Wordly
Wise
Remember when we were in grade school and were learning reading,
writing, and speech? We had phonics, based on the theories of
phonetics as assisting our learning to produce, transmit, and
receive—or spell and read and pronounce--words by ear (from
Greek phone, sound or voice). Well, times they have a
changed: we now give our children and learners Wordly Wise.
Wordly Wise still promotes/uses phonics as an adjunct to a slew of
other disciplines. Yet it now trumps up the description of
Wordly Wise phonetic learning materials, purportedly one of the oldest
learning programs, with descriptions such as the ones that follow, in
paraphrase:
For example, Wordly Wise goes beyond the nomenclature of yore to break
phonics into phonological awareness and phonics decoding.
With phonological awareness study materials, one learns to
“identify and manipulate” “sound segments
of spoken language,” what the makers of Wordly Wise note as
the rhymes, rimes, syllables, phonemes, and onsets of written and
spoken speech. With phonics decoding, consonant and assonant
sounds, prefixes, suffixes, and affixes alike are made accessible and
manageable with programs designed according to the rigors of academic
standards.
Wordly Wise also caters to the growing numbers of
“at-risk” readers and learners who struggle with
the written text. At-risk students are those who perform at
below standard levels, and include learners with learning challenges
and difficulties not found in the learner who seems to grasp and mimic
and reproduce (or generate) without struggle.
In addition to the hundreds of books and pamphlets in the multi-leveled
series, Wordly Wise includes readers for homeschooling teachers and
parents. Such titles include How to Teach Spelling, The
Sonday System, Teaching and Assessing Phonics, and Success Stories.
Also on the Wordly Wise website are supplemental downloadable (PDF)
documents, articles for parents and teachers who want to further study
or consider the benefits of and rationale for teaching phonics, the
historical and technical background of phonics as a discipline,
articles addressing and defining the signs of learning disabilities,
glossaries of learning differences terminology, ways to help a
struggling reader and writer, and a piece devoted to reading failure
prevention.
So with forty some odd years behind me, and a number of teaching
experiences passed by, I discover Wordly Wise, read up on the
components and contents, and compare them with those of my own
childhood experiences learning phonics in the dusty auxiliary library
of an elementary school where a reading specialist was imported to
assist us small-town folk with reading and writing. And I
wonder what the differences are. Phonics and phonological
awareness. Hmmm, guess I’ll START by sounding it
out.
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