Slow news day?
I’m not often up in time to see the delights that are BBC’s early morning news programmes (or rather, I usually choose to watch something less depressing that early if I am up!) but Duke had it on this morning and aparently Synthetic Phonics is being introduced to British schools. There was this woman being shall we say less than complimentary about phonics and how it’s basically not as good as the current system of teaching reading in schools as children won’t be reading as quickly as if they did the look say business to start with adn paid lip service to phonics once they hvae learnt to do everything differnetly. She was also saying how it’s worked for all these years hasn’t it? I mean all our current teenagers were taught this way and they can all read (which is not what my SIL says about a good quarter of her pupils at age 11 when they move up to her class….)
Hmph, now I’m not going to say that phonics is the be all and end all (cos I don’t think it is actually) but I do know that phonics is hte best way for the vast majority of children to learn to read and is, aparently, better for many children who have reading troubles of one kind or another. It just takes longer than learning to recognise enough words to get through a Magic Key book.
Funny really as if you look at the article on the BBC site, down the links to previous articles on similar topics "synthetic phonics" was introduced in 2005. Was it a slow news day today chaps? Or (whispers) has it taken this long for someone to realise that you can’t expect teachers who were taught look say to magically know how to do phonics….
