> We were really puzzled why the reading curriculum featured stupid books where each page had a picture of a mouse and another object, and you were supposed to read "Mouse sees bear".
This horse-shit made one of my daughters backslide in reading for about 3/4 of kindergarten. She was progressing fast in Montessori school, then went backwards in ability for most of the (public school) kindergarten. Made her really lazy too, and seemed to shift what she thought reading was from "read the words" to "just guess", which, JFC. Recovered and then some, luckily, but god damn do I hate those starter leveled readers they used.
To expand, what these books do is have some pattern for a sentence, then every page is the same sentence with one word different, and you can guess which word with about 100% accuracy by just looking at the picture. So you just need to figure out the sentence once, then you can zoom through the book without reading another word.
They also had them do some computer reading program that had a feature that'd read the book to the kid. So guess what the kids all do, for their "reading time", some of them well into 1st and 2nd grade(!). They're not reading, just listening to books. WTF. Total waste of time and encouraging more reading-laziness.
All this means more work on our part to undo the harm. What a fucking waste of everyone's time, including and especially the kids.
This horse-shit made one of my daughters backslide in reading for about 3/4 of kindergarten. She was progressing fast in Montessori school, then went backwards in ability for most of the (public school) kindergarten. Made her really lazy too, and seemed to shift what she thought reading was from "read the words" to "just guess", which, JFC. Recovered and then some, luckily, but god damn do I hate those starter leveled readers they used.
To expand, what these books do is have some pattern for a sentence, then every page is the same sentence with one word different, and you can guess which word with about 100% accuracy by just looking at the picture. So you just need to figure out the sentence once, then you can zoom through the book without reading another word.
They also had them do some computer reading program that had a feature that'd read the book to the kid. So guess what the kids all do, for their "reading time", some of them well into 1st and 2nd grade(!). They're not reading, just listening to books. WTF. Total waste of time and encouraging more reading-laziness.
All this means more work on our part to undo the harm. What a fucking waste of everyone's time, including and especially the kids.