Yet in our eagerness to promote classrooms full of the next Steve Jobs, it’s easy to skip right past the importance of one decidedly August/September 2015 63 SHUTTERSTOCK old-fashioned fundamental: reading. tutoring company. “Now at preschool, they do letters, sounds and some blending of sounds and maybe reading basic books,” she says. “The most common thing we see is that students don’t know all their phonics combinations. For example, when you look at ‘o’ and ‘a,’ you’re supposed to know it sounds like ‘o.’ If things are moving a little too quickly, a child might not know what the teacher is talking about.” Gil says Knowledge Quest uses the “80-20 rule,” meaning that it treats 20 percent of the words as sight words that need to be memorized, and the rest are figured out phonetically. “For example, take the word ‘said.’ The way you pronounce it has nothing to do with how it looks,” she says. Both Walker and Gil suggest parents be more aware of how their child’s school teaches reading and figure out if that is the right fit. For example, is your daughter expected to have 50-plus phonics combinations down cold by early second grade? “I had no idea what reading methodology my son’s school employed,” admits Tammy Luna, a Mountain View mom whose son, Grant, is now a third-grader. (Parent and child names have been altered to protect their identity.) “It’s funny that when I was visiting different kindergartens, I researched pretty much everything, even down to the lunch program, but it never occurred to me to understand how they taught reading.” Yet that turned out to be crucial. After Grant was labeled a slow reader, the family switched Grant to another private school better suited to his learning style. Educators are aware that there is a fine line. “No matter what you do, the developmental milestones are still there,” says Gil. “You and I could go into a room and say that all first-graders need to know such and such. But that doesn’t always work. You’re working with children, not widgets in a factory.” Gil is finding that “some students who are actually strong students but maybe not two or three grade levels ahead are thinking they’re not smart, which isn’t true.” Likewise, according to Walker, “Now we get a lot of kindergarten students who are marked as ‘behind’ and it is really the prior first grade curriculum being given in kindergarten.” Her advice: “Get help if your child is struggling, as it can be solved.” n
South Bay Accent - Aug/Sep 2015
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