photo by: Mike Yoder

Lawrence Public Library, pictured Aug. 20, 2015.

Phonics is the key to unlocking literacy skills among Lawrence K-12 students, according to educator Barbara Mullen, and the use of other methods to teach reading, especially to kids with dyslexia, is often ineffective.

Mullen is bringing her pro-phonics message to parents this week at a free event in Lawrence. A former teacher at Sunflower Elementary School, Mullen will be the featured speaker at the “Reading Boost Parent Seminar” at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Lawrence Public Library.

Phonics, which Mullen says has been re-emerging and increasingly embraced in American schools, primarily entails matching sounds of spoken English with individual letters, or groupings of letters. Mullen describes it as the blending of sounds and letters together to decode unfamiliar words.

Mullen noted that the cueing model is the most common method of literacy instruction in public schools. The model emphasizes word meaning and sentence structure in print via the use of context cues from pictures. Mullen characterized it as guessing, compared with the sound-it-out decoding of words that phonics employs.

“Decoding words is really the only true way to teach children to read,” she said.

Mullen said the cueing approach helps children to memorize words, but not to gain a deeper comprehension of their meaning. Further, once students hit fourth grade generally “there are no pictures in their books anymore,” she said.

Mullen believes that English language skills are currently trending in the wrong direction at Lawrence Public Schools, and she said that the cueing system is a disservice to many young students, especially those with some form of dyslexia.

“It’s not structured literacy at all,” she said, adding that she believes phonics better equips students to learn the basics of syllables. “More than 800 public schools are changing to phonics, so there is a shift across the nation.”

For Wednesday’s speaking engagement Mullen plans on providing an overview of an older curriculum, Alpha-Phonics, considered a primer for beginning readers. Attendees will also receive a free phonics workbook designed to track their child’s reading progress over the summer.

“It will have different (exercises) to help them actually decode words, rather than just guessing pictures,” she said, adding that related resources will also be discussed.

Mullen emphasized that her advocacy for phonics is not a knock on public schools, but simply a plea for a curriculum-switch to benefit kids.