August/September 2015 61 SHUTTERSTOCK Woodland, based in Portola Valley, also seeks an appropriate technology balance for teaching students from junior kindergarten through eighth grade. With the younger set, “we use a lot of different manipulatives,” explains Gair. For example, the Handwriting without Tears program allows kids to trace letters with their fingers. Students in fifth grade and above may bring in e-readers. But a key Woodland curriculum component is reader’s workshop, which features small-group, guided instruction by a teacher. Likewise, Delphi Academy Headmistress Marcy Green says the Campbell K-8 school provides students with audio books on Kindle e-readers as needed. “Sometimes a child needs to hear the language being read aloud,” she says. “This can happen when English is a second language or if English is spoken with an accent when heard at home.” But Delphi views the e-readers as tools, not human replacements. “Students hear reading every day,” Green says. “Younger students may have several short books read aloud to them daily while older classes progress chapter by chapter through the week.” Hooked on Phonics Over the years, there have been many heated battles concerning the “right” way to teach reading. One of the best known examples was the 1955 best-selling call to arms, “Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It,” a book that prompted a generation of parents to embrace the phonics method over the then-popular whole word approach. Conversely, “When I did my graduate studies, I was not offered a phonics class,” says Sue Walker, the director of Learning Plus Tutoring in San Jose who has taught reading for more than three decades. Today, there seems to be a bit of a truce. Boiled down to simple thus admittedly incomplete definitions, phonics is a bottom-up rote system that breaks apart words and teaches the relationship between letters and letter combinations and sounds (such as “tion” sounding like “shun”). With whole word instruction (sometimes referred to as “look-say” or “sight” reading) children recognize and memorize words as whole units and derive meaning by context (think of the old “Dick and Jane” books). There Teaching a child to read is not as simple as A, B, C, and for most of us, the mechanics of reading are a complete mystery.
South Bay Accent - Aug/Sep 2015
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