Brenda Garrett - Confusing and Contributing Factors

Learning to read does not begin at school, it should begin at home. Parents need to be

involved in the process of teaching their children to read. Newspapers, books, and magazines

should be available for them to sit down and read. Not encouraging young children to read

causes a low literacy rate. In society today when children are not yet at school age or are home

from school they are in front of a television watching a show or playing a video game. Neither of

these encourages reading. Parents are the first teachers to their children.

It is imperative that students learn how to read by 3rd grade; it is after this grade that

students should be reading to learn. The lower reading literacy issue seems to be much higher in

the higher poverty areas. Students need to know 95% of the words in a text to comprehend what

they have read.

There is not a one size fits all when teaching a struggling reader. Teachers are not given

the professional development that is needed to help them teach students to read. They can only

teach what they have knowledge of themselves. There needs to be a change of behavior in grades

Pre-K-3rd when the minds are learning sounds and how to put letters together. They need to be

read to and asked to read. There is instructional confusion in the classrooms. Schools need to be

supporting the learning of teachers or the low literacy rates will continue to grow. The context of

a passage does not teach a child to read words. Children need to be able to sound out the letters

to make the words. School administrators should give classroom teachers the tools and resources

to teach all students to read before they are moved through the system and dropout rates continue

to grow.

When the English writing was created for Latin and contains 40 different phonemes that

are heard when we read. There are arrays of letters that make different sounds when used in

different words. Readers are confused when consonants and vowels have different meanings and
Brenda Garrett - Confusing and Contributing Factors

sounds depending on how they are used in a sentence. Some of the first words that children are

taught to read are three syllable words like ball, bat, cat, and they are asked them to sound them

out. However, when they are asked to spell not sound out words like graph they spell it with an f

because they are using the same skill as when they read the three syllable words.
Brenda Garrett - Confusing and Contributing Factors

Reference

Causes and Contributing Factors. Children of the Code. (2018, March 21)

https://childrenofthecode.org/Tour/c3/index.htm