Educators probably are aware of the differences between phonological awareness and phonics. For parents who want to help their child's early efforts at reading, phonological awareness is an understanding of language and its sounds.

Nursery rhymes, beginning and ending sounds of words, and how words are broken into parts all have to do with phonological awareness.

Phonics are the actual, isolated sounds made by letters or blends of letters. Phonological awareness must precede any real understanding of phonics, or the child can't make necessary connections to letter sounds later on.

My school district has recently embraced "standards based" curriculum. The word from on high is that this is a national trend, and that many other states already operate on academic standards.

As explained, the standards are specific criteria which each individual student must meet to be promoted. The standards are supposedly so concise that there is no room for "interpretation," and no one can argue about a student's achievement.

Unfortunately, while the theory sounds fine, what our staff developments and preliminary screening of "The Document" has created is mass confusion. Standards which either are so limited and specific as to exclude real understanding of a topic, or so vague as to obscure even the state's mandated criteria (known in Texas as "TEKS", or Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills, offers no real improvement to existing curriculum.

This is not specifically a knock; there is no doubt that public education can be improved, and districts ofen find themselves applying what worked elsewhere in an effort to help their own students. Standards-based curriculum is still being developed, and the final outcome may eventually be worthwhile. As long as students (and teachers!) are not steamrolled under, new approaches are valid. Nevertheless, it is impossible to ignore the frustration and concerns currently facing educators trying to keep up with horrendous staff development demands, time constraints, and unclear expectations.

Organization and classroom management. . . those are two subjects that teacher education programs, in my experience, anyway, gloss over. There is, it seems to me, no real preparation for dealing with 22 (or more) young children, while maintaining truckloads of paperwork.

Our district has recently gone to "standards-based" curriculum, as mentioned elsewhere on this page. That means more hands-on-activities for my first graders, which is fine. One of their favorite projects so far this year is a rainforest diorama, made from those ever convenient shoe boxes. Just before the dioramas (and spring break!) I received 350 little books as a result of a reading workshop. You can never have too many shoeboxes or books, Lord knows. But my question, with the annual evaluation looming large, is--where do I put the 22 kids? !

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Should schools practice censorship in their selection of books? Read "The Myth of Protection," at Epinions.com. There are also various book reviews that may be of interest to parents or educators. Just type "legar" into the search box, and titles of various opinions and reviews will pop up.

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Cute kid, cute quote: During a phonics lesson, my students were talking about "clipping" consonants, and why you didn't need to do the same to the short 'a' sound. When asked why, one of my students, unable to remember the word "vowel," explained "Because it's a bubble. You never clip bubbles!"

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