<p>In my Midwest public school in first grade (1967) I was taught how to read using this method: [Initial</a> Teaching Alphabet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_Teaching_Alphabet]Initial”>Initial Teaching Alphabet - Wikipedia). Instead of a 26 letter alphabet we were taught how to read and write(?!) using a 45 letter alphabet, with each phonetic sound having been given its own character. </p>
<p>It was phonics pure and simple. I still have story books printed with words using these characters, I can’t read them now, but I could then :). I have stories I wrote using the characters. It must have been a failed experiment because on the first day of second grade, we were all summarily switched to the regular alphabet without explanation. I recall being terribly confused for the first part of second grade. My first grade class was the only one who was taught using this method, the other two classes used the conventional alphabet.</p>
<p>To this day I’m not a very fast reader, I think such a pure phonetic approach to reading encourages “hearing” every word rather than seeing it and quickly moving on. It slowed me down quite a bit. </p>
<p>Just curious if there are any other ITA “lab rats” out there who have lived to tell the tale?</p>
<p>Yikes! It looks like a totally different language alphabet! I was in school about the same time, but we used a more standard approach. Was that a public or private school? It sounds like you were truly the lab rats since the other classes used the other method and you were switched after that year!</p>
<p>I didn’t but my brother did. We transferred to a school when I was in 4th grade and my brother was in kindergarten and he learned using ITA. They still use ITA today. Honestly, I don’t think it was a very good program and the other schools in that district have gone away from it-did many, many years ago. That one school still uses it because they get a lot of grant money to do so. One of the teachers in that district did a master’s thesis on ITA vs “regular” and found that the ITA kids were farther behind with basic phonics skills in the high school years and that those kids were not as successful as the kids from the other elementary schools in the district when they were in high school. The kids that attended the ITA school were from the wealthier side of town for the most part too.</p>
<p>That is wild! I had not seen that…but a very wise first grade teacher told me that not all kids learn to read the same way. She said the most difficult thing was to figure out how each kid learns to read and then work with that system. My second was a visual reader. He learned a word, one at a time, and then he retains it…he couldn’t “sound out” a word to save his life.</p>
<p>My younger brother’s class used ITA – and just as SteveMA noted, the transition to regular text didn’t go so well. That particular cohort lagged in reading their entire time in public school. </p>
<p>It was an interesting effort, but I simply would not call it phonics.</p>
<p>
These two aspects, recognizing the correlationship between letters and sounds AND the speed of reading are not one-and-the-same. In fact, teachers discourage students from reading aloud in order to get the students to read faster, so it’s the pace of normal speech. It’s called “automaticity” and that’s what you want all children to acquire however they are taught to read. Phonics is just one method to learn to read, and something like 85% of all words are phonetical. Unfortunately, you have to do a two-step process to read: you have to convert letters like “ch” that you see in a book into the designed “ch” that you were taught before you “read” “ch” as part of a word you read. </p>
<p>It’s like seeing someone you met and trying to remember her name. It doesn’t come naturally. You have to say to yourself, “It’s not Sally, it’s Anna” before you remember her name.</p>
<p>I learned to read with ITA at a small private school that only had first grade. The school existed primarily for kids who were a little bit too young to be allowed to start in the public schools–the complete opposite of kindergarten redshirting.</p>
<p>Anyway, ITA worked well for me. I was aware that it wasn’t the same thing that most people read and was very motivated to make the transition. By the end of first grade I was reading standard English well.</p>
<p>My family moved before my younger sister started school and she went to a school that used Dick and Jane. My mother has always regretted that my sister wasn’t able to go to the same first grade I did.</p>
<p>I belong to a Facebook group that’s all about “Remember When …” for the town in MA where I grew up. Recently there was a long thread about ITA. It was used after my time in elementary school, so I never experienced it. I’m not sure how many years the town used that method, but of the people responding, the majority seemed to have had negative experiences.</p>
<p>I learned to read using ITA.</p>
<p>The elementary school was in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I think there were about four first grade classes and perhaps only one that used this method.</p>
<p>It worked extremely well for me. </p>
<p>I always thought the advantage was that we learned to read much faster. Our first readers were more sophisticated than the “Dick and Jane” books of the time, which we didn’t get to use.</p>
<p>Once we were able to read ITA fluently, the transition over to the regular alphabet and spelling was easy. </p>
<p>I seem to recall that we did have teachers who knew how to transition us – we weren’t just dropped into second grade and a new way of spelling and reading.</p>
<p>That looks really confusing. I remember my reading books were color based, but I don’t remember being taught how to read. One class was taught using creative spelling, and when that group of kids were in high school they were still terrible spellers.</p>
<p>My youngest brother learned to read with ITA. His whole cohort had trouble transitioning and are miserable spellers to this day. (His best friend from childhood who is very smart - is a doctor - complains about his inability to read or spell as well as his colleagues.)</p>
<p>I was subjected to something called the “New Math” in 8th grade which was confusing and frustrating and turned me off to Math forever after.</p>
<p>For some inexplicable reason, I’m actually a really good speller, just a slower reader. </p>
<p>Reading above^ about “New Math” and “creative spelling” (wasn’t that called "whole language’?) drives home the fact that a lot of educational approaches have to be tried out in the classroom to figure out what works, but the kids in the classrooms where the methods used are not effective end up carrying possible deficits well into their higher education.</p>
<p>As stated above, I started with ITA and I am also a very good speller.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>One interesting thing my dad did(he is an engineer, and loves experimenting with things) was to transcribe a paragraph in a New York Times article that was on some foreign policy issue into words using the ITA alphabet. He then handed it to me, and at age 6 I was able to read the entire paragraph out loud. Of course I had no idea what I was saying, but I could pronounce all the words correctly. I think he used me and that trick a few times at parties :)</p>
<p>
Sorry if I am quoting myself, but yalemom, this is why you struggle to read quickly. If all printed letters used that ITA style, you’d breeze right through, but instead you have to “convert” what is printed into ITA (in your head) before you’re reading. Your post #14 confirms that.</p>
<p>I was taught with the ITA method in England in the mid 60s. I am a very fast reader and good at spelling, but not sure if this is the reason! :)</p>
<p>they did this with my sister in first and second grade… she graduated from high school in 1981 to this day she can’t spell worth a darned… the entire class was messed up i don’t think they used in the school there before that year. i think it would be 1968, but i know it wa a bunch of crap because they stopped it abruptly and the kids were just left sorta dumbfounded</p>
<p>I loved ITA and credit both my spelling skills and love of writing to it. I wrote stories from the moment I learned it and loved everything about it. My mom was a reading teacher and I am the only child in my family did not attend Catholic school as she pulled me out so I could be taught ITA in our public school. I was the first group of first graders to be guinea pigs. (1965)</p>
<p>I loved ITA and credit both my spelling skills and love of writing to it. I wrote stories from the moment I learned it and loved everything about it. My mom was a reading teacher and I am the only child in my family who did not attend Catholic school as mom pulled me out so I could be taught ITA in our public school. I was the first group of first graders to be guinea pigs. (1965)</p>
<p>“Our first readers were more sophisticated than the “Dick and Jane” books of the time,”</p>
<p>fendrock: You probably were more eager to learn to read because you had good literature. Dick and Jane were boring and uninspiring. I can imagine many kids being discouraged by having to sound out (or “sight” read) words that didn’t add up to a hill of beans, in the end.</p>