Tucson, AZ - A staff of more than 250 specialists at South West Regional Laboratories (SWRL) developed a beginning reading program in the late 1960s. The program was tested with hundreds of thousands of students in hundreds of elementary schools before its launch in 1973.

This Beginning Reading phonics-based program was a great success. Follow up studies showed that students who learned to read with the program had superior reading skills and were advanced in all other educational indicators when tested as seniors in high school. This finding also held up across districts and schools, as well as ethnic, gender, and social class groups.

However, the Whole Language method of teaching reading supplanted Phonics instruction in the late 1970s. The SWRL beginning reading program was gradually taken off the market. In 1986, with government cuts in educational research, SWRL closed down and the reading program was forgotten.

After two decades of Whole Language in US schools (and also in the UK and Australia) the tide turned again. Literacy rates were drastically falling. The US Government called for an investigation. The National Reading Panel (NRP) was formed in 1997 by order of Congress. The panel was charged with assessing the effectiveness of different approaches used to teach children to read.

The National Reading Panel found that certain instructional methods are better than others. Their research found that to become good readers, children needed to develop:

Phonemic awareness
Phonics skills
The ability to read words in text in an accurate and fluent manner
The ability to apply comprehension strategies consciously and deliberately as they read

The Panel also found that many of the difficulties children had when learning to read were

caused by inadequate phonemic awareness. They found that systematic and explicit instruction in phonemic awareness directly led to improvements in children’s reading and spelling skills.

The Panel concluded that there is strong supporting evidence that phonics instruction produces significant benefits for students from kindergarten through 6th grade, and for children having difficulty learning to read. The greatest improvements were seen from systematic phonics instruction. This type of phonics instruction consists of teaching a planned sequence of phonics elements, rather than highlighting elements as they appear in a text.

While the tide has turned back to phonics, many teachers who are used to the whole language method of teaching reading are slow to adopt it. Many are not teaching phonics because they are not sure how.

Francis Morgan, cofounder of Reading A-Z and RAZ-Kids, rediscovered SWRL Beginning Reading when researching phonics programs. To upgrade the program for the digital age, Morgan put together a team of writers, illustrators, actors, sound engineers, musicians and animators. They have produced animated interactive videos for the 52 original stories and added 28 new stories.

The 80 stories are now on the ReadingTeacher.com website. Students can access these animated stories online. They can have the stories read to them, or read the stories themselves.

The new website also has Lesson Plans which provide step-by-step instructions to teachers and parents to demonstrate how to teach the phonemes before the stories are read by students.

Another new feature of the program is the online quizzes that students can use at their own pace. These quizzes test comprehension after a student has read the story. Quiz results can be tracked in the Teachers/Parents administration center.

“I’m a strong believer that students should supplement their online reading with physical books, so we have made the 80 stories available in book form for downloading and printing. Each student can have a personal copy of each book to take home.”

Francis Morgan,
Founder, ReadingTeacher.com

Teachers and parents who used the SWRL program in the past are happy to learn that it has been revived:

“I just wanted to let you know that I learned to read with these same exact books in the ‘70s and I always wondered what happened to them. I am THRILLED that you have revived them as I am in the process of teaching my daughter how to read.”

“I just have to share that both my daughters used the “I See Sam” books. (They are now in their 40s.) We had two sets and I’ve shared them with friends whose children were struggling with reading. They are great books. I am glad to know they are still available.”

The reading program can be found at:
http://www.readingteacher.com

All 80 stories and everything on the website is available for immediate access.
Free trials are available. Complimentary accounts for the press are available from:
[email protected]