Jones Blog

Hi. I just posted about your blog. Thanks for suggesting I take a look.
 

Hi Vernice,

Got to your site through Jenny D's - interesting site. I am a ph.d. in language, literacy and culture, and would like to suggest a few ways you can use texts that your son loves to teach him how to read -- i agree that it is difficult to find satisfying phonics texts out there, and yet so many kids need good phonics instruction. Two suggestions - buy a cookie sheet and a set of magnet letters and then do word building work with the letters - you can start with five letters (like c, a, t, s, m). put them all on the tray; ask your son to pull down the letters to spell "cat" then ask him to change cat to sat or mat. You can use words that are in his favorite texts and then build words off of those. Another fun activity is to do language puzzle - photocopy a page from a favorite book. Cut the words into sentences and have him put it back together. Then cut the sentences into smaller and smaller piece. You can make the "puzzle" as challenging as you want and you can do the puzzle many times in many different ways - the repetition is very helpful.
 

I LOVE the puzzle idea. That would be a great fit. Thanks!
 

I came here through a recommendation by JennyD. Your writing certainly speaks clearly about your worries and your hopes for LO. I particularly liked the line "LO is going to turn out like Carleton on the Prince of Bel-Air." That's funny, but I also sense the undercurrent of concern about cultural values.

I think that you're right to be concerned about the racial achievement gap. It's real and the best way to have LO live up to his potential is for you to be proactive in shaping his environment. We know that positive environmental influences can't boost innate IQ but they sure can help us live up our potentials. That said I'm not aware of research that claims to show the best way to provide a positive environment. We know that Asian families raise their children differently than White families who in turn raise their children differently from Black families. When experments were done on white children raised in families that emulated Asian values to educational success, the children didn't excel to the same standards as their Asian counterparts. In a sense the experiment was a failure in showing that environment had a drastic influence. What it did show was the limitations.

Now what I imagine is the tricky part for you is raising your son to be fully engaged with his heritage and also living up to his potential. Here follows an unpolite line of thought - is it possible to do both? That's what I take away from the "Carleton" comment. We do know that African immigrants and Afro-Caribbean immigrants tend to perform to higher standards than African-American students. Why is that? I think we can exclude genetic factors for the moment and concentrate on differing environmental conditions. From the content of your writing I sense that you will soon have to prioritize cultural homogeneity against educational achievement. From your writing, I'm sure you have a good grasp of the dynamics involved.

You mention helping other children via Head start types of initiatives and I'm wondering if the positive influence that you can provide for a short period of time can overcome the remainder of the cultural influences that they pick up. I'm pessimistic on that front. Maybe content yourself with providing more engagement with LO where you know your influence in still paramount and can have a large and positive effect.

One of the issues I think you should start exploring is trying to determine how your son best learns his lessons. Studies in school systems show Black students perform to higher standards with didactic lessons rather than constructivist approaches. Perhaps this is because of the nature of the schools, the socio-cultural mix therein, or other factors. Whether this is repeatable within a home-schooled environment is a very good question. Nevertheless, I think it's important for all children to learn and master basics before they start discovering knowledge for themselves. One thing you may want to investigate is playing digit-span and reverse digit-span "games" with your son. Basically, they stretch the memory. You start by having him memorize a multi digit random number and repeating it back to you after he's memorized it. The reverse part comes in by his repeating the number in reverse order. This part of the task uses different brain functions than simple memory. As he gets accustomed to the "game" his brain is physically responding in how it grows and his time to memorize will decrease. Over time, years, the number of digits increases. What this means is that his memory can take in larger gulps of information. As the reverse digit span calculation increases, it means he can process more difficult calculations.

Anyways, good luck, keep writing because this is an interesting journey you're on. Also you've got probably less than a decade to stamp your influence on your son before the importance of his peers overwhelms your input. Read Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption for more information,
 

Hello,

I taught my daughter to read with a book called "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons." It's a systematic phonics-based approach. I get the impression that you may consider it "boring" but it's extremely effective and very easy to use for both parent and child. I suggest you check it out.

Harold T. Peabody III
 

We actually did try to use it initially- LO hated it! So, I suppose this is an example of how different materials work with different kids. (I have heard that it has worked well for some kids.)
 

I read the Dr. Seuss I-Can-Read Beginner Books (Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, etc.) with my daughter. Almost all the words are one syllable, and lots of heavy rhyming. So I omit the last word from many of the lines and have my daughter say what the word is. I guess it's a pre-reading exercise.

But, I gotta tell you, my Ma told me I learned to read from billboards and other commercial signage. And Sesame Street. There's so many different sources of written text out there.