Hooked on the Sonics of Phonics

Students at the Nativity School in downtown Los Angeles rhymed their way through a phonics lesson the other day.

“Give me some work that’ll challenge me/I can’t be happy with a B,” chanted the students, guided by their visiting instructor, Lindamichellebaron. (She merged the letters in her name, itself an exercise in phonics, she says.)

This is not quite phonics the way most adults remember it. But the performance artist, poet and educator says it is a great way to get children to learn how sounds and letters relate to form words. And, she stresses, it is especially appealing to urban youngsters hooked on rap music lyrics.

Now that California is returning to phonics as the foundation for reading instruction, educators are searching for ways to make learning the basics fun. That’s why Nativity’s principal, Sister Judy Flahavan, was happy to have Lindamichellebaron, a former schoolteacher based in New York City, recite her poems with the students at the school’s Vermont Avenue campus.

Instead of holding up alphabet flashcards, Lindamichellebaron used a microphone to bellow out some of the poems she has been writing for decades. She led the audience of 260 students in the K-7 Roman Catholic school through a lesson in sounding out words and rhyming single-syllable, and then more complex multi-syllable words.

“This is the way . . . hey! we start the day . . . hey!/ We get the knowledge/ to go to college,” the poet chanted.

Lindamichellebaron made the students memorize and then repeat each line she recited. They mimicked her rhymes while tapping their feet to poems that ranged in length from two lines to two pages. Many youngsters also clapped, snapped their fingers and danced in their seats.

Sounding out words is the way to write poems, she tells students.

“I don’t show them posters with the ABCs on them, but I do have to use all 26 letters and their sounds,” she explained.

Nativity School is one of 10 schools Lindamichellebaron has visited in California to spread her message. Along with illustrating phonics with her poems, she said she hopes to infuse students with the joy of language. That, she said, is the springboard to reading and writing.

“I want the children to read between the lines of my poems,” she said. “If these children don’t know how to read effectively, their lives are going to be at stake.”

What’s more, her light and easy-to-read poems are peppered with messages about the importance of reading and writing.

Students, she says, can get a lot out of a poem such as “A World to Read” with lines that say “We are needing/ a world of reading./ Help us get a wondrous start./ Feed our minds . . . our souls . . . our hearts.”

With a master’s degree from Columbia’s Teachers College, Lindamichellebaron knows the debates about teaching reading and supports phonics as the best way.

When not writing poems geared toward children and giving motivational speeches, she is a spokeswoman for a phonics curriculum that is marketed nationwide.

There was no need for her to do too much convincing in California, where phonics instruction is now a matter of state education policy. Last year, the state Board of Education adopted a new instructional blueprint that calls for elementary school teachers to use phonics as a gateway to higher-level reading.

This came after a decade-long rendezvous with whole-language instruction--which called for students to learn to read by being immersed in literature. Whole language was widely blamed for the dismal performance of California’s schoolchildren on standardized reading exams.

Nativity’s principal, Flahavan, embraces the idea that poetry can be used to teach the links between words and their sounds.

At Nativity School, 60 percent of the students live in households where English is not the primary language, making phonics instruction all the more important, she said. The kindergarten teachers, especially, encourage their students to rhyme, whether in poems or rap lyrics.

“The child especially needs to hear the words used and to hear the language pronounced correctly and to repeat it correctly,” Flahavan said.

Karen Vieweg, interim director of USC’s program for early childhood education, agrees that poems and songs can be useful teaching tools if teachers use them in engaging ways.

“It’s a fun way for kids to listen and learn,” Vieweg said. “It’s really that repetition. . . . They’re patterning and that helps with language.”

Indeed, Nativity does have a few poets in the making.

“Give me a stage, a mike, a beat,” rapped Rashid Hubbard, 13, as he walked out to the playground after Lindamichellebaron’s lesson.

Jerry Gallardo, a 12-year-old would-be poet and rapper, said he liked the poetry session.

“Some of the words can be complicated,” he said. “When you try to sound them out and rhyme them, you understand them better.”

* IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA LIVING: From Ranger Rick to Cricket, the kids will race you to the mailbox when you get them a subscription to a magazine. E3