CHICAGO–Your on Dave Eggers was cool.
— Peter Bishop
READING WARS
CHICAGO–I thought that the articles on phonics vs. whole-language (“War of the words,” March 2-3) were very interesting. My wife and I home-school and we started with phonics at the kindergarten age and both children could read at the 1st-grade level by the end of the year. I like the phonics program we have (“Sing Spell Read & Write”) but I don’t think that it was the program alone that produced such great results. I think that it was the joy of reading that my wife and I have shown to our children and the great variety of good and interesting books that we had available for their reading level.
So my question to educators is: Why not do both? Teach the sounds and the functions of letters and groups of letters and also offer a rich and varied library of books that kids would want to read. Once you have a child that likes to read you can then introduce more challenging and difficult material. That is when you can require reading of the “classics” and actually have the children read the books (and maybe enjoy them).
— Michael Lake
