days kids are doing some kind of cube thing? Seems neat!

[anomnom@sh.itjust.works]

What decade though. I did too, but it was the 1980s

[nemo@slrpnk.net]

Yes, my elementary school explicitly used it.