And... from the west coast http://www.latimes.com/news/natio

Notice, in LA they are teaching reading for more than 3 hours per day! We are still essentially teaching reading for 1.5 hours per day, even though we have programs like Open Court in place. If we are going to get the achievement up that much, we need PERMISSION to teach reading for much of the instructional day. 3 hours of reading and 1 to 1.5 hours of math instruction. At my school we have about 5 .5 instructional hours per day. If we actually devote this much time to language arts instruction, along with an equally effective portion of time to math, then we have pretty much used about 5 hours per day. This leaves about 30 minutes to handle a special, like P.E. which is mandated by our state. So, we don’t formally teach social studies and science.

All of this is fine with me, however we need permission from the highest levels in our state to actually DO this. I realize we can weave social studies and science concepts into our reading/writing instruction, however this is not the same as having a program that systematically covers the standards for the grade level.

I have personally argued, in the staff room and wherever else, for adopting a model that emphasizes teaching language arts and math heavily for at least the first few years of school. Formal science and social studies can probably wait until the children can read and write fairly well. Comprehension skills need to be pretty sharp to contend with the often challenging social studies and science text books.

Parents and teachers who read this, we CAN do a better job educating all our children if we are permitted to focus on the most important skills needed in learning early. Language arts is a skill, not a subject. Until a student is reasonably proficient with language arts skills, he or she will not be proficient in content areas. Please help us to be better teachers, whenever you can, argue for devoting most of the day in primary grades, perhaps through 4th-5th grade, to teaching language arts skills and math.

In my resource room, I could teach so much better if I had enough TIME with each of my students to actually carefully and systematically cover all the skills almost every day. To do this I would need each group for at least 90 minutes or more. With the spread of students in a K-6 school and the diversity of needs that is appearing on the scene, I cannot possibly TEACH any student enough minutes to do the job I know I can do. I simply don’t have resources available to me with just one aide. We flat out run out of instructional minutes, so we have to squish and squash.

Hmm, maybe the reason the one room schools of old times worked was because they spent all their time teaching the 3r’s.

Thanks Sue

My mother taught in a one room school house. She had grades 1-8. The biggest difference was that there were only about 20 students total. She said she had the older kids help with the younger kids. I don’t know if it was the focus on the 3 R’s or maybe it was class size. When you only have 3 students and 1 teacher it helps. They focused more on memorizing rules and procedures and not on understanding concepts like we do today. Things that are taught in high school now were not taught until college.