Number Phonics

By Karen Louise Davidson

Subjects: Number theory, Biography, Reading, phonetic method, Study and teaching (Primary), Scientists, biography, Businesspeople, biography, Phonetic method, English language, study and teaching, Phonetics, Books and reading, New york (state), biography, Lebanese Americans, Childhood and youth, English language, Children, books and reading, Children, Social life and customs, New york (state), social life and customs, English language, phonetics, Reading

Description: Karen Louise Davidson is a public school teacher, a homeschooling mother to her seven children, and a tutor of remedial reading. She searched for many years for a program that would best help her students learn to read. She studied every phonics program and used many of them with her students. She also studied strategies other than phonics for teaching word recognition, but did not find them to be useful. When she found Romalda Spaulding’s reading program, she felt it was inspired. Spaulding taught reading with phonics. She asked students to memorize a chain of sounds for a letter or combination of letters. The idea of chanting multiple sounds for one letter was appealing because it gave the student tools to work with in sounding out words. Davidson also liked Spaulding’s use of numbers under some letters of words. A number indicated a specific sound in a chain of sounds that the student had memorized. The student was to use that sound for this letter in a particular word. She found that her students easily memorized sound chains and liked using the numbers as clues to help them sound out words. Although Spaulding’s method worked well in some ways, it also had shortcomings. Davidson felt that the program could be simplified by eliminating the teaching of sounds for combinations of letters. This meant that a few more sounds would need to be taught for some letters, but it made the system simpler, more coherent, and easier for students to grasp. Also, since her students liked number clues under letters, she wanted to use numbers under every letter of a word. Davidson reasoned that it might be possible for students to teach themselves to read, if they knew all the sounds for letters and had numbers to tell them exactly which of the sounds to use in a word. Learning to read in English could then be totally a matter of logic, which it has never been before. Davidson plunged into a study of 2,000 high frequency words to see for herself what sounds were needed for letters in English words. She evaluated the sound for every letter of the 2,000 words. Then, sorting the letters and their sounds, she lined up all the sounds for each letter of the alphabet in a diagram, and taught students the sounds from the diagram. Assigning each sound a number, she used these numbers under every letter of 1,000 words. Davidson wanted to test whether students, knowing all the sounds, could sound out the words by logic. She was quickly rewarded. Her students learned to read with understanding and enthusiasm. And they learned much faster than before. Some students had struggled for years with reading. After using the Number Phonics system, however, they quickly turned around and made rapid progress. In fact, Davidson found that her system worked well with every student. Parents were amazed and pleased by the accomplishment and self-confidence that their children displayed after only a few lessons. Some parents reported that their children were advising their teachers at school as to the sounds of the letters. Several of these children had been in Special Education or Title I programs for as long as two years and had made little or no progress until they tried Number Phonics. As many as one third of the children in our nation’s classrooms simply do not respond to conventional teaching methods. Yet nearly all of these students would by helped by Number Phonics. It’s different when you use a system that is logic-based. Children can follow the logic and do much of the teaching themselves. Using Number Phonics, a parent who wants to teach his or her own child to read can do it simply by working through this book, one page at a time, as many other parents have done. Who should use Number Phonics? Homeschoolers. Parents who want to give their children a jump start. Parents whose children are struggling. Classroom teachers and reading specialists.