Rod Everson Posted February 1, 2012 Share Posted February 1, 2012 I usually post on the Special Needs board, but this has application to all, so I'll post it here. One of the reasons I think reading instruction is such a mess in the schools today is that even professional educators can't agree on how to teach it. As a result, many kids don't even get exposure to the concept of a phonogram and how one phonogram can represent several different sounds. Well, I've worked with about 200 struggling readers over a decade and have taught the same Code Knowledge to each of them. Eventually, I devised a PDF of 84 phonogram flash cards with the options I taught for each phonogram listed on the back of each card. I'm convinced that if every child, and adults as well, knew the contents of these cards, then reading instruction would make a lot more sense to everyone involved. (They are a blend of the phonograms found in WRTR and Reading Reflex, by the way, with some tweaking that I found useful when working with kids.) On my website, I stated that I would give away 50 free copies to the first fifty people who requested them, but I'm getting ready to start marketing them soon and would like to speed the process up. I still have about 35 copies to give away and thought I'd offer them here. (You just get the PDF and print them at home using 8.5x11 card stock and then cut them up into individual cards.) To see what they look like, there's a full preview at Lulu.com here. Just click the "Preview" button under the picture and you can go through the entire set. If anyone is interested in getting one free, I'll email it to you if you go to the Teaching the Phonograms page of my website and request them through the email link you'll find in the gray text box there. (Sorry for the extra step, but I don't want to list my personal email on the board.) It might be just a bit of a hassle to request them, but I'd rather have only the people who really might use them ask for them anyway. (If you're just interested in what they look like, you can see the full set just by going through the Preview at Lulu.com.) I have no idea how many people will want one, so for now I'll only offer these free copies through Friday, Feb 3rd, or until I send out all of the 35 copies I want to give away. I'll edit this message if I reach that point so people don't have to go to the trouble of trying to get them when I've already sent 35. All I ask is that people receiving them respect the copyright notice and use them only for their own family (or classroom.) All the best... Rod Everson OnTrack Reading P.S. I'm a reasonable person, so if 45 or 50 people want them, I'll send them all. I just don't want to have to suddenly respond to 500 requests, and I have no idea how many of you might be interested, hence the limit. Again, if you're curious about them, but unlikely to ever use them, just view the Preview at Lulu.com Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod Everson Posted February 1, 2012 Author Share Posted February 1, 2012 Incidentally, I'd be happy to discuss the reasons for some of the choices I made, should anyone have questions. Essentially, it was a matter of sorting out the conflicts between WRTR and Reading Reflex, and most of those involved how to handle the "ending-e" on so many English words. In that area, I went with RR primarily. Most of the other choices involved what sounds to teach for a particular phonogram. Romalda Spalding in WRTR made better choices in that regard, I feel. Once I got it more or less sorted out in my mind, I taught it to a lot of kids to see how it would go, and was very pleased with the overall results. RR just didn't do a good enough job of getting the various options into a child's memory. WRTR does an excellent job of that, but the program was way too long for my purposes, which was remediation, rather than initial instruction. Incidentally, if every school used Spalding across the nation, I'm convinced that reading abilities would improve dramatically. Rod Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rod Everson Posted February 2, 2012 Author Share Posted February 2, 2012 There seems to be more interest in the pdf on the Special Needs board, so I won't bother checking this thread again. It gets lost pretty quickly in all the traffic here. :001_smile: I'm just posting this because a few requests got trapped in my Spam filter. :angry: If you did request a copy of the pdf and it didn't arrive by now, please try again, because I've sent all the ones I've received. Thanks. Rod Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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