ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marsha Cunningham, elementary school teacher for more than 25 years, developed this system of reading, teaching it first to her four-year-old daughter many years ago. After becoming a teacher, she put the best of all her practices into this book, which is guaranteed to get you results, too! To find out where Marsha got the ideas for this very simple and easy plan, click on "Inspiration."
Excerpt from IN THE BEGINNING: There Was Whole Phonics
As a teenager in 1961, I spent more than a year in Japan, where a neighbor and friend taught me to read Katakana, the symbols used to depict the syllables of Japanese when writing foreign words.
Later, as a young mother, I wanted to teach my four-year-old daughter to read, and thought I would use the same syllable method I'd learned in Japan, but of course, with English vowels. I made a chart like this:
|
ba
|
be
|
bi
|
bo
|
bu
|
|
ca
|
ce
|
ci
|
co
|
cu
|
|
da
|
de
|
di
|
do
|
du
|
and so forth through the whole alphabet, as my friend had made for me in Japan. I used only the sounds of the syllables, and not the letter names. I taught my daughter one row per day, which she also printed as she made the sounds. We also thought of words that began with the same syllables as we went along.
We then turned the syllables into words by tacking a letter on the end, in the form of several riddle-type word games. When she had learned hundreds of short vowel words, I went back over the syllable chart using long vowel sounds, and taught her all the long vowel words using the same type of word games. In less than two months, she was writing notes all day long and reading directions to me out of a cookbook.
Using syllables is most helpful because it enables students to better hear the word that they're sounding out. It takes so long for them to sound, "c-a-t," that by the time they get to the "t", they forget that they ever heard the "c-a"! By sounding "ca" as a syllable, the blending process is simplified. I discovered that Noah Webster taught reading and spelling by using syllables back in 1784! I saw the same charts that I use in his famous old spelling book, THE BLUE BACK SPELLER.
Years later, after earning a teaching degree, I happened upon a book written by a woman who said that teaching letter names was unnecessary and that they had nothing to do with reading (except for long vowels which have their own name). My heart made a leap; I knew that this made sense. I had spent three years in first-grade classes coping with the many problems I had in weaning the children away from letter NAMES and on to letter SOUNDS in teaching them to write and read. I have also since learned that many private schools and other reading methods are well known for using letter sounds only.
I finally went to the kinder teachers, trying to convince them that if they would only use sounds, it would cut out a step and simplify the process. They were skeptical, to say the least.
The problem is not so prevalent in some areas or with some children, but any child with even a mild learning disability is bound to be somewhat confused between the two. Moreover, adults have told me that they remember the confusion and the stress that it caused when they were learning to read.
For the next two years, I taught the entire first-grade curriculum without ever mentioning a letter name. Unbeknownst to me, I was doing something called decontamination. This is a term used in the introduction of SILABARIO, the well-known and widely used Spanish reader in Latin American countries.) It refers to the process of getting letter names out of a student's mind and replacing them with letter sounds, before they can be properly taught to read and write.
How This Handbook Came to Be
At the beginning of my career, I had third graders who could hardly read a word. I saw the need to put a booklet together for parents, in terms they could understand, as an answer to their question, What can I do to help my child at home?
I spent the next three years of spare time finding phonetically regular words and putting them into families that all followed a given rule or generality. I didn't know that there were already publications out there with all those words already gathered together; but, after all, my own search helped me to focus and give thought to the problem.
Along with a few charts, games, and some directions, I put it all together in a booklet and began to offer it to parents with children who were not doing well in class. I guaranteed that I could show them how to tutor their children in reading and writing in just one hour, without any stress or taking extra time out of their day. This was something that they could do while cooking or washing the dishes. The parents always appreciated the material and ideas. Many reported back to me about their successes, although in those days, the book was only a 27-page collection of word lists and ideas for their use, written in the days before I had a computer. It has been refreshed and added to now, with more years of experience in it, but the basic methods and philosophy are the same.
Occasionally parents would come to my class and ask what was going on, saying that their kindergartner or first grader could read better than their older siblings could. I would explain that it was just plain old phonics. Sometimes they would ask me if I would show my method to the teachers of their older child. I did go to others, intending to share it, but at the mention of PHONICS, I got a lot of frowns and worse, from both teachers and administrators. It got to the point that I actually hid my material. I eventually met some teachers who were interested and encouraged me to write everything down, saying that they would try it.
|