Pluggers by Rick McKee for June 27, 2013

Sure ’nuff!

Lately it is becoming more about age than plugging. (not saying I don’t fall into both categories, but there are a lot of pluggers too young to remember Dick, Jane and Spot running.)

NNNnnnooooooooooooo I’m a Plugger aaaaaggggghhhhhhhI cant be that old

Spot on.

Saw the Dog ‘Go’

You really are a plugger if remember the name of the publisher [Scott Foresman].

I must predate that, because my first reader was about Bill and Susan.

I remember those 1st grade Dick & Jane primers and thinking to myself “Real people don’t talk like this.”

Well I guess that makes it official, I am a plugger. I saw Dick, Jane and Spot run, jump and play. Those were still the first grade readers in the 70’s.

One-room schoolhouse in the ’40’s…Don’t forget Baby Sally.

my grandson was up in the attic and found my 1st grade report card. yellow and faded.

There are two schools of thought about how to teach children to read. The one that works is phonics, which teaches the sounds of the letters and how to “sound out” words. With this method even an average child should be reading real books in pre-school.

The method that has repeatedly failed is the “whole word” (or “look-say”) method in which children are taught to recognize the shapes of words through repeated exposure. That was the premise behind the mind-numbing repetitiveness of Dick and Jane. Most kids taught that way saved themselves by figuring out the phonics on their own, but at the loss of 2 or 3 years of reading experience they could have had. The less smart kids were just out of luck.

Astonishingly, look-say still has its advocates, though many of them have taken refuge in claiming credit for the fact that the many idiocies of English spelling make it necessary for phonics programs to have the kids memorize a few dozen of the most-used but least phonetic words such as TO, ONE, GO, HAVE, etc. But that is very different from the original look-say concept which was based on the observation that adults read efficiently by looking at the “whole word”, so that’s how to teach children. Can you imagine thinking children should learn to run before they can walk?

True dat. I was a Seuss man myself.

Let’s not forget Puff…..

“Puff”One of our barn-cats back in the day. I learned to read before the school board came and drafted me.. Drove my mother nuts asking “what’s THAT word, Ma?” trying to decipher the words in the stack of Sunday comics I found in our old woodshed.. Got ‘fast-tracked’ into second grade right off the bat. Can’t do THAT today.. not PC and besides, I’d have to learn cursive on my own. We’ve “progressed” right into the Dark Ages only equipped with flat-screen TV…

I loved those Dick and Jane books. Got me started reading really well and faster than the rest of the kids in my 1st grade class. And those Dick and Jane books continued on through the sixth grade, bringing up the level of reading as they went. Couldn’t keep the books though. They belonged to the school so you had to give them back. Back when those books first came out it was the approved method because at the time, kids were repetitive with their speech during playtime, so the books did make sense. These days, kids are almost talking like adults, so of course the books are out of date for today’s kids. I wouldn’t mind finding those books now that I have a granddaughter. They would be fun to read to her when she starts talking.

so are they saying my McGuffey readers are out ot date

I seem to remember Dick and Dora…. Where did that come from?

If it were ‘See Spot, Dick & Jane’ would the Supremes need to approve?

My first one was “Alice and Jerry in Around the Top” – that was in 1947…