Mr. Rogers and Garden of Your Mind

“Mutual caring relationships require kindness and patience, tolerance, optimism, joy in the other's achievements, confidence in oneself, and the ability to give without undue thought of gain.”
― Fred Rogers

SUMMER IS HERE!! RELAX, READ, REPEAT

PREVENT THE SUMMER SLUMP
Research shows that children who don’t maintain reading skills over the summer are likely to start the upcoming school year at a disadvantage. Here are our top tips to prevent the summer slump:

* Integrate reading adventures into your daily routine.
* Explore your local library. * Bring learning tools with you on the road.
* Find educational activities you and your child can do together indoors and outdoors.
* Look for books and programs that feature your child’s favorite characters.

Phonics Critics Have It Backwards

How Phonics Instruction Teaches Critical Thinking Skills

A common misconception about phonics is that it consists entirely of rote memorization, and that it stunts children's intellectual development by limiting their opportunities for the development of critical thinking skills - but this is actually the opposite of the reality. Children who learn to read using phonics develop superior critical thinking skills because phonics instruction automatically teaches many aspects of formal logic, which is the foundation of all critical thinking.

Non-phonetic ("meaning-emphasis") reading programs rely on two primary strategies - whole word memorization (to increase the number of words that a child recognizes) and the use of context clues, where the child is trained to determine the identity of an unknown word by deducing the most likely meaning of the word that would fit in that spot, based on the semantic context of the word.

Phonics critics believe that children who use context clues will develop better critical thinking skills than children who recognize words using phonics. They assert that children will learn deduction by using the context-clue procedure, which involves:

determining the semantic context of the unknown word,
deducing a list of likely possibilities,
then using further deduction to determine which of the possibilities is the correct one.
Students will presumably then improve their future performance by making inferences about the deductions that they have used in the past. Unfortunately there are several problems with using context clues, either as a primary word recognition strategy or as a vehicle for developing critical thinking skills:

Context clues generally don't work well because the number of possibilities for typical contexts is simply too great, causing children to tend to choose the wrong word. Objective research demonstrates that context clues are little-used by good readers, and are effective only as crutches for students who are poor readers due to their lack of training in the use of more effective strategies (i.e. phonics).

Children using context clues learn to accept inaccuracy and failure. Since context clues don't work very well, teachers must artificially increase the success rate by accepting semantic near-misses as successes (e.g. accepting a child's answer of "pony" when the word was really "horse").

The use of context clues teaches little, if anything, specific about critical thinking. The problem is that there is no systematic framework, because each deduction is done within a new context. Rather than learning specific strategies of logical deduction that can be shown to work over and over again in a controlled environment (such as the realm of letters and phonetic rules), children are faced with an essentially new problem every time, since the number of contexts is potentially infinite and the number of unknown words is nearly so (in the tens of thousands even for middle-elementary readers).

The huge universe of potential combinations of contexts and words also precludes the possibility of learning or using inference skills, since little can be inferred from large numbers of generally unrelated situations.

Systematic Phonics Program

Phonics Teaches Logic Automatically and Indirectly
Even though a phonics teacher is not explicitly trying to teach logic to his or her students, it is simply impossible to avoid doing so. Phonics students learn formal logic (i.e. "critical thinking") more quickly, more effectively and at an earlier age than otherwise possible, for several reasons:

Phonics defines a small and relatively well-defined environment in which a young mind can comfortably operate without being overwhelmed by the sheer vastness of the possibilities.

The logic lessons of phonics are taught by example during the learning and the application of phonetic rules. Even though a child of 4 or 5 might be incapable of comprehending direct formal logic instruction, it is quite clear that children of that age can implicitly grasp logical concepts that are taught by example.

Decoding and encoding are themselves well-controlled logical operations, embodying many concepts that facilitate the student's future understanding of more advanced concepts in mathematics and various sciences, most especially computer science.

A Scientific Approach to Reading Instruction

By: Barbara Foorman, Jack Fletcher, and David Francis (1997)

Direct, systematic instruction about the alphabetic code is not routinely provided in kindergarten and first grade, in spite of the fact that at the moment this might be our most powerful weapon in the fight against illiteracy.

Important intervention findings:
Direct instruction in decoding skills emphasizing the alphabetic code results in more favorable outcomes than does a context-emphasis or embedded approach. (all NICHD studies)

The type of direct instruction alphabetic program is less important than the intensity, duration, and teacher training/monitoring so long as the program is structured and explicit. (Florida State University)

Over 90% of children reading below the 15th percentile at the beginning of first grade read at or above grade level by the end of the first grade with appropriate intervention. (SUNYAlbany)

Fifteen minutes of instruction in the alphabetic code as part of a standard kindergarten curriculum led to significant gains in phonological analysis skills relative to children in the same curriculum who did not receive this training. Facilitation of reading ability occurred only if the program was continued into subsequent school years. (University of Houston)

Comparisons of direct instruction phonics, embedded phonics, and two context- emphasis approaches in socially disadvantaged (Title 1) first and second graders showed that only the direct instruction approach was associated with average levels of reading proficiency after one school year of intervention. Curriculum effects outweighed effects of tutoring and variability across teachers. In fact, many children in the context- based approaches showed no gains. (University of Houston)

Decoding and phonological analysis skills are necessary but not sufficient skills for successful reading. They are not the (w)hole story. Once you can decode, you must be able to decode rapidly words that represent the orthographic elements of English (e.g., morphological units and writing conventions). Comprehension processes are separable and must also be taught. Print awareness, immersion in literacy, and reading to children also account for variability in reading outcomes, but they are less robust predictors of long term outcomes relative to single word skills.

Necessary & sufficient conditions for learning to read
Phonological Awareness: Sensitivity to the sound structure (rather than the meaning) of speech

Phonemic Awareness: The ability to deal explicitly and segmentally with sound units smaller than the syllable (i.e., phonemes)

Alphabetic Principle: The insight that written words are composed of letters of the alphabet that are intentionally and conventionally related to segments of spoken words

Orthographic Awareness: Sensitivity to the structure of the writing system (spelling patterns, orthographic rules, inflectional and derivational morphology, etymology)

Comprehensive Monitoring Strategies: Strategies that help students attend to and remember what they read

Read article: A Scientific Approach to Reading Instruction

Bee Keeping in Schools

Teaching the 3 R's

Beekeeping has now been thoroughly integrated into Charlton Manor's curriculum. In PE, the children study the waggle dance that scout bees do to tell the other bees where nectar is to be found. In cooking lessons, they use honey in their recipes, and in geography, they learn how different parts of the world make use of bees.

Business advisors have helped the children open a shop selling honey in the school playground. The pupils weigh the honey and work out pricing, write ads for the shop and design branding for the jars.

An unexpected benefit has been the effect the bees have had on behaviour. Baker says they have had a "massive impact" on challenging pupils:

"One of the big things for me is getting children to think of others, and to be aware of their responsibility to others. With some children, you can't get them to understand that in relation to other children, but you can show them using bees, chickens or plants."

One pupil was a regular visitor to the school's behavioural support house because of his violent outbursts of kicking, punching and throwing furniture around. While he struggled with academic work, he discovered that he excelled at the the practical side of beekeeping: making the wooden frames that go into the hive, and dismantling the hive to access the honey.

When the Guardian's bees expert, Alison Benjamin, visited the school, the pupil told her: "The bees made me peaceful and calm."

math skills among kindergartners turn out to be a key predictor for future academic success

Kindergarten: Math Skills Prove Key To Later Academic Success

Even after accounting for differences in IQ and family income, Duncan found that those who learned the most math in kindergarten tended to have the highest math and reading scores years later.

"It was very surprising," said Duncan, whose research appears in a new book. "Everyone says reading is most important, and if a child can read by third grade, the chance of dropping out of school is so much lower. But it was math that stood out as serving the kids best in promoting later achievement. Reading was next most important, and then attention skills were third most important."

Social skills, including the ability to self-regulate and control one's temper, also are important. But Duncan found that they weren't as closely linked to future academic success as math and reading. Students who exhibit antisocial behavior through elementary and middle school tend to drop out of high school at higher rates, Duncan found, but again, those with persistently low math scores also dropped out at higher rates.

Duncan said kindergartners are ready for a variety of math concepts that can be taught in fun and playful ways.

"I'm not implying that there needs to be flashcards and drill-and-kill exercises," Duncan said. He suggests teachers use math lessons that let kids explore and manipulate numbers. For parents, he recommends they point out shapes to their kids and play cards and board games to help them get comfortable with counting.