Larry Williams Drive

I don’t know why we try to reinvent the wheel sometimes.It’s becoming more and more obvious that we made a huge mistake 50 years ago changing the way we teach kids to read when we stopped teaching phonics.There’s a great article in the Herald today written by Megan Wood. She is a journalist and she’s also a mum.She tells the story of her almost 9-year-old son. He can’t read. He’s a really clever kid so everyone assumed he’d be great at school and would thrive but he got there and he never learned to read.Megan is now paying $120 a week to get him a tutor to teach with phonics.If this was 1969 she wouldn’t have to pay for that because he would just have learnt it in school.Back in 1969, kids still learnt to read through phonics. That’s where the kids learn by sounding the word out. And it was working. New Zealand 14-year-olds were placed 1st-equal out of 15 countries in reading comprehension.But then we ditched phonics in 1970 to teach kids by word association with pictures. So as Megan says, a word starting w