(No, that’s not a picture of E. He doesn’t have glasses.)
Just a short report here. I’m delighted with 25-month-old E.’s reading progress. We are not studying phonics nearly as carefully and systematically as we did with H. We have been going through (more or less randomly) the two ending blends presentations, adding s, and digraphs and x. More than that, we’ve been doing various quizzes. When I open up Reading Bear, E. insists on doing quizzes (about 75% of the time).
We continue to read several books per day. The level of the books is now decidedly beyond the baby books, and now we’re into the toddler books. To take a few examples, we’ve been reading quite a bit of Curious George, as well as the little-kid versions of fairy tales from Mary Engelbreit. He still likes the Biscuit stories, which are incredibly annoying.
We’re also doing stuff on the iPad, including Reading Bear on iSwifter, the Starfall app (which is great), some vocabulary apps, some counting apps, etc.
When looking at screens, he’s been spending at least as much time on Starfall and Literactive as on Reading Bear. I still haven’t found any other free sites with decodable stories that can be sounded out with a click, like Starfall and Literactive. Have you? Please tell me about them in the comments. Anyway, I’ve been delighted at how well he’s been reading beyond the level that he is at on Reading Bear. Like H., his ability to decode words in the context of a story is a few steps beyond his nominal phonics level. My hypothesis is that he has been figuring out unfamiliar phonics principles on his own. There is no reason to be too surprised at this, it seems to me; once you know the letter sounds and have some modest experience viewing how letters and sounds match up, there are usually a few obvious ways to decode an unfamiliar sequence of letters, and it’s just a matter of mentally trying them out and picking the one that matches a word you’ve heard. I wonder if research supports this hypothesis.
Another thing we look at quite a bit on my desktop are my presentations. He is crazy about my “Balloons” presentation (still) and likes many others, like “Kids,” “The Mind,” “Chemistry 1″ (not as hard as it sounds), etc. These are all available on Slideboom. I made a new one, too, called “Bubbles,” which he likes. (Unfortunately, funding for new presentations is not forthcoming at this time.)
I think E. is a few months ahead of where H. was at this age (not surprising, considering that I started teaching E. phonics earlier), but at this age H. was a little ahead of where E. is in terms of books he prefers. This also shouldn’t be surprising considering that I was able to spend more time with H. on his reading.
But all in all I’ve used similar methods with my two boys and in terms of their educational outcomes, they’re very similar so far. I’d definitely say that E. is reading now, at age two, in the sense that he is able to decode most, probably all, of the words in certain stories that he can understand and enjoy.
I’ve made a video of E. reading, but it shows his face and all and Mama can’t have that online. I’ll make another one soon.
Although 13 Southern states permit school officials to paddle children in the public schools, research shows school boards are moving away from corporal punishment in Florida, North Carolina and Texas.
via TCRecord
In the course of responding on the “readbygrade3″ mailing list (I’m a subscriber), I came across this page on ReadingRockets.org. I was greatly struck by the fact that, here in 2012, professional advisers to reading teachers state that, by the end of first grade, a good student “has a reading vocabulary of 300 to 500 words, sight words and easily sounded out words.” This, I think, is a travesty. At the end of first grade, students should be able to read whatever words they can comprehend, meaning (of course) many thousands of words.
Rudolph Flesch maintained, on the basis of a great deal of first-hand experience, that there is no reason why the vast majority of first graders should not be able to read–period!–at the end of the first grade. At the end of that year, they ought to be able to pick up any book, as long as the vocabulary is comprehensible to them, and read it. Decoding should present zero difficulties. Period. And so by the end of first grade, they have no need for contrived basal readers. They can start reading actual literature. For what it’s worth, my six-year-old is downstairs reading The Secret Garden–his choice–in the original version right now. I fostered his literacy from babyhood and he started reading when he was two.
I’m using Reading Bear and other resources to teach my second son to read. He is 25 months old. We started seriously when he was around 18-20 months. He’s up to presention #11, capable of getting 13-15 out of 15 on the quizzes on that material. He can read (with a little help) any of the first 8 or so stories on Starfall’s excellent Learn to Read page, as well as any of the stories on Literactive’s level 1. I fully expect my two-year-old to get through all of the word lists on Reading Bear and to be decoding (not necessarily comprehending) at a 3rd grade level by his third birthday. My first son developed in a very similar way four years ago.
If my two-year-olds can do this, your six-year-olds can do it. Teachers, now that Reading Bear is complete and 100% free, you have no excuse. I understand that your districts impose a lot of top-down control of curriculum. But you still have some freedom. Reading Bear’s presentations are 15 minutes long, and you can definitely take that much time out of your busy day for this program. Let’s say you don’t have access to a computer lab. Fine, but surely you have a projector. If all you do is show Reading Bear’s presentations for 15 minutes each day for the 180 days of first grade, you’ll be giving your students the gift of literacy.
To begin with, spend a week on each presentation for the first 10-15 presentations (or better, four days on a new presentation and one day on review). After that, students will catch on much faster, so you’ll be able to spend less than a week on each one. You’ll also discover that you don’t need to show the full, 15-minute “Sound It Out Slowly” presentations; as time goes on, you’ll be able to go on to the “Sound It Out Quickly” and “Let Me Sound It Out” presentations.
Teachers, your first graders can be decoding at an advanced level by the end of the year. Being able to do that now, rather than after the third or fourth grade, opens up the whole world of books to them, and not just easy, decodable picture books, either, but chapter books. Prove me wrong–why not give it a try? What could you lose? It’s easy to do–you’re just showing and reacting to a presentation. Your students will be exposed systematically to over 100 phonics rules, according to Flesch’s time-established method, as well as vocabulary. I personally guarantee that, at the very least, you won’t be wasting your time.
Analysis suggests that value-added modeling (VAM) is not reliable or valid for the purpose of identifying and replacing low-performing teachers and is not cost-effective for the purpose of raising student achievement.
via TCRecord
The provision of a strong education that supports the requirements of a democratic society is one of the many foundations of education. In the turn of the century, Dewey called for an overhaul in the provision of public education that reflected nationwide universality. In his view, the advancement of the United States and its citizenry would be best served by such a bold revolution. Within his work, Dewey attempted to situate the meaning of ‘Vocation.’ His framing of the term may be the source of controversy, in terms of how contemporary educators view vocational preparation, and perhaps it is worthy of some debate within the community of teaching practitioners.
via TCRecord
Well, what do you think?
My enjoyable time with the group behind WatchKnowLearn.org and ReadingBear.org is winding down, and soon it will be over. My benefactor of the last four years has kindly given me some time to finish up my remaining work and find something else to do. As much as I enjoyed developing WatchKnowLearn and Reading Bear, and as much good as I think those websites will do for kids, it is always nice to start something new. I’m a serial starter; it’s a process I enjoy.
Making my situation even more interesting is that this will be the first time since 2002 that I don’t have something lined up. Back in 2002, I was another unemployed Ph.D. philosopher. Now, I can put on my resume that I am a founder of Wikipedia, Citizendium, WatchKnowLearn, and Reading Bear. So, naturally, I’m very curious what’s available to me. I thought I would put the question out to you, readers of this blog. What should I do next? And, of course, please spread the word that I’m available and looking!
I have far more ideas about things I’d like to do than I have time to pursue them. I just don’t know which one I would love the most, or which is most likely to work out. I’ll put these roughly in order of my excitement level, although all of these are exciting to me. I’m sure I’m leaving out 3-4 ideas that I’m just not thinking of right now.
1. Textop! I’ve been dreaming about this since 2006. Imagine taking the Great Books of philosophy, history, law, and so forth, cutting them into paragraph-sized chunks, describing the chunks, and then organizing them in an outline of ever-increasing detail and depth. That is the core idea. It sounds very wonkish and scholarly, and I suppose it is, but I believe this idea will prove to be deeply revolutionary; I think few people understand just how much so. It has the potential to change the nature of scholarship, research, education, and ultimately everything forever. It would be more revolutionary than Wikipedia. It would be a brand new kind of reference work. It’s a project I really want to work on, more than any other. I’ve thought of approaching various reference publishers, universities, tech companies, etc., but I suspect it will be a hard sell.
2. Policy Analyst or Writer for education or ed tech thinktank/nonprofit. I’ve long wanted to try this. I almost got into it in the 1990s. Education is a long-standing interest of mine, and I do enjoy writing about it, as any reader of this blog knows very well. I’d love to write a book titled Why Knowledge Is Important, defend homeschooling against hare-brained attacks, and go to the mat for back-to-basics curriculum married to the liberal arts as well as for vouchers and school choice. Basically, I think education is easily one of the most important institutions in society, and I want to enter the marketplace of ideas and improve it.
3. Crowdsourcing spaced repetition. Having used SuperMemo for the last five months with my 6-year-old, I’ve got some ideas about how to bring spaced repetition into individual classrooms and schools and thus into the big time. One thing that needs to happen is that we need to start working together on making the best sets of questions for common texts. Memorizing random, contextless information in the form of stacks of flashcards is tiresome. Memorizing information that you have already properly learned, by reading well-written books, is where it’s at, I think. I haven’t thought so much about this one, but it is certainly a problem I’d be interested in working on.
4. A filtered version of Wikipedia. No, not Citizendium redux. It would be involve me, a filtering company, and possibly another party or other parties. The main feature would be that Wikipedia’s pages are displayed in up-to-the-minute versions, with images cleverly removed within the page rather than blocking whole pages. One company demonstrated to me how this might be done. I was quite impressed. In addition, we can use a “filtered Wikipedia” website to gather professional feedback on Wikipedia articles and, perhaps, fork selected articles once there is enough interest in doing so. Such a website would be a version of Wikipedia that would be recommendable to school districts and so would constitute a natural source of traffic and revenue. The Wikipedia community and the WMF have really fallen down on the job in developing Wikipedia to its potential. Providing to the world an up-to-the-minute version of Wikipedia with features that that community refuses to add, on principle, is personally my best hope of making Wikipedia into something that I really can get behind and be proud of.
5. Children’s philosophy books. I don’t think it would take me very long to write a general introduction to philosophy for children, and another general explanation of ethics for children. In fact, I have worked on the beginnings of these books, off and on, for a while. I don’t think I’ll ever finish them properly without lots of free time (which I don’t have), and I think the world needs them. Adolescents, especially, need a clear explanation of what is right and wrong, and why we should be moral. I think I can explain it to them. This is important work, and it makes me sad that I don’t have an opportunity to do it (while, of course, supporting my own family).
6. A news wiki/a crowdsourced news summary/opinion project. One of the things that, early on, we discovered that Wikipedia does very well is to aggregate news reports into a massive summary of a sort that ordinary news outfits are not capable of developing. This is why Google links to Wikipedia’s articles about events in the news: they just lay everything out. I’ve been approached by one veteran journalist and, separately, the journalism department of a major southern university to develop a crowdsourced journalism site. Since I was otherwise occupied at the time, I had to pass in both cases. But I wouldn’t rule that one out. I think the world needs a more even-handed news source, one in which biases are explicitly acknowledged. I’ve got ideas about how to do it (of course)… Another, related idea is an opinion wiki, in which people collaborate on, not factual articles, but arguments, position statements, etc., about everything. This has been attempted, but not in a way that attracts a lot of eyeballs. I’ve got ideas about how to do this sort of thing right, too.
7. Facebook for traditional tunes (a little like this site). Each has its own page. Users can submit versions in ABC format, which are displayed in sheet music form and voted on by other users, and the top vote-getter is displayed at the top of the page; they can also submit recordings and videos (of themselves or their bands). They can also “teach” the tune via a different set of videos. There are other features. I was approached by one of Ireland’s top fiddlers about starting an Irish trad website, but I to my ever-lasting regret had to turn him down because I was heavily into Citizendium and WatchKnowLearn at the time. Of course, now, there should be a big app component of the site, I imagine. TheSession.org does a good job of this, by the way…but lacks a lot of the features I’d like to see. It is easy to imagine that, with the right level of funding and partnerships with, say, the Irish Traditional Music Archive and the Traditional Tune Archive, this could become an essential resource for traditional music. Anyway, something like this should exist and I’m kind of surprised that it doesn’t yet. There’s no reason it would have to be limited to Irish traditional music, too. You can imagine similar sites for similar styles, and instruments (think bluegrass, solo piano, and cover bands).
8. Joining an existing company or recent startup. I wouldn’t be too proud to write or develop ideas for others, or to work on somebody else’s ideas. Of course, my preference is to work on stuff that I really believe in and can get behind. Various things have come to mind:
So, what do you think? Where should I put in most of my effort? I would really love to develop and get funding for an idea of my own, but a lot of these are long shots; I want to make sure I can pay the bills
This paper centers on a perennial problem in education: the dissemination of research findings having to do with innovative practices introduced to the field. The research project involved four campuses that chose to integrate the arts into tested subject areas. The digital storytelling technology was combined with the narrative inquiry research method to produce ‘digital narrative inquiries’—16-20 minute multimedia representations of each school’s experience of its change initiative. Video clips excerpted from these larger productions were then used to discuss the affordances and constraints of using the ‘digital narrative inquiry’ representational form to share research findings arising from innovative educational practices.
via TCRecord
As California’s accountability system places great emphasis on annual school improvement in Academic Performance Index (API) scores, this study investigates the within school effects of changes in student demographics and school resources on API gains. A balanced panel data set of 5,750 schools in California over the period of 1999-2008 was analyzed using a fixed effects model.
via TCRecord
Using structural equation modeling, this study examined the direct and indirect effects of family income on SAT performance for Black and White test-takers. Family income was found to have a nonlinear direct effect on total SAT performance and the association was substantially larger for Black students than for White students, especially for those families living in poverty.
via TCRecord
Drawing upon data from the first and second follow-up interviews of the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS: 2002), this study investigated socio-demographic, motivational, and postsecondary contextual factors that explain community college students‘ baccalaureate expectations.
via TCRecord