JMJ
April 02, 2013
Yes. It’s really true. There is a movement to stop people from learning to read. When we had children four and five years old in the mission school we began to teach them to read We knew that we may their only chance.to literacy. The parents were pressured to tell us that we must not teach them to read. The children were enjoying the prereading programme and were happily learning to read a few pages a day. But there was so much pressure on the family they began frightened to read .
The pressure continued and the parents were forced to put their children in the state school. This year after two years we got one of those children back. She hadn’t advanccd at all and had forgotten much that she had learned. Her mother who goes to the mission school with her was threatened that she would be in trouble if the child was not returned. The mother refused . She wanted her child to read. I then learned from various direct sources that reading is not taught in the tax funded school That’s right. They don’t use phonics, look- say or whole word. They don’t use that reading series or this one. There is no religious content in their readers .They don’t have readers.
Meanwhile Harriet Roy in the Northern Reading Challenge sent in her packet papers for parents which state “ Never, never teach your child to read. “ Now the secular school refuses to teach reading. Parents are told that they must not teach their child to read. So how does the child learn to read. He doesn’t/
The SaskParty government introduced legislation to have academic standards throughout the province. A University of Regina professor objected. He said that these tests are inaccurate and do not take into consideration cultural differences.
The cultural differences are native children may be subjected to deliberate shoddy education so that they are dependent the rest of their lives, open to manipulation, and control. The parents are bullied to believe that they cannot make educational choices for themselves and their children
Let me introduce some solutions. We use a phonics based programme called Little Angel Reader by Linda Bromeier. There is a red, yellow, green, and blue reader with matching workbooks. There is a detailed, readable teacher’s manual that many parents and teachers have found very useful. The stories even in the simplest level are meaningful and interesting. They teach good Christian and family values. There are Aesops’ Fables, stories of saints, and family and friends stories. The vocabulary is controlled, going from short vowel one syllable words, to long vowel one syllable words, to blends, two syllable and compound words. The new words lists are not four or five new words as in a look- say programme but a page or two of related words. I take ten of them for spelling lessons . It is easy to learn a spelling list if the words are in the same family, for example: sing, wing, swing, Spring ...et c
The publisher is Stone Tablet Press,3348 Whittsets Fork Road, Wildwood, Missouri
63038 Phone:636-458-1515. We get ours from St. Francis Books in Cannington, Ontario.
There are many school in Catholic Communities without any Catholic content programmes and resources. Some have never even seen a good Catholic textbook on any subject. Excellent materials are being produced. Homeschoolers have used them for years but there is no reason why a classroom can’t use them. They make the teacher a better person while making the students literate with good values. Gay
