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Throughout the first months of school teachers use other devices. In Chicago there are storytelling times and tell-and-do periods. But whatever the device the goal is the same. The class may take a walk around the room or a trip to the zoo. Then they dictate to the teacher a story about what they have seen. The story appears on the blackboard or on a posterlike "experience chart" and is later read back. As such dictation proceeds, says San Francisco's Assistant School Superintendent (Elementary Schools) Alda Harris, "the children see that their own words can be transformed into written symbols."
Rabbit & Rattle. By such methods, the pupil is expected to build up a vocabulary of 50 to 100 words he can recognize at sight. Some teachers use flashcards; others may have a "daily newspaper" for which the children can recite a one-sentence story about themselves ("I played ball yesterday"). Detroit schools use a pre-primer called Before We Read. This teaches the beginner to distinguish shapes (e.g., by picking out a sailboat from a series of trucks) and sounds (e.g., by picking out objects with similar names, as in rabbit and rattle, turtle and turkey). The next book also contains a number of word captions which through repetition the child learns to recognize at sight. With this small vocabulary the pupil is ready for elementary phonics.
Soon pupils are confronted with rhymes (cat, fat, bat, etc.) and lists of words beginning with the same consonant. Thev might also be asked to pick out from a series of words (boy, toy, boy, dog, box) the two that are alike. They learn other words by how they are used in a sentence (e.g., milk, from "The cat drinks milk") are encouraged to look up unfamiliar words in the dictionary. Prefixes and suffixes, vowels and diphthongs, combination words such as oatmeal and airplane are all taught in their place.
Educators agree that phonics alone can be the most effective instruction in some cases. But Rudolf Flesch to the contrary, most children seem to need a combination of methods. Whether the modern school has hit upon the best possible combination is probably a question that could probably be answered only by entering today's pupils into a wholesale competition with their phonics-trained parents. In the Birmingham News, Managing Editor Charles 11 reported that there was some indication that the adults might not come off too well. Among the letters rallying to the Flesch banner, he noted that one teacher had spelled differentiate with one "f" and another wrote seperately. Several grown ups used alright for all right; one mother put two "l's" in personality, and three fathers had written such oddities as begining, forth grade, and uncerten. Editor Fell's conclusion: "A lot of grownups aren't any hotter with their spelling than some of them think you are, Johnny, with your reading."