What is a mixed method?

[columngollum]

Can a brave teacher explain what she means?

Occasionally a teacher pops up explaining how necessary the storybook pictures are. But she gets such a ripping from the phonics fanatics that it's never possible to find out what she means.

Firstly we never know what the picture is of.
And secondly we never know what the word or sentence concerned is.

I think simple common nouns alone per page with their names below are excellent.

"Another method, the "look and say" teaching technique, also known as the whole word method, was promoted by American psychologist Edmund Huey from 1908 and became established in the UK in the 1940s.

In the 1950s and 1960s the main characters used to promote this method were Janet and John, who became hugely popular with school children. The "whole word" approach was to repeat words on each page enough times that children memorised them."

"Teachers will use a variety of strategies because no child learns in the same way," says Ian McNeilly of the National Association for the teaching of English. "There are many methods which may be used in combination.

"In the look and say method, children are exposed to pictures and stories from an early age and will learn to recognise complete words. This is, if you like, at the opposite end of the spectrum to synthetic phonics."

"19th century: "look and say" introduced

In 1837, Horace Mann, a lawyer and Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, proposed to the Boston School Masters the adoption of a "new method" of reading that began with the memorization of whole words rather than just learning the letter sounds and blending them into words. His "new method" was based on the work of Thomas A. Gallaudet, who had developed a way to teach deaf children to read. Since deaf children had no ability to "sound out" letters, syllables, or words, the constant repetition of "sight" words from a controlled vocabulary seemed to be the most efficient way to teach them to read.

Adapting the work of Gallaudet, Horace Mann and his wife Mary developed a reading program that applied the same principles to students who had no hearing impairment. His method was tried for about six years in the Boston schools, and then soundly rejected by the Boston School Masters in 1844."