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I've been busy lately making new movies.
My sight word movie, must watching for anyone who has children learning sight words at school, is finally finished and is online at YouTube. (It was hard to find a YouTube name--almost everything I tried was taken, probably by those millions of people uploading cat videos. Isobella was my Spanish name in Spanish Class in High School.)
And, I've updated a few more of my phonics lessons. When they're all done updating, they'll have good enough audio and video quality to start mass producing DVDs and CDs for churches or other groups that want to teach with them. If you want a good overview of the difference between short and long vowel sounds and when words will have each sound, lesson 14 is a good resource. The lightbulb goes on for many of my students after watching this lesson. I've updated 15 of 32 lessons so far.
The math people are evidently more geeky, there is a lot of good stuff out there on YouTube. There are not as many phonics people that are technically oriented, it seems.
My movies are actually pretty low tech and boring, but they get the point across. If people want flashy and songs, they can pay hundreds of dollars. They can get boring for free.
However, I may need to throw in some cats to up my YouTube views and get some stars.
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5 comments:
Brilliant - this is good stuff. The sports analogy was appropriate, too. That difference between learning to throw a football, which wasn't all that tough with good instruction, and unlearning your softball throwing style to make way for a better approach made your point clearly.
I hope lots and lots of sight-word parents see this video.
Thanks! I have a gymnastics analogy, too, but it's a little obscure for most people. I have a poor round off, it's the basis of all your run-ins to your backwards flips, with one-on-one training from a good coach, I modified my roundoff to be a little better and more powerful, but was never able to fully fix the problem because I had been doing a poor round off for years.
That may be why they're saying you have to remediate by grade 3. I've actually had success with older students and adults by using nonsense words and limiting their outside reading, but my younger students were able to change their habits easier and quicker for the most part. I did have one 5th grader who made the transition fine, he was going into 6th grade. He is the oldest student I've worked with so far who made the transition from sight word guessing to sounding out words without guessing fairly painlessly.
This reminds me - I've got a question re: sight words.
Do children who learn sight words have more trouble reading handwriting, especially cursive, where there could be tremendous variations?
"Do children who learn sight words have more trouble reading handwriting, especially cursive, where there could be tremendous variations?"
You can add one anecdotal "no" to this. My wife and I tried teaching our son to read using phonics. I suspect that he mostly just memorized the words he ran across (although he can sound out words ... he just prefers to not do so). He reads cursive fine. We have absolutely *NO* idea where he learned to do so.
-Mark Roulo
Several of my remedial students have not been able to read cursive. I'm not sure if that was due to sight words or a lack of emphasis on cursive in their school.
The word shapes of cursive are actually similar to a degree to the words learned as sight words. Uppercase masks this, I use all uppercase with my lessons to help break the guessing habit. A student I'm tutoring now makes twice as many errors if he's reading from normal print instead of uppercase. Eventually after the guessing habit is broken, you can switch back to normal mixed case print. There is also a period of slowed reading and it is tough for them to sound out words, they don't enjoy it at first but after repeated practice without exposure to sight words it becomes automatic and easier. Usually, their reading speed then increases from what it was prior to tutoring.
Don Potter likes to use cursive for his remedial students and finds it different enough from print to help. I'm not as well trained in handwriting instruction so I prefer to stick to printing in uppercase.
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