Quality Material and Quality Instruction
The Fun Phonics materials have been developed by a respected educator with more than 35 years experience teaching students with learning problems, and training teachers. Elizabeth Gallistel, the principal author earned a doctorate in school psychology at the University of Minnesota with a special field in remedial reading. She taught teachers of remedial reading at the University of Minnesota and was director of the learning disability program there. For a decade she headed the learning disability training program at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). She is a fellow in the Academy of Orton-Gillingham. While supervising practica experience it the SCSU graduate program and directing programs at two public schools, she observed teachers using the Fun Phonics materials and continuously refined and improved them. She has tutored students of all ages using the Fun Phonics materials. Learning disabilities resource teachers, content experts, tutors and students provided important input into the development of the Fun Phonics series.
These research-based methods and materials have been used successfully in public and private schools throughout the United States and Canada. The most intensive test of the method took place from 1998 through 2004 in five, low-income, ethnically mixed schools in a mid-sized New England urban area. The 100 poorest readers in these five Title I schools were given two years of supplemental instruction using this method, in addition to classroom reading instruction, in first and second, or second and third grade. At the end of second grade, 69 percent of those students were no longer in the state's remedial category on the national Degree of Reading Power (DRP) test. In the one school that tested the method in second and third grades, between 64 and 76 percent of the students in different years moved out of the remedial category according to the DRP post-test. On the state story reading test the students did even better, with successes ranging from 86 to 92 percent.
Fun Phonics materials are organized in a progression which will be familiar to teachers trained in Orton-Gillingham and other phonics-based programs. However, this training is not required to use the program successfully. The comprehensive and easy-to-follow Teacher's Manuals enable the materials to be used by teachers and tutors who have not “learned the rules” of our complex language system. Teachers can rely upon the careful selection and progression of word choices, and the scripts provided, to help students recognize the patterns which underlie English. While these materials are often used in special education resource rooms and by private schools for children with learning disabilities, they are also well-suited for use by teachers and tutors in Response to Intervention Programs (RTI) providing small-group instruction for Tier 2 students. Use of the Gallistel-Ellis Test of Coding Skills will help focus instruction on the specific coding/decoding skill which a student in any RTI tier lacks, and will measure progress in attaining these skills.
These materials rely upon principles which are supported by recent brain research. The brain constantly searches for patterns. When it recognizes these patterns it can incorporate them and build complex frameworks which support automatic retrieval. Careful selection and presentation of the differing patterns of written English enable the struggling reader to remember and gain automaticity in this pattern recognition.
