[MOSAIC] Phonics Instruction

[wendell berry]

I too have taught at a primary school for a long time.....17 years and I believe this without a shadow of a doubt that explicit phonics instruction makes the difference when acquiring beginning reading skills.  I have taught K, 3rd, 4th, Dyslexia..
Title 1/ARI..TAKS intervention...(during the same years) and Gifted and Talented.  Across the many different levels, most (not all) of the students I have taught in the upper grades, GT classes, upper Title/ARI classes who have difficulty reading have poor phonics/phonemic knowledge.  

My district has tried many different approaches to reading- using basals, whole language, Johnny Can Spell, MTS/MTA, Accelerated Reader and Saxon Phonics.
In my pull-out program now, any child in 2nd-3rd who sees me is put in an intensive phonics program.....Great results happen-through decoding, spelling, reading, writing, etc.   The phonics program we use is strong and explicitly teaches vowel sounds, orthographic patterns, SYLLABLE DIVISION (which I personally believe to be one of the top important skills), word origin, spelling patterns, etc.  This program helps lead to much more fluent readers.  

When I was five(barely by two months), I started school in a foreign country and solely learned (at school) by sight reading.  Fortunately, I had a mother who taught me phonics/phonemic awareness beginning at two!  However, when we returned to the states, my parents put me back a year, so that I would be appropriately aged in class and would receive more intense phonics- thank goodness they did!

I know that there are poor programs that teach these skills and I strongly feel that the really strong-researched based proven programs are the ones that should be used and not altered by educators....at least not done so without a committee looking at what can possibly be changed.  We have had too many teachers- new, old, emergency certified-decide what is important in the progression and have seen it be detrimental to the students.


H