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HomeNewsNortheastern Catholic District School Board back to teaching reading through phonics

Northeastern Catholic District School Board back to teaching reading through phonics

Last year, when the Ontario Human Rights Commission told school boards they were failing in providing students the right to read, the Northeastern Catholic District School Board took up the challenge.

Superintendent of Schools Daphne Brumwell says the commission noted that moving away from a phonics approach was a significant error. So the board has reverted to the old way of doing things.

“So they have refocused on really looking at those word recognition skills and teaching kids specifically how to both decode — so read — and encode — spell or write — using a phonics approach,” she says.

Brumwell adds that it  begins in kindergarten. The first part is oral: hearing and playing with sounds and words. The second teaches phonics in a strategic way.

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“So there is a half-an-hour lesson every day as a large group, and so our kids will begin that program in their first year of kindergarten.”

That all continues right through Grade 6.  It will take some time to be able to gauge results.

Much more detail is in our interview with Daphne Brumwell.

Phonics: a method of teaching people to read by correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters in an alphabetic writing system.

-Definition by Oxford Languages

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