Why is Blend Phonics free?

There is no other way to get this superior phonics method into the hands of every first grade teacher in America. This is the spirit in which Mrs. Loring published her method in the first place. She felt that the real problem in American education was that money controlled education. The only way to free education from inferior methods was to make available a superior method that every teacher could obtain for free. I am very much in agreement with her sentiments. Motives are an important factor. Many people involved in developing educational programs have a huge financial interest in the sales of their program. Success is simply the ability to sell. It often has very little to do with good teaching or successful learning. 

What is artificially induced dysleixa?

Artificially induced whole-word dysleixa is a common form of dyslexia cause by teaching students sight-words as wholes before teaching them a comprehensive phonics program. This condition is very difficult to cure once developed. It can be prevented by teaching Blend Phonics before exposing the students to sight-words. Phonics should always be taught first. Rudolf Flesch called this "phonics-first."

Are there any commercial programs available like Blend Phonics?

Yes, there are several. I have taught a number of them. The main difference is simply that Blend Phonics is free. It also has  the advantage of being very easy to teach. The purpose of this web site is to promote Blend Phonics only. You can find other programs on the Educational Page my web site www.donpotter.net . That web site is very comprehensive. This Blend Phonics web site is purposely kept very clean and lean. I do not want to confuse people with a plethora of options.

What experience do you have with Blend Phonics?

I have been using it since summer 2007 in my personal tutoring practice and at the Odessa Christian School in Odessa, TX. I have found it as effective as any of the great commercials programs that I have used over the years. Shortly after the program was first made available in 1980, over 5,000 teachers were sent copies. The author received a flood of letters from teachers reporting success in their classrooms. Her daughter, Pat Lent, used it to teach adult illiterates to read.  

What kind of experience do you have?

I taught for a total of 21 years in public schools and am now in my second year in private education. I was trained in the Heman method for reversing dysleixa. It is a great method, but is very expensive. I was also trained in Saxon Phonics, and Project Read: The Language Circle. All of these programs are very complicated, expensive; and for first grade, are not any more effective than Blend Phonics when taught following Loring's teacher instructions. I commend schools for using these great programs, but feel that their expense and complexity limits their viability for my vision of a nationwide campaign to restore good phonics instruction in EVERY school in America. 

How can I tell if a students has artificially induced whole-word dyslexia?

You can administer the Miller Word Identification Assessment Level One or Two.  This assessments is very easy to give and yields valuable insight into the way students are identifying words. The test consists of two sets of words. One set is sight-words which are generally taught in kindergarten and first grade. The second list consists of words that are phonetically regular, and easy to decode, but not taught as wholes. A comparison of how the students read the two lists will give clear insight into how they are identifing words. Objective readers (those taught with phonics-first) read both lists at the same speed and free of errors. Subjective readers (those taught by sight-words first) read the sight-word list faster than the phonics list and misread more words on the phonics list than the sight-word list. The always complain that the phonics list was harder than the sight-words list. Subjective readers generally guess words from configuration (the outline or shape of the word) and context. 

What is Directional Guidance?  

Directional guidance is the distinguishing characteristic of Blend Phonics. This is the special feature that prevents whole-word dysleixa and cures it. Many phonics programs teach word families (at, hat, mat, pat, sat, fat, etc.) and often try to teach phonics using analogy from memorized sight-words. This is often called inductive or embedded phonics. Unfortunately the word guessing reflex that is developed when sight-words are taught first interferes with later phonics instruction. Whole-word dyslexia is essentially what you get when students are not taught to look carefully at all the letters in the words from left to right. Blend Phonics teaches one letter at at time: b + a = ba + t = bat. Blend phonics is a technique that appears under various names. It used to be called single-letter phonics. 

What do reading experts say about of the blend phonics' technique?

Isabel L. Beck recommend the blend phonics technique in her excellent 2006 book, Making Sense of Phonics: The Hows and Whys. She "In contrast to final blending, I strongly recommend succesive blending (which I have sometimes called cumulative blending). In successive blending, students say the first two sounds in a word and immediately blend those two sounds together. They say the third sound and immediately blend that with the first two blended sounds. If it is a four-phoneme word, then they say the fourth phoneme and immediately blend that sound with the first three blended sounds.  The strong advantage of successive blending is that it is less taxing on the short-term memory because blending occurs immmemdiately after each new phoneme is pronounced. As such, at no time must more than two sounds be held in memory (the sound immediately produced and he one hat directly precedes it), and at no time must more thans two sound units be blended." (50). Beck mentions another advantage of the blend phonics' technique for the teacher: " A strong advantage of the successive blending chain is the precise information available in terms of locating an error. If a child makes an error while performing the chain, the teacher knows where the error is - that is, which link in the chain is incorrect. With this kind of precise information, the teacher can give the child a direct prompt. ... The availability of precise error information enables the teacher to go right into where the problem is and deal with it. This is in contrast to simply knowing that a child didn't read black or set correctly (53, 54).

To put a face with the web site, I am posting this recent school picture. 

Anyone can be a successful phonics teaching with nothing but Loring's Reading Made Easy with Blend Phonics for First Grade. Those who care to delve deeper into the psychology and pedadogy of reading are invited to spend some time at the Education Page of my web site: www.donpotter.net. Everything I have learned about best practices in reading can be found there.