whole language products for sale on eBay: 199
balanced literacy products for sale on eBay: 22
look and say products for sale on eBay: 60
phonics products for sale on eBay: 7,260
Of a piece with the observation that nobody ever hires a constructivist tutor.
It isn't what's for sale on ebay, but how much stuff is selling for. Looks like phonics supplies may be cheap, because there's so much of it. I'll have to go and check it out!
ReplyDeleteThanks...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAh, but MANY, perhaps most, of these "Phonics" items for sale are fake phonics. Caveat emptor.
ReplyDeletePhonics sells to parents. "Phonics" is written in big letters on the covers of many Balanced Literacy books, but inside the covers they denigrate phonics. Fountas and Pinnell, among others, have done this.
And Scholastic may try, with sets like the Dora one pictured here, but I don't think the company has a clue (or cares) about what systematic, explicit phonics really is.
I used the Dora (and Diego) phonics as practice with my son but he was already reading at a kindergarten level at that time. There is no phonics *instruction*, it's just readers. Plus, there were plenty of big words he still struggled with.
ReplyDeleteI have to say Hooked on Phonics worked for us. And I also got a Phonics Pathways book, so we work through both of them. PS Kindergarten so far has been mostly sight words and decodables. They do get some "this is a long I sound" or "words with short A sounds are..." but I'm so glad we worked Hooked on Phonics prior to starting kindergarten.
You know, I vividly remember the first time I saw a "Hooked on Phonics" TV commercial. I was pretty young, but I just did *not* get it at all. (At that age, I had never heard of or imagined homeschooling.)
ReplyDeleteWhy would there need to be such a product? The pat answer from anyone I asked, of course, was "It's for overachieving parents."
But I guess, perhaps, that must have actually coincided with phonics starting to go out of style in the schools.