<p>I learned to read with the ITA alphabet in Berkeley in the early 70s. I loved reading right away, and I think that quote is the reason why-we were able to quickly access more complicated material. I hadn’t seen the ITA letters since then…it seems so challenging to me now!</p>
<p>When my parents had dinner parties one of my dad’s ‘party tricks’ was to have me read an article from the front page of the New York Times that he had transcribed into the ITA alphabet out loud to the guests. I was this 6 year old kid reading some complicated article on the Vietnam war and pronouncing all the words correctly (because they were spelled with this phonetic alphabet) of course not really understanding the words that were coming out of my mouth! As an adult looking back on that now it must have been pretty funny :D</p>
<p>Judging by all the success stories here, I think my difficulties with it stemmed from only getting it for first grade and not having it through more of my elementary education. I wish once they had started they would have stuck with it.</p>
<p>Yalemom- I know many people who learned ITA and had problems with it. My mom said I may have been a good reader-speller despite ITA. We also had it in first grade and by the second half of second grade were transitioned to TO. (Not sure what TO stood for) </p>
<p>Sorry about my double posts. New phone doesn’t seem to show the original and takes forever to update)</p>
<p>My grandmother was a reading specialist in the Philadelphia public schools. I remember seeing some ITA books in her house when I was small, but by then I knew how to read so they just struck me as funny. I don’t think she was enthusiastic about the method.</p>
<p>I learned to read with ITA (kindergarten in 1967 in the midwest also). I am a very fast reader (and avid, I read a lot). My spelling isn’t fantastic, but I actually blame that partly on a couple of years in middle school where they took the best English students and put us on the school newspaper and yearbook staff instead of in regular English class. Just when they were getting to the hard spelling words… my kids are not great spellers, either, and they did not learn with ITA. In fact, they were a bit slow to learn to read, so we starting using a more phonics-based approach with them at home than the “whole language” approach their teachers used. Once we started doing that they took off like rockets after a couple of months, and are now also voracious and fast readers. I don’t think learning with ITA damaged me at all, not sure it made much difference in the end.</p>
<p>I had the Dick & Jane books in my first grade class which was excruciating as I had taught myself to read using phonics before kindergarten.
( my daughter did the same at an even younger age)
My spelling used to be stronger, I think Ive gotten lazy(blame spellcheck)</p>
<p>Ha, ha - ITA! Yes, I was taught that and learned to read and write very quickly. Unfortunately when we moved the next year to a school that didn’t teach that way, I had to relearn everything very quickly. I am a fast reader, decent speller, and great proofreader but I have never been able to shake the sneaky suspicion that I’m not too smart - I blame that on ITA and New Math!</p>
<p>I to was taut in first grade Ita , i could read a little in kindgarder the normal way. Then ITA in first grade , then dropped into second grade to read the normal way. Needless to say they made me stayback in second grade.and i never got over that till 12 grade, the shame, the crying, how little i felt every day i went to school, today they make bulling sound so bad.i would of loved to be bullied.want to hurt a second grader tell him he is staying back, bulling aint so bad afterall</p>
<p>I have never heard of ITA but am a very fast reader and not a good speller. I don’t think there is necessarily any correlation between those and learning method. I learned all the conventional spelling ‘tricks’ and studied spelling the old fashioned way with some very traditional elementary school teachers. I think much of it is just learning style and how any individual’s brain works.</p>
<p>My brother’s class had ITA back around 1964 for a year. There was a marked dip in the Iowa Test scores for his cohort compared to the year before and after when ITA wasn’t used. (It was a one-year experiment in our district, so only first-graders had it.) But…I do not know how much instruction teachers had in learning how to teach using it, and if you don’t teach the teachers, I don’t know that the results are likely to be too good. </p>
<p>It drove my dad nuts. (But then again, so did my “new math” requirement for doing arithmetic in base 12, and learning to use an abacus.)</p>
<p>YES! I didn’t think anybody else had heard of it. (And honestly, I never knew what ITA stood for). </p>
<p>At my school, one class did ITA in first grade. We had to stay in same teacher in 2nd grade too as we transitioned. It was the same teacher, so my happy memories of 1st/2nd grade are all globbed together. </p>
<p>I am a decent reader (read LOTS of books as a youngster) and speller, despite the ITA beginnings. But I think that probably has more to do with my wonderful seasoned teacher than the reading methods. </p>
<p>I’ve never heard of that. I had the old Dick and Jane books (well, the catholic school version: John and Jean…they were the same but had some religious pics and nuns in them…lol.) And the first word we learned was, “Look”. </p>
<p>Never heard of it in Wisconsin. There’s a good reason it is not used in my opinion. An added step to unlearn…</p>
<p>I learned a different cursive than my aunt did. When son was in elementary school they were teaching printing that was more close to cursive than I learned- to make that transition easier. Now I am hearing cursive isn’t always taught. I modified my cursive to mimic more printing than I was taught. I suppose some day people will have the same trouble reading our generation’s writing as Germans do older forms where some s’s look like f’s…</p>
<p>Never heard of this and think it would be a huge burden to students AND teachers. My kids had a lot of trouble with learning Mandarin because the alphabet was so different. I don’t see the value in learning a new alphabet that so few people know and then having to unlearn it and learn what more people are using and understand.</p>
<p>My kids are great readers and I’m SO grateful they were spared learning this. It seems like another fad that was fortunately mostly not imposed to too many folks.</p>
<p>I learned to read with ITA in Iowa in the mid 60s. I’m a very fast reader and excellent speller. I don’t think ITA had any bearing, positive or negative, on my reading or other kids’ skills. I was in the local paper with some other kids in a little article about it-- they made sure to mention that Prince Charles had learned ITA, lol!</p>
<p>Reminds me of the way kids are being taught to subtract and divide - long and complicated, in the hopes the kids will understand the process better. What a disaster.</p>
<p>Looking back on my own experience with learning how to read using ITA I’ve come to the conclusion that I wasn’t particularly damaged by it, but also not advantaged by it either. It was almost as if I went to school in first grade learning one type of language and then switched completely in second grade to another language, the way some immigrant children are thrown into an all English speaking classroom when they arrive in the US. The young mind is highly adaptive when it comes to language. </p>
<p>I was taught the ITA method in 1st grade in the 60’s, but my family moved away the year after to a place where ITA was neither taught nor even heard of. Looking back, I remember the humiliation of failing nearly every spelling test in 2nd grade and of being laughed at when writing something on the blackboard. I haven’t thought about those days for many, many years. </p>
I waz, can u tel? God Lord the memories, 5 of us learning this & then learning the usual way!But I always loved reading, learned very early & this was just a sidebar to all of it!
I was a lab rat for its. I was in first grade in Bethlehem PA in 1966. I fondly remember reading Dinasuar Ben, Houses, and Whillie the Whale. I remember having reading difficulties in 2nd grade when we switched to regular reading. I was a horrible speller all my life. In 3rd grade I was in the lowest reading level and never really caught up till after college where I majored in engineering.