On 22 Mar 2005, DeVolder Carol L wrote: > Stephen, how early did your daughters learn to read? Was the program > successful for you and for them?
Nah, it didn't work. Both are now illiterate adults. OK, kidding aside, they were both reading phonetically (real reading, but not, you understand, War and Peace) by around their third birthday. I didn't explicitly follow the DISTAR programme except in spirit, but the readers were very helpful. One innovation, for example, was to print silent "e''s (e.g. as in "have") in a very small font, so they quickly learned to ignore it. But in the more advanced readers, it was printed normal size. As reinforcers, I used such stuff as froot loops and potato chips (half a chip at a time, which they still recall with resentment), and agreeing to play the world's most boring board game with them, something called "Curious George". The neighbourhood was scandalized, the most common concern being "But if you teach them to read too soon, won't they be bored in school?" I also made a primitive video (because videotaping _was_ primitive in those days) to document their early reading, but mostly just to show my classes how cute they were. Just one anecdote: my finest moment was when my younger daughter (probably 3-4 years old at the time) casually read aloud from a t-shirt an older cousin was wearing (fortunately, a non-scatological message). It blew their minds. Thanks, Paul (Brandon) for your url http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/carnine.pdf to the article by Douglas Carnine, which generally confirms what I remember, and adds interesting detail. I didn't know, but am not surprised to learn that David Elkind (the devoted follower of Piaget) condemned the method, as he long argued that the problem with reading instruction was that it was started too early in school. I was puzzled by the absence of any mention of Carl Bereiter, whom I remember as an important contributer. So I went looking. He's still around, currently at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto), but his CV http://ikit.org/people/~bereiter.html doesn't mention Direct Instruction or DISTAR. But the mystery is solved in an informative biography of Seigfried Engelmann http://tinyurl.com/46vs2 where Bereiter's contribution to the early Bereiter-Engelmann Preschool Programme is mentioned. That's where I first heard about the readers. I was also delighted to learn from the bio that Engelmann developed his programme by trying it out first on his own children. That's what all us great psychologists do. Stephen ___________________________________________________ Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. tel: (819) 822-9600 ext 2470 Department of Psychology fax: (819) 822-9661 Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lennoxville, QC J1M 1Z7 Canada Dept web page at http://www.ubishops.ca/ccc/div/soc/psy TIPS discussion list for psychology teachers at http://faculty.frostburg.edu/psyc/southerly/tips/index.htm _______________________________________________ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: archive@jab.org To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
