ble reading power and enjoyment to the children.The inescapable message: teach intensive, systematic phonics!Example # 3 - ask Sue Dickson, author and former first-grade teacher"In college I had been taught that phonics doesn't work, that the English language is too complicated to be taught that way, and I swallowed that reasoning hook,line and sinker. . . . So, during my first two years as a teacher, I didn't use any phonics. But in 1954[sic], my mother bought a book by Rudolf Flesch called`Why Johnny Can't Read.'" At first Sue rejected his recommendations. After all she was "the one. . .with the teaching degree." Finally she decided that she had todo something because ". . . I was losing whole groups of students through the cracks. . . . I decided I would give phonics a try. But I was so scared. Myprofessors had been so adamantly against it. [But the result was that] my class had scored so high on the standardized tests that the [school] administrators thoughtI had cheated [in reporting my test scores]!" She never went back to teaching "look and say" again.Then she began to develop her own system of teaching reading, using the principles of phonics, but also using music to make it easier for the children to learn theletter sounds. It took her thirty years to perfect the system, but now hundreds of teachers are using her program "Sing, Spell, Read and Write" with thousands ofchildren, from Maine to California, Michigan to Texas! One school system in Mississippi that used the program in 1988 found that students who were first gradersin 1987 improved their reading performance by 42 percentile points on the Stanford Achievement Tests. Reading comprehension improved 34 percentile points,and spelling went up 30 points.The message is clear: teach intensive, systematic phonics!Example #4 - ask the thousands of satisfied customers of "Hooked on Phonics"In 1984, Sean Shanahan's son came home from school very upset, so upset that he threw up his...
