Review
"It has been my pleasure to work with this outstanding staff and to help in the rehabilitation of many exceptional students during the past several years. As a clinical neuropsychologist, it is often one of my tasks to define as exactly as possible the breakdown in reading skills of certain patients. Often there are functional and organic disabilities which interfere with the initial speech sound or phonemic analysis in these individuals. Until the child can utilize basic phonetic sounds in analyzing words, the reading process can never really begin. In the text, a program is presented to circumvent the often deficient phonetic memory by taking advantage of specific visual mnemonic or memory techniques. In most children with dysfunctional phonetic skills, the visual memory processes are intact and may even be superior. Once phonetic skills have been encoded by these alternative methods, a major hurdle toward fluid reading has been surmounted. These simple and well throughout out materials can provide the first step toward a program of reading reeducation as well as a basis for improvement in the child's often damaged self-image." Wallace T. Cleaves, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Licensed Psychologist in Clinical Neuropsychology -- Wallace T. Cleaves, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Licensed Psychologist in Clinical Neuropsychology
From the Author
For many years I have worked with students who struggle to develop reading skills. Early on I discovered the enormous value of teaching key words. Key words are like a hook or a trigger to help a student remember the sound of a given letter. Many very efficient and wonderful multisensory phonics-based programs utilize the concept of key words very efficiently. One in particular, Gillingham's Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling, and Penmanship, is based on the concepts as discussed by Samuel T. Orton, MD., a pioneer in understanding dyslexia. The concept of key words was like magic for some students, as it gave them a way to remember, for example, that the letter m has the /m/ sound. All they had to do was remember the key word, monkeys and then they could use that hook to remember the sound and the letter. The students practiced and drilled on the sound/symbol associations and greatly progressed, though it took some time. At my clinic one day our staff was discussing how so many of our students have very strong visual skills. Some students can remember almost anything if it is presented in a picture! Others remember better if color is involved. We also noticed how many of our students could easily remember advertisements and jingles, but they struggled to remember rote academic information. We decided to pull these concepts together and develop a visual mnemonic system to help our students learn the key words and sound/symbol associations in a quicker, more efficient manner, and with much more enjoyment. We decided to follow the general sequence for introducing sounds as presented in the Gillingham program, since that was our primary remedial program. For example, the first five consonant sounds are t, m, k, f, and p. The students are presented with a picture labeled "tiny monkeys kiss fat pigs". It was amazing to us how fast they learned the phrase and how easily they remembered the picture, especially if they colored the picture themselves. Once they had this hook to recall the key words, it was then quite easy to help them pull out the first sound and remember, for example, that the sound for t was /t/, like in tiny. Similarly, the picture for the short vowels is Apple Ed is on umbrella. We also included pictures that show sounds that have more than one spelling, as with the long a sound, and pictures that show when a letter has more than one spelling, as with the letter c. We had a great deal of fun developing these 44 pictures and I enjoyed writing the book to explain the technique so that other teachers and parents could use the same system. The staff at Richards Educational Therapy Center and Big Springs School have been using these techniques quite successfully for over 15 years and we are excited about how they speed up the learning process for our students. It is my hope that you too will have fun giving your students the benefit of a visual mnemonic system for learning sound/symbols correspondences. The system can be used along with any reading program and we have found that even those students who are not struggling with reading enjoy the program.
