A minority of students can read at or above their grade level. Literacy rates are going down in this country, and that has huge implications not just for our future politically, but also for the state of our country spiritually. I m going to show you a viral video that shows, sadly, what this looks like in our high schools today. But I am going to talk about my solution to the reading crisis that we have in our country. And then we ll also have Producer Bree on, talking about the Met Gala.
00:00:00.000A minority of students can read at or above their grade's reading level. Literacy rates are going down in this country, and that has huge implications, not just for our future politically, but also for the state of our country spiritually.
00:00:17.080I am going to show you this viral video that shows, sadly, what this looks like in our high
00:00:22.740schools today. But I am going to talk about my solution to the reading crisis that we have in
00:00:28.840our country. And then we'll also have producer Bree on, y'all. We're talking about the Met Gala,
00:00:32.900and we have a really fun game for you. At the end of today's episode, it's brought to you by
00:00:37.360our friends at The Last Stand. The Last Stand is an awesome pro-life conference where I will be
00:00:42.280on June 5th through 6th in Denver, Colorado. Frank Turek, Seth Gruber, so many more speakers.
00:00:47.580If you go to TheLastDan.com, get your tickets, use my code Allie,
00:00:50.580you'll get a discount. TheLastDan.com, code Allie.
00:01:02.500Hey, y'all. Welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. We've got a full and fun show for you today. Some
00:01:07.380much needed comedic relief with producer Brie at the end of this episode and some pop culture
00:01:13.560stuff. First, we got to talk about reading. Maybe that seems random, but this viral video showing
00:01:18.320high school kids that can't read pretty basic words has really disturbed me. And so I am going
00:01:23.760to go on a bit of a rant about the importance of reading, not just practically, but also spiritually
00:01:29.760as Christians. And then I will also be giving, you know, my tips of just young kids of what
00:01:35.520we've done to try to cultivate a love of reading in our home, and hopefully it's helpful for you,
00:01:39.680especially if you're a new mom. Before we get into all of that really important stuff, I do
00:01:43.720just want to tell you that we've got a Mother's Day sale going on for Share the Arrows. So Share
00:01:48.280the Arrows is our Christian Women's Conference. This is our third year to put it on. It's been
00:01:52.720incredible. Holy Spirit-filled every year. I'm so excited about it. We can pull up the speaker so
00:01:59.060you can see. It's October 10th, Dallas, Texas. We've got Rosaria Butterfield. We've got Elisa
00:02:05.340Childers. We've got so many others. Shane and Shane is going to be leading worship. I am so
00:02:10.360excited. October 10th, Dallas, Texas. Sharethearrows.com. Right now, we've got a Mother's
00:02:16.220Day sale going on. So you can enter promo code MOTHERSDAY20. And y'all, Ticketmaster is just,
00:02:22.100it's just Ticketmaster. Like, it makes things difficult. So to enter the promo code, you
00:02:27.820actually have to press the little filter button at the top of the page, press the filter button,
00:02:32.940and then you enter in Mother's Day 20. And then all of the prices that you see for the seats will
00:02:37.820be 20% off. So make sure you snag your ticket. If you're a Christian woman and make your way there,
00:02:43.580you're not going to want to miss it. Also, we are doing a giveaway. This is very important.
00:02:48.260We are doing a giveaway right now. We are giving away a gold VIP experience for two plus a $100
00:02:55.620dollar share the arrows merch gift card we've never done a giveaway like this before so take
00:03:00.360advantage of it you can do it whether you've already bought your ticket or not gold vip members
00:03:06.080will be invited to an exclusive vip dinner with me the other speakers gold members uh the night
00:03:11.580before it was really incredible last year and also you get a vip lunch with a lot of amazing perks
00:03:17.620here is how you enter and you can see all of this at share the arrows.com by the way there's a little
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00:03:43.540click the giveaway tab, and you'll see all of that. So I just wanted to make sure that you knew
00:03:47.480We've got Share the Arrows news, and you got to come.
00:03:58.620All right, let's get into our first story of the day, and that is about phonics.
00:04:03.920How many of y'all, especially like 80s, 90s kids, remember Hooked on Phonics?
00:04:10.460It was a game that taught you about the letter sounds and basically taught you how to read.
00:04:15.360well we need to be hooked on phonics we need to get re-hooked on phonics there was this recent
00:04:20.740viral video on tiktok i saw it on instagram like a good millennial that shows high schoolers
00:04:25.580attempting to read and really struggling and look i i don't want to shame these individual kids
00:04:31.240that's not what this is about um this is really about a system as we will talk about that has
00:04:37.820not trained kids from an early age how to read we have unfortunately abandoned the tried and
00:04:45.340true methods to teach kids phonics. And we've relied on these newfangled strategies that really
00:04:51.340don't build lifelong readers. Plus, there is a deficit of parents reading to their kids. And so
00:04:57.080this is not about shame. I just want to show you the example of what I'm talking about.
00:05:01.640it's not one in this car for me she wore a suit clothes that were0.75
00:05:09.000who's this for extra ordinary but somewhat1.00
00:05:17.300gertrude no explain what that means i don't know she were a sahalat of clothes that were1.00
00:05:27.440extra during me whatever bro but somewhat what does that mean like she wore a lot wait she wore
00:05:34.920bro i don't know bro okay so it goes on and on like that it's not just those two kids
00:05:40.440um they're trying to say the word silhouette and extraordinary silhouette and extraordinary
00:05:45.380um and those are i guess bigger words but these kids are in high school they're
00:05:50.860not little kids the truth is is that this is indicative of a bigger trend that reading
00:05:56.040proficiency has been declining for years now from 2019 to 2025. Fourth and eighth graders are down
00:06:03.380about five points when it comes to their reading level and their literacy overall. Fewer than 35%
00:06:10.460of students are considered proficient. Fewer than 35 and record high numbers of students score
00:06:15.740below the basic reading level. Since around 2012, scores for younger students at ages 9 and 13 have
00:06:23.480fallen by about five to seven points from the early 2010s. Okay. So we're not talking over the
00:06:28.720past 30 to 50 years. We're talking like in the past 10 to 15 years, these declines were already
00:06:34.440happening before 2020 pandemic and everything, the stay at home orders, which were just absolutely
00:06:41.160catastrophic for kids in their education, but it got worse after that. And they're showing up
00:06:45.980across student groups. The problem is especially bad for high schoolers. Current test results show
00:06:51.780that the lowest reading levels in decades, that we've got the lowest reading levels in decades for
00:06:57.16012th graders about 10 points below where they were in 1992, okay? Along with the highest percentages
00:07:03.480ever of students falling below basic reading levels, okay? Basic reading levels. The majority
00:07:10.340of high school seniors today do not even have an eighth grade reading level. There are a large
00:07:17.380percentage of seniors today that don't have above a fourth grade reading level. There are middle
00:07:24.020schoolers and high schoolers, a huge number of middle schoolers and high schoolers in America
00:07:29.020today that have a kindergarten reading level. That's actually probably what we just saw there.
00:07:34.020That was literally probably kindergarten, first, second grade reading level that we are seeing in
00:07:40.020high schoolers. The decline is because of a trend to teach kids to guess words. This is what I think
00:07:44.880anyway. And if you've watched the Sold a Story podcast, I really highly recommend the Sold a
00:07:50.500Story podcast. She talks about this strategy of teaching kids to guess words, so use deductive
00:07:57.940reasoning, rather than sounding them out based on a very pervasive but incorrect theory. This
00:08:06.140happened in the early 2000s where we switched from phonics to this deductive reasoning,
00:08:11.520sight words. And sight words became not just it or this or that or the or a, but even longer words
00:08:19.720like weird or like beautiful. Those became sight words that kids were just supposed to memorize
00:08:26.180and never have really any understanding of why that word makes that sound. This is the whole
00:08:32.820language approach and it ditches phonics. It emphasizes immersion, so-called, in language.
00:08:39.100There was a researcher named Marie Clay. She popularized these ideas in the mid-20th century with her reading recovery program. And the popularity of this approach really rose in the 1970s, but it became super popular in the 1990s, in the early 2000s.
00:08:55.880And the idea is that children are naturally going to learn to read just like they naturally learn to speak just by being immersed.
00:09:02.160So you just show them a bunch of words.
00:09:04.240So in this program, the kids are encouraged just to use context clues and the overall meaning of a text or pictures.
00:09:10.940There's even this example in this podcast of like a teacher would basically cover up all of the words on a book, show the picture and make the kids guess what the book says just based on the picture.
00:09:25.880And then they would reveal the words, and that is how they would teach them how to read.
00:09:30.320Proponents of this view often emphasize just overall comprehension of a text, that apparently
00:09:35.100that is more important, and they believe that this facilitates a love of reading and stories.
00:24:48.160I won't play you the whole thing. She's got the video out there somewhere.
00:24:53.240but the I learned the words associated with the letters and the sounds associated with the letters
00:25:00.620as you can see I wasn't even too there and that was easy to memorize the tune was easy to memorize
00:25:05.700and that is something that we have also adopted and tried with our kids now every kid is different
00:25:11.980this worked really well for my oldest my second has needed something a little bit different to
00:25:17.120help her memorize her letters and the sounds like that but I can tell you what really worked with
00:25:21.040my oldest because we think very similarly. Before I ever taught her her ABCs, before she could say
00:25:27.520the ABC sound, we were teaching the letter sound. So this is what I would do. We had these little
00:25:32.240letter cards that we bought on Amazon and they had a little picture next to it. It really doesn't
00:25:38.120matter as long as it's got the capital letter and the lowercase letter. I never taught her until
00:25:43.340much later that this is A, this is B, this is C. I said this is A, this is B, this is K. And a little
00:25:50.780bit different. You're not supposed to put the uh at the end of it, but you know what I mean.
00:25:53.840And then eventually, again, before she was two years old, way before she was two, I was able to
00:25:58.960lay out the letter cards and then out of order, I would be able to say, go get mm-mm-mm or go get
00:26:04.000pu-pu-pu. And then she would be able to retrieve them and bring them to me. And she now, if I can
00:26:10.420just say this about her, she is an excellent reader. And yes, she has words memorized for sure,
00:26:16.520But her ability to sound out really big words, the other day she was reading something, she was reading the instructions on the back of a box and one of the words was proficient and she didn't get it exactly right.
00:26:29.700I think she said like proficient or I don't remember exactly how she pronounced it, but it was really close.
00:26:35.500And I really believe it is because of this building block, this foundation of learning phonics before she was one.
00:26:43.360But then there's also or before she was two, rather. But then there is also the memorization that I think comes from reading your kids and allowing them to look at the words as you are reading. I am a big fan, a big fan of Dr. Seuss. There's also been Dr. Seuss hate. There was like some politically correct criticism of Dr. Seuss a few years ago. And then again, you got the toxic mommy culture on Axe being like, I don't like Dr. Seuss. I just don't enjoy them.
00:27:11.320and I'm like, you're not the target audience, Jessica. Okay. The book isn't for you. It's for
00:27:17.000your three-year-old. Okay. And it's fun. Fox and Socks. If you just tell yourself that you're
00:27:22.500having a competition with all the moms in the world and you're trying to be the very best and
00:27:26.520never stumble over anything in Fox and Socks, you can make it fun. And you don't have to read
00:27:31.720every single page when they're that little until they can figure out that you're skipping.
00:27:34.600but that was huge I mean we read Dr. Seuss and rhyming books like every day of her little life
00:27:41.860she's also my COVID baby and so we had like a ton of time at home and I know it's a little bit
00:27:46.240a little bit different now but that also helps and I think the rhyming really helped with
00:27:51.320memorization because my opinion is that it's a combination of both it's a combination of the
00:27:56.060memorization the sight reading the deductive reasoning using the context and the phonics
00:28:01.540I'm not saying this as an educational professional.
00:28:04.880I'm not saying this as a mom of 50 years.
00:28:07.580I'm saying this as a mom of littles who also just learned a lot from my own parents who
00:29:22.740another tip that I would say that I have found works for us especially with my oldest we don't
00:29:28.180do this as much with my middle and youngest yet but read books that are above their reading level
00:29:32.780we read through Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe multiple times she's not reading those I mean I
00:29:37.480could sit there and let her try to figure out how to read them we're just not doing that right now
00:29:42.340and we are almost done with the second book in Little House on the Prairie and it takes us a
00:29:49.280while. Like we read a chapter, half of a chapter every night. It's definitely above her reading
00:29:53.980level, but, and she's not always paying attention. Like I don't make her sit still and ask questions.
00:29:59.180Like sometimes she's flipping through another book. She's laying there. She's playing with
00:30:03.280something as I'm reading, but I, I just believe I don't even have the statistics to back this up.
00:30:08.600I just believe there is something about that, that stretches their minds and stretches their
00:30:13.780imaginations that's good for them. My second learns totally differently. We have had to have
00:30:19.360totally different methods in helping her memorize her letters. It's a ton of repetition, a ton of
00:30:24.800visuals, a ton of even kinetic learning with her body. So I'm not saying that every child is the
00:30:30.540same. Obviously, some children have dyslexia, special needs, things like that. But you as a
00:30:35.440parent are more equipped than you think. It is more important than you think. Just because your
00:30:40.340child has dyslexia or dysgraphia or something, do not let people convince you that they're just
00:30:45.500never going to be able to read or that it's not important. You figure out, mom, what works for you
00:30:51.020and what works for your child, and that will pay off for the rest of their lives. Don't let your
00:30:56.440child be limited by the label that has been put on them. And educators who are doing this correctly,
00:31:03.260thank you so much. Thank you so much to the teachers who are teaching phonics and who aren't
00:31:10.120letting these children who maybe aren't read to at home, letting them just fall behind. Thank you
00:31:15.860so much for the good teachers out there that are challenging us. This is a huge issue. This has to
00:31:21.560do with not just literacy, but biblical illiteracy, which has huge moral existential implications for
00:31:28.940our country. So read, make your children read, make it be fun. And I'm sure my mom would love
00:31:34.660to come on here and give some more tips for how she did that for us. All right. Okay. That's the
00:31:40.560serious stuff that I wanted to talk to. Now we are going to get into a conversation with Brie
00:31:45.500about the Met Gala and all kinds of fun stuff and a game at the end, y'all. It got a little
00:31:49.840inappropriate, but it's fun. You're going to laugh. Okay. Let me just tell you about my next
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00:32:18.440counselor. She was a counselor for 37 years. She refused to refer to students by opposite sex
00:32:24.180pronouns, and she was fired for that. So she was fired because she wouldn't go along with0.99
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00:33:00.040so producer brie welcome back hello thanks for having me again yes okay you are our fashion
00:33:06.780connoisseur you are our hollywood liaison you are our expert on everything hollyweird thank you for
00:33:13.960being here and we've got the capital of hollyweird at the met gala yep and so tell us a little bit
00:33:22.040about what the met gala is and what the theme was this year just to give people some context
00:33:27.740Yeah. So the Met Gala is a I'm probably going to use the wrong words. So sorry if anyone really knows about the Met Gala, but it's a fundraising benefit for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Art. And the theme this year was fashion is art.
00:33:45.680okay and then the dress code or the theme sorry that they mixed them up the theme was costume
00:33:52.000art and then the dress code was fashion is art i remember being confused because those weren't the
00:33:59.000same thing um but people took that to mean like taking inspiration from painting and like other
00:34:05.100forms of art and dressing that way it's kind of up for interpretation a little bit some people
00:34:11.840take it more literally some people will just dress in a pretty dress right yes and i think
00:34:17.320that a lot of people who work with fashion houses pick their outfits like a year in advance so they
00:34:22.540don't even they just kind of like make a story for it later and make it fit so and some people
00:34:27.300go all in some people so we can't necessarily just judge the outfits that we're about to see
00:34:32.800by whether or not well we could whether or not they're pretty or whether or not they fit the
00:34:37.440theme or whether or not they're cool we could do that yes the whole concept i've explained this to
00:34:42.680people last night even the whole concept is not like the oscars where you're just trying to look
00:34:47.800really nice the concept is you're supposed to look like really out there and like campy and
00:34:52.760um it's supposed to be costumey so the i like to think of it like if you look like you're going to
00:34:59.760the oscars you've kind of failed the met gala because that's not the point of it yeah you know
00:35:04.060And I think the theme one year was camp.
00:35:56.000Okay, the centrality of the dressed body.
00:35:57.940I wonder if we could come up with a phrase like that.
00:36:00.140um we are going to examine the uh the periphery of the dawned face and that has to do with glasses
00:36:13.340I don't know if you know that or not and how people who wear glasses are continually
00:36:17.980marginalized and pushed to the outskirts of society did you like that I love that that's
00:36:22.560next year's Met Gala that's next year's Met Gala how did you know yeah I don't know I just know
00:36:26.980So by interspersing garments and artwork to create pairings that not only illuminate the indivisible connection between clothing and the body, it's indivisible, but also the complex interplay between artistic representations of the body and fashion as an embodied art form.
00:36:44.100Okay, so they have to express their own relationship to fashion.
00:36:48.500The evening raised a record-breaking $42 million for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
00:36:56.980What's what's that? What's that Kardashian quote? It's like people are starving, Kim.