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Starting at Square One Rationale for AVKO’s Concept of Teaching Reading, Writing, Keyboarding and Spelling AS the Alphabet is Being Taught Rather than AFTER When children start school it is normal for them to want to learn to read and write – right NOW. Many children don’t want to wait and wait and wait and wait while the alphabet is being taught to them. They want to read now. But no, traditional methods dictate that they must wait. Now is not the time. First they must be taught the names of the 26 letters of the alphabet. This seems reasonable enough until we remember that each letter of the alphabet has many different appearances. Not only is there the upper case A and the lower case a, but there is the italic a and a as well as the D’Nealian manuscript A and a, the D’Nealian cursive A and a , or the stick-ball A and a and as well as more than a hundred different printed fonts and as many different handwritten styles as there are writers. So when you get down to the exact number of different written symbols for the 26 letters of our alphabet, there are well over 300 that must be learned. Now, that’s quite a chore. It’s no wonder that so many children have trouble learning to read and write when they enter school. What AVKO proposes is a very simple common sense approach. Let’s teach the alphabet slowly and as we teach the names of the letters, teach the sounds they make and how these sounds make words. We can teach the concept of reading words left to right and top to bottom as we teach the alphabet. What we want the children to learn is that it is the letters that make the sounds that make the words – not the picture. Teachers who employ the sight method of teaching reading often create problems unintentionally. For example the word PROBLEMS written in caps does not have the same picture as problems in lower case (Notice that only the letter o has the same shape in both upper and lower case) and the word proèôems looks entirely different in cursive. PROBLEMS, problems, Proèôems, problems But since as an educated adult you can read these words, let's put you in the position of a child learning to read with sight methods. Assign any meaning you wish to the following scrambled words, three of which are real words and one is not: Rpbalbeo could be carrot. Rpblmseo could be horse. Rpntesed could be barn. Rpblmaeo could be garage. All you have to do is see how fast and accurately you can teach yourself using sight methods to respond correctly to these words.
Now that you know these words, match them quickly. Color all the carrots orange, the horse brown, and the barn red in the grid below.
We’ll bet you didn’t even try. Too frustrating, perhaps? The basic rationale remains the same for teaching remedial reading or teaching English as a second language. What many teachers fail to realize is that the names and the sounds of the letters in our alphabet are often not the same in other languages that use the Roman alphabet. For example, the name of the letter A can be “AH” and the name of the letter E can be “AY” and the name of our letter “EYE” can be “EE!” |