I am beginning to think that perhaps we are getting our priorities wrong in the business of teaching children to read & defining the required standards to be tested
As many have pointed out, children are more likely to take to reading early if they see adults around them doing it. But, even in the most highly educated middle class families, children are less & less likely to see adults involved in paper-based reading. And seeing an adult write almost anything but a list of some kind or a signature on a Christmas card must be even more rare. So the important motive of copying what mummy & daddy do is lost, reading & writing are just chores imposed on them by school
The ability to interpret large blocks of uniform black squiggles on a pale background is something that begins more & more to seem like the ability to interpret the hieroglyphs on an Egyptian tomb
