Magic Penny Reading- Early Literacy Solutions for Home and School

Whole word approaches fall into 2 categories:  Sight word approaches and Whole Language approaches.

Both methods are intuitively appealing to adults because adults who are good readers don’t sound out words…do they? The problem is that the cognitive processes that support well-developed human abilities are not transparent. Take a concert pianist…do they just use melody-based strategies when they play or is there some complex interaction between the various skills that they use; and, just as important, when learning these complex skill sets, we always start with the bottom-up sensory-motor skills and work toward developing those skills to automaticity.  Modern reading research suggests that phonemic decoding (bottom-up processing) is always at play…even in skilled adult readers…they are not the only skills…there are also language-based, linguistically-based, and cognitively-based skills (top-down processing strategies) that are also always in use.  So fluent reading is a combination of bottom-up and top-down processing with the contribution of each varying as a function of the skill sets of the reader and the material being read.

It would not make sense that humans could possess an intrinsic ability to make sense of a human invention that has only been universally-available (in some societies and in some regions of those societies) for 200 years or so. Writing is a human invention. In English, that invention, by necessity, uses the phoneme to encode spoken language. As with any code, the decryption algorithm must mirror the encryption algorithm.

Beyond this, word based strategies have been proven ineffective:

Sight words strategies seem to work with young children but human memory will max out at about 2000 words. (This strategy is akin to memorizing phone numbers from a telephone book.) Children will do fine for the first year or two but when they hit their memory limit many will fail…usually in second or third grade. Keep in mind that the number of words in common usage is about 50,000 words.  Most adults know about 100,000 words.

The Whole Language approach mistakenly assumes that since children learn language naturalistically, they can also learn to read. This is a beautiful idea that fails miserably. California mandated that only Whole Language be taught in their public school system in 1987 and by 1992 they had dropped to last place in the nation in reading comprehension.

Eclectic approaches: Many reading approaches today use an eclectic approach. This approach is again intuitively appealing…children are all different and shouldn’t we use the approach that matches their learning style? Eclectic approaches, while appealing, fail to recognize that combining ineffective methods results in an ineffective method. Even a good approach will suffer if it’s “eclectically” combined with ineffective approaches. Every non-effective method that we use has the potential for derailing the educational process.  Our resource rooms and special education classrooms are living proof.

These are not the reading wars of the latter part of the 20^th century. We know that traditional phonics approaches, while marginally better than Whole Word strategies, are still only about 70% effective. Mixing these ineffective methods into an “eclectic approach” will not help. Even an effective method can be weakened by combining it with ineffective strategies.

If a school is 99% successful in teaching their students to read at or above grade level, then they should continue with that approach.

However, the only method that continues to be this successful is an integrated phonemically-driven and linguistic phonics approach that is used with fidelity and is embraced by the teachers using it.

Magic Penny Reading is an integrated phonemically-driven, linguistic phonics approach with a 99% success rate when the program is used with fidelity.