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Why is it Important to Review?
In our everyday lives, we do a lot of reviewing. We don’t realize it, but we do.
1. For example, we learn a new song by hearing the song many times and by singing its lyrics
over and over again. Soon it is memorized. Then a new song comes along that we want to
learn and we begin the same process but we stop singing the first song. What happens? We
forget the lyrics to song number one. Days or weeks later we hear the song again and we realize that we no longer can remember the lyrics.
2. Perhaps you meet quite a few new people at a party or at church. You are sure that you will remember every name. But the chances of that are not high. Instead, it will take meeting those people several times before you have memorized their names and connected those names to
their faces. If you don’t see those people again for a time, what happens? You forget their
names.
3. At school the teacher teaches you several new lessons each week. Again, you must learn
each lesson along the way and keep reviewing or you will forget the lessons. In Lesson 15 of my book, Pure Phonics, I teach the first sound of the letter y. Y at the beginning of a word says “yuh” as in yes. In Lesson 16, I teach the second sound of the letter y. Y at the end of a big word says “e” as in candy. And in Lesson 17, I teach the third sound of the letter y. Y at the end of a little word says “I” as in my. Students think that they have each lesson learned. Without
review though, by the time the student has learned the third sound of y, the first two sounds
will have already been forgotten.
Just like in any aspect of life, consistent, daily review produces mastery. Don’t forget this very important step in the learning process.
The Sight Method is NOT the Way to Learn to Read
The Sight Method of teaching reading is not the way to learn to read. Phonics is the only way to learn reading.
In the late 1900’s, the US government threw out phonics which was the traditional method of teaching reading and in its place put in a system called Whole Language which today is known as Sight Reading.
The idea was that if a child memorized what words looked like, then when he saw the words in a book that he could “read” those words. So the curriculum companies who were working with the government took the most frequently used words in stories that the child would read that school year and put those words on flashcards. The parent was to flash the cards at the student and the student would memorize those words by sight. When the child would look at a book, he would see and say the words that he had memorized and everyone rejoiced that he was reading. But that wasn’t reading; that was just remembering what those words looked like.
The Sight Reading Method produced many problems and here are just four of them.
1. First, when a child learns to read by phonics, his eyes track from left to right. But with the Sight Method, the child’s eyes sees the word as a picture and his eyes wander all over that picture. His eyes don’t learn left to right progression. They don’t know whether to track left to right or right to left or down and up or up and down. Some children began to “read” or look at the picture backwards and dyslexia was created. The term “Dyslexia” was first used to mean reading backwards. Today Dyslexia is a catch-all term for many problems. So the first problem created by the Sight Method was Dyslexia or reading backwards.
2. The second problem was equally as bad. As the child memorizes the Sight Words, the pictures or images of the words are filed into his brain just as if the brain were sort of a “filing cabinet”. As the child memorizes more and more words, the brain has to search through more and more “files” to find the word that it is looking for. When the child comes to a word he doesn’t quickly remember, the brain starts its search and by the time it finds the word, if it ever does find the word, the child has already forgotten what he read. This means he has no comprehension of what he just read. When the child is asked the to tell the teacher something about what he just read, the child can’t remember so he is prompted to “look at the pictures” and this establishes a very bad habit of guessing.
3. And, as the child is trying to recall these “Sight Words” that he sees in the story, there is a time lapse between the word he just read and the word his brain is searching for. This creates a very choppy way of reading. The Sight Method reader is not a fluent reader.
4. If these problems were not bad enough, the Sight Method also creates terrible spellers. A child must know the sounds of the letters in order to spell. However, the Sight Method reader must memorize what words look like in order to know how to spell a word. When students come to see me for help, I ask them to write a word or a sentence or two so that I can see how well they can spell. For example, I might ask a child to spell the word hat. The child who learned to read by the Sight Method generally says something like, “I know it starts with the letter h and it ends with the letter t but I can’t remember what the letter is that goes in the middle.” This is the result of memorizing Sight Words. The child has no ability to spell the word phonetically because he doesn’t know the sounds of the letters or any other of the phonics rules.
The results of the Sight Method speak for themselves. The method has produced generations of children who have reading disorders, who have no comprehension of what they have read, who are choppy readers and who can’t spell. And the saddest part of all is that so many children hate reading because they learned to read by the Sight Method instead of the traditional method of Phonics.
