A former preschool (Taska) teacher, Rose Hsu, telephoned me sometime in Early August 2018 and said her daughter who is in primary three can hardly read any sentence in English.
I asked her to come to my house and she brought her daughter with her. After speaking with Rose I asked her daughter to read some alphabets I had written on a piece of paper. She read the alphabet names perfectly but when it came to sounding out the phonemes of the letters it was all wrong.
I explained this to Rose and told her that she can easily teach her daughter and told her how to go about teaching her daughter the correct phonemes without adding vowel sounds to consonants. I gave her links on the computer to sites teaching the correct sounds of letters.
In addition to phonics, I also advised her to get her daughter to memorise the Dolch words. After more than 3 weeks I invited Rose for a cup of coffee to ask how her daughter was doing. She enthusiastically said that her daughter was now a happy child and was eager to learn and could read a few Dolch words. Rose was getting her daughter to learn 3 Dolch words a week. I responded by saying that she should at least get her daughter to memorise 20 words a week and that will not be difficult for her daughter as she is now in primary three. Furthermore, the child is a smart girl – very smart girl.
The following video was recorded on 6.9.2018 after our coffee session. Here she confesses how she had wrongly learned and then taught the sound of alphabets wrongly to her teacher. Her mother who had been teaching kindergarten kids for more than 20 years had also been teaching the wrong sounds of alphabets as confessed by Rose.
I then asked Rose to come to my house to see the progress of my two students Isaac and Arianna. Rose came just as soon as I had introduced a new book to my students and I asked Rose to observe how Arianna who is in primary three reads.
Arianna was on her 23rd day with me and read well. Rose was spellbound and was curious as to how Arianna who could not spell even one word of Dolch words when she first came to me was now able to spell all the 220 Dolch words and was able to read well.
Rose then said that she will also get her daughter to learn the Dolch words just as Arianna has learned.
Here are two more confessions of teachers who did not know how to teach kids. One teacher is from the US whilst the other is from Australia. Most teachers teaching kids to learn to read have no clue as to why many smart kids cannot read in English.
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