We've been watching entirely too much TV lately, with everybody being sick and all

[conuly]

Which is how we discovered Superwhy.

This show is seriously cute. SERIOUSLY.

So I visited their website. And if you click around a bit, you discover the part where the various characters have their own little videos. Princess Presto has "I love to spell". Great, great. She carefully sounds out the words, then spells them with her wand. Love it.

Except... she sounds out "Sing" by asking what letters make the N and G sounds.

Don't see the problem? Say the word a couple of times. A couple more. Slowly. Yeah. There's neither an N nor a G sound in it! Instead, there is a single ng sound - and that's the difference between sing and sin, so it's an important one! One would not spell out "Shin" as the S and H sounds, instead one would say that the sh sound is made from two letters, and that's the same principle here. BAD VIDEO. BAD.

(Meanwhile, Angelique is much more concerned about the fact that they don't say please to their supercomputer, and compelled me to type them a sternly worded email about it. We all have our priorities.)

Comments

[conuly]

1. Fair enough :) I wonder how it would work, though, to spell it and make them write it as you spell it, giving a bit of muscle memory to that written image...?

2. That is a perfectly good point. I will add my caveat, though, that not every child learns the same way. Of course you know that, I'm just pointing out that even if this program works wonderfully for 90% of the population, there will be some who learn better some other way. When it comes to education, that sucks, since teachers can't teach 30 different ways to 30 different students (there's a lot of suckage in that, but that's beside the point), but in the real world, all thinking differently is probably a good, advantageous thing.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Well I would imagine after you write it, they have to copy it anyways. The program stresses tons of writing too.

And yeah, this school knows about not every kid learning the same way, I know because of the MASSIVE accommodations they make for Finbar. It blows my MIND how flexible they are. And it's not just for him, I volunteer there and see them work with others in different ways. Lots of staff, so lots of support.

Last year they learned math in a way so that different styles were accomodated, and the teacher would teach, say, six ways to add, and you would have to give her three examples. She'd say 'out of the six ways to solve this, show me a way/two ways' whatever and have kids show their way of doing it.

Also I saw their math books and they take a concept and work it different ways too. Math Trailblazers, I think. A lot of reinforcing different ways for one thing. Topped with accomodations for those who CANNOT learn another way (i.e. Finbar can't process visual things at a distance, he must use near point copying).

This state has a history of being good for education. It's not perfect but I'm pretty happy.

[conuly]

You should speak to ozarque, she's made at least two different posts that I can think of referring to inflexible teaching techniques, and she's just a wonderful person to read anyway, and she'd probably be thrilled to know some people teach in a sensible way.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

We had a teacher like that in the first grade here -- who came to the IEP meeting complaining that he would rather READ for a reward than watch TV in the class. She was so rattled by a kid like Fin that she wrote a bit of a personal statement about what she saw wrong and whimpered at the meeting "I just don't know what to DO with him!"

This teacher now found ways to give him breaks without him looking like FREAK KID WHO CANT HANDLE CLASS. I am thrilled. Two years running with great teachers. And that's gen ed -- I'm also happy that for Ted he has classes for autism spectrum kids and they do a lot of sensory stuff and accommodations. No adversives, no repetitive craziness, and a decent amount of general ed put in the mix with an aide.

K's school still pisses me off though. Abstinence only education? NO NO NO NO. Im still waiting for them to call me back so I can yell at them. (Well, wag a finger at them.)