Make Sure Your Child Can Read In First Grade.

Elementary school, that's when children must learn to read. Then everything else magically improves.

However, according to the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only about ONE-THIRD of elementary students in the U.S. are reading at grade level. The other two-thirds are already crippled.

The Reading Wars have been going on for 80 years. They have always been sustained by lies. Sight-words are like learning to do math with Roman numerals. You should be concerned that, if you tolerate this approach, you are complicit in your child’s failure.

If students are made to memorize sight-words in the first grade, it's NOT likely they will become readers. Sight-words are a predictor of educational failure. And a big cause of it.

Our Education Establishment, due to horrific incompetence and/or ideological sabotage, promotes illiteracy. The easiest way to guarantee this outcome is to instill bad reading practices. That is, no phonics, but lots of  sight-words. (Memorizing thousands of sight-words is impossible except for that rare child with a photographic memory.)

When children try to read, they usually encounter lots of words they have not memorized. If they don't know phonics, they must try to GUESS the words, which is unlikely to work. Or they try to deduce meaning from CONTEXT, a goofy technique that rarely helps. (Suppose a sentence says "Tom opened the door and saw a —-.” What did he see? You have no idea because hundreds of words fit in the slot.) 

With all of these unnecessary steps, reading even a simple sentence might take minutes. Real reading processes two or three words a second! 

Now you can understand why millions of school children can't be bothered with reading. It's tedious, it's boring, and at the end of the day, students are not sure they understand even a fraction of the assignment. Young people give up on reading even by elementary school. It's very common now for teenagers to brag they have never read a book.

Inability to read will devastate every school activity and every activity later in life. The psychiatric community came up with the conclusion that "early reading at first grade predicts adult reading at age 42.” The ordeal for badly trained children is endless and profound.

Now think for a moment about sight-reading as you play the piano. Those little symbols on sheet music are absolute. You cannot figure out their meaning from context. It would be supernatural if you could guess their meanings. And you cannot pretend a symbol means anything but what it means. It is, absolutely and totally, middle C or whatever the case is. If you don't know the meaning, you can't play the music you intend to play.

Here is another study showing that defective reading wrecks a person’s life. A study by researchers at Harvard University finds "association of book reading with longevity.” Here's the abstract:  "Adjusting for relevant variance, including age, sex, race, education, co-morbidities, self rated health, wealth, marital status, and depression, book reading contributed to a survival advantage… Compared to non-book readers, book readers had a 23-month survival advantage.” That’s books compared to newspapers. Reading books compared to not reading at all would presumably be more than 23 months.

Here are the next two steps. Look at my YouTube video, “Reading Is Easy.” Less than four minutes and you'll know everything you need to know.

The second step is to find a good phonics program. One of the most popular among homeschoolers is Alpha Phonics, which Sam Blumenfeld created. Rudolf Flesch, one of our greatest educators, wrote his instruction guide and included it in his famous book, Why Johnny Can't Read. Used copies of these famous books are available cheap on Amazon.

For me …watching the Reading Wars is like watching fat people eating big meals. You will die younger, don't you know that?

All phonics experts say children should learn to read in the first year or two of school. Thereafter, school consists of using reading to enjoy stories and to learn science, geography, history, maps, and so on. That's how it's supposed to work.

Big Think states that reading rewires your brain for higher intelligence and empathy. “Get lost in a good book. Time and again, reading has been shown to make us healthier, smarter, and more empathic.”

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Reading Is Easy. (Only four minutes.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws&t=30s

Alpha Phonics, the official website
https://alphaphonics.com/misc/Alpha-Phonics_sample.pdf

Episode 169 from podcast  "Let's FIx Education."

The US has 50 million functional  illiterates. Why? Because the schools use sight-words instead of phonics. That's been the essential scam and crime of American K-12 for 80 years.