My parents read to me when I was very young, but never tried to teach me to read. So all I knew of reading was that it was something my parents could do. I learned to read in first grade, at school. I found it compelling and did it on my own at home without much prompting or "enforcing."
That didn't really change until High School, when I found most of the standard reading assignments in English class to be tedious and hopelessly old-fashioned. If I'd also had trouble reading from a technical standpoint at that time, I have no idea how I would have gotten through it.
By contrast, my parents were high school dropouts. When I was little, my mum would read to me, with her finger following the text. I somehow got the idea, and started to sound out the words with her. By kindergarten, I was reading at a Grade 2 level. I think there are as many paths to reading as there are kids.
The cueing theory seems misguided, in teaching kids to regard pictures as the source of information. I'd say that teaching kids to read requires a mix of activities, with a heavy dose of phonics, but also activities that create a joy of reading, by showing interesting people and stories. I can't see how cueing helps.
Cueing reminds me of some of the stranger ideas in math pedagogy in elementary schools, notably that rather than learning algorithms for arithmetic operations, kids should invent their own, and maybe have several, which they choose from in a specific problem. Of course, some students have much more difficulty than others, but there really are some basic ideas they must master in order to be competent at arithmetic. Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.
> Allowing a kid to amass a forest of partially working techniques and then have to hack through it to solve any problem seems ridiculous to me, much like putting a student driver in a car, with no training, and telling them to try various things to see how to drive to a given point without getting killed.
Trying to invent ways to do math operations is not a bad idea per se... it's just that at some moment you should teach them the universal and efficient algorithm instead.
It's like, if you are learning to program, and try your own ways to design the code, and then someone teaches you the design patterns. I don't believe that you were harmed by trying to program your own way first. You will probably appreciate the design patterns more, and maybe understand them on a deeper level, now that you have a first-hand experience of the problem they were designed to solve. I even suspect that without this extra experience, people would be more likely to over-engineer their code, e.g. to use a complicated design pattern where a simple function call would suffice.
Similarly, after trying a few ad-hoc ways to add numbers, you will appreciate the standard "put them in a right-aligned column, proceed from right to left" algorithm more. But you will also notice that you can add 199 and 601 without putting them in a column first.
The crime of these approaches was failing to teach the kids the standard solutions. Experimenting for a while is itself OK.