Teach Reading

The art and music specialists were picking up tips about teaching reading.Reading and English teachers were learning to incorporate the visual and performing arts into their language lessons.Neither group felt as if it was taking a back seat, as members tried to learn more about teaching youngsters to read. That's the idea behind Learning to Read Through the Arts, an educational philosophy and method for teachers of all subjects, grades and ability levels.Though the program is more than 25 years old, it addresses the needs of today's teachers -- particularly in Maryland, where state officials are moving to put more reading instruction in the repertoires of all teachers.

It is time to move past Alomar's infraction, which was aberrantNearly two years after Orioles second baseman Roberto Alomar spit in an umpire's face, I feel he deserves forgiveness from both the fans and umpires he so blatantly offended.His actions resonated with the fans for two years as they repudiated Mr. Alomar in spite of his many accomplishments as a perennial All-Star.But he has served his time and won top honors at the 1998 All-Star game in Denver for his incredible feats. He continues to amaze on a daily basis with his bat as well as his fielding maneuvers.

THIS IS TURNING out to be the Summer of the First R.In Northeast Baltimore, 3,200 teachers are going to summer school to learn how to employ the city's new elementary reading curriculum.Community activist Sally Michel's SuperKids camps open this week for about 1,500 children, some of the more than 4,000 city second-graders who tested below grade level in reading in September.Their instructors, trained over the past few weeks, will work at 19 sites around Baltimore. Most are delightful reminders of the idealistic 1960s -- young college students participating in the America Reads program.

AT THE Jonestown Day Care Center in inner-city Baltimore, children are learning to read the James M. Furukawa way.That isn't what the 72-year-old professor at Towson University calls it. The "CPC Way" is the title he's given to the learning "system" he has been trying to perfect for much of his adult life.Perhaps because Furukawa is a psychologist, his methods violate many of the rules laid down by the deadly serious educators who push systematic phonics.Five-year-olds start out in the CPC Way with a heavy dose of old-fashioned spelling.

"Trying a few new ideas... wouldn't be so harmful if it weren't for the fact that tried-and-true methods, such as phonics-based instruction to teach reading, or basic skills emphasis in all other elementary school subjects, are often abandoned along the way."-- Craig Schulze, an instructional resource coordinator in the Baltimore schools, commenting on his more than two decades of watching public-school officials adopt one unproven reform tactic after another.Pub Date: 6/07/98

OAKLAND -- With dramatic flair, kindergarten teacher Denise Helbig uses the story of "Henny Penny" to teach word rhyming, spelling and letter sounds."What letter does 'ducky' start with?" she asks her class at Garrett County's Dennett Road Elementary School, gathered on the floor around her "reading rocking chair." She writes "ducky lucky" on the chalkboard and asks, "Are these words alike?Next up was a study of the "h" sound in "hen," and a reinforcement of rhyming and word similarities with "Henny Penny" -- the type of book Helbig likes because, she says, "It's a mix. Phonics is there, literature and fun with rhyming.

Maryteresa Bressler went to college to become a teacher. She now realizes she never got some critical information: how language develops, how to teach the sounds that make up words, how the brain responds to reading.Those important tools came only "by trial and error during my first four years of teaching first grade," the Baltimore County teacher told the State Board of Education yesterday.The Middlesex Elementary teacher was testifying at a hearing on proposed reading courses for Maryland teachers.

A national reading expert challenged Maryland educators and policy-makers yesterday to be bolder in their attempts at reforming reading instruction.Not only should Maryland increase teacher requirements, as has been proposed, but it should also institute proficiency tests for teachers, Louisa Cook Moats, a teacher-training expert, told the Maryland State Board of Education."

In Baltimore, the City that Reads, a years-long absence of a uniform reading curriculum in public schools has produced a dizzying jumble of approaches -- some phonics-based, but mostly whole language -- to teaching young children to read.Harford Heights, Baltimore's largest elementary school, uses Silver Burdette Ginn readers for young children and the Macmillan series for older pupils.Barclay Elementary uses Addison Wesley's basal readers for kindergarten through third grade and Junior Classics literature for fourth and fifth.

Catholic schools are hooked on phonics.Over the decades -- as fads in reading instruction have come and gone -- Baltimore-area Catholic schools, like many other parochial schools across the nation, have held to teaching children to read by first focusing on the sounds that make up words and sound-letter relationships.In stark contrast to most public schools, which in the 1980s tended to forsake teaching sounds for an early focus on reading stories, virtually all of the 70 elementary schools in the Archdiocese of Baltimore teach phonics as a separate subject in the early grades.