Mrs. Black's Class - Overview

The Mrs. Black's Class is a set of very short, decodable readings for students who are learning their letter sounds. There are posts for lessons 1-15 of the Phonics Reading Program. Each post is a series of images that can be printed and made into a booklet.

The booklets are not, of course, high quality literature. They let children do some real reading, giving them practice and satisfaction, but kids will need to hear more worthy stories than they are capable of reading on their own. Starting with lesson 10, this program provides simplified pieces of literature and non-fiction in addition to and then in place of the "Spot ran" sort of thing in Mrs. Black's Class. Easy readers should accompany the lessons as soon as children can handle them, and by the time the program's texts peter out, children will (hopefully) be ready to leave such stilted writing behind.

Each booklet has a "cover" page and four to eleven numbered, stick-figure-illustrated text pages. They are meant to be read with a parent, and unlike the text, the titles are usually not decodable. Some students may like the extra challenge of figuring the words out; others may do better if parents read the title.

Why "Reactionary"?

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

     - C.S. Lewis


In the last couple of centuries, the West has:

    - overthrown every earthly authority previously respected, from kings to priests to parents.
    - discarded the morality and way of life that humans have guided humans since they became humans as "outmoded" and "out of touch".
    - worked to dissolve every societal institution that tied people together: marriage, parent-child bonds, church, community, and nation.
    - made Man (sorry, Human) their God.
    - decided that, unlike every other group of people, they have no reason to protect their culture, their homelands, or their children's future. They go beyond transcending these, as the "noble savages" do; people is simply irrelevant to the enlightened Westerner.

We do not need to make more of such "progress"; nor do we need to "conserve" the mess we've made so far. Progressivism and Conservatism are destructive. Reaction is a maligned, and not wholly adequate term (perhaps "traditionalism" is better), but it gets the point across quite nicely.

Phonics Reading Program: Introduction

The professional education world has long been fighting the "reading wars", trying to decide between phonics and "whole word" or later "whole language" approaches to reading. Phonics aims to teach children to read by telling them which letters make which sounds, while whole word has them learn, predictably, whole words (by sight). More recently (but not very recently) the whole language approach has largely replaced whole word. It aims at children reading lots of books and writing lots of stories (as well as they can; at the early stages pretending to do so is a substitute) and gradually absorbing the information they need to become readers and writers.

The name of my reading program may betray which side I'm inclined toward. I think most children learn best when they are taught, logically and explicitly, how something works. However, the whole word and whole languages approaches are not without their merit. Learning by rote common words who follow complicated rules or no rules at all offers children early success and opens up much more reading to them than a pure phonics approach does. And hearing lots of stories, making stories up, and playing at reading and writing provides the joy of these activities even when actual reading or writing is very tedious. Whole language, moreover, focuses on students doing a lot of real reading and writing once they've learned to - a practice not peculiar to whole language, of course, but owing some innovations to it.

With this in mind, I ordered the sounds and rules of language children would need to learn for reading and spelling from most immediately useful and simplest to most advanced. I made a list of words students would be able to read after each lesson (for use in teaching the rules and for students to read off and practice writing). The fifth through twenty-sixth lessons also include words to learn by sight; these are either irregular or use advanced rules. Each of these lessons has an accompanying passages using the sight words for extra practice.

The tenth through twenty-fifth lessons have accompanying readings that are mostly decodable for the student who has completed the lesson. These should be read with an instructor in most cases; a few words will be beyond the student's knowledge. Some of the lessons also have poetry accompanying them. I will add to the poetry section as I find or come up with more pieces that help teach the rules.

I designed copywork for the first twenty-five lessons. It is very simple, but will reinforce the spelling and handwriting and expose students to sentence structure. Once children have the basics of reading down, hopefully, they can copy passages of more inherent value.

How Should We Educate Our Children?

If education is "the leading of human souls to what is best", then we should hope that those doing the leading know their way. Sometimes the popular guides have it mostly right; sometimes they are woefully wrong. For a while now they've been tramping triumphantly in the wrong direction.

This blog will focus on providing learning material to parents who wish to give their children a good (reactionary) education. I love education and have amassed a great deal of it for when I have children of my own to teach, and would like to ease the burden of coming up with such material for those who do not find it a leisure activity.