"Yippee, I CAN READ"
This young child says it all: "It just happened one day and suddenly it felt like 'Yippee, I CAN READ, and it made me feel different inside my tummy. I felt kind of powerful."
You can almost feel the joy that this child is feeling at his new found ability. Even in this high tech age, there are few things more exciting than learning to read. For what has seemed endless time, the squiggles on the page are an impenetrable mystery. Then suddenly, the confusion vanishes and it is all so clear. The code has been cracked! It is exactly the way the child puts "it just happened one day."
Happily, this is an experience many children have. And once they have it, the reading experience is transformed. The stumbling over words, the slow sounding out, the hesitations all gone. In their place is smooth, accurate reading.
Unfortunately, for many children, this is not what happens. And the numbers for whom that is the case are unbelievably large--about 40% of the population. Yes, you read that figure right. That is the percentage of children that government figures indicate have problems learning to read. For those children, the clouds of confusion do not vanish. They even seem to worsen as the failure and frustration are repeated day after day.
Ironically, the help they are given often only serves to make things worse. The usual method of instruction is some form of traditional phonics where the children are taught to sound out words. The complexities of English, however, are such that sounding out of each letter is usually impossible. Try putting a sound on each letter in “simple†words like bread, home, cow, and mouse and see what you end up with. To deal with these inconvenient facts of English life, children are taught to memorize almost 600 rules! So children who are already drowning in failure find their problems expanding as they struggle to memorize hundreds of rules that almost no one can master.
Ironically, the children who have the "Yippie, I can read" experience never have to go through the agony of memorizing the rules. They are reading--like any good reader--without conscious awareness of any rules. It is only the children who are already failing who have their lives complicated by layers of rules that do little to make the code any clearer.
Is there an alternative? Yes, there is. That is what Phonics Plus Five is all about. The materials have been carefully selected and crafted to lead the children to intuit the rules underlying the letter cluster patterns in English. As they begin to see these patterns, the code starts to emerge, enabling them to share the incomparable "Yippee, I CAN READ" experience.
