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P A R E N T T O P A R E N T About Reading
Works
A little background about Jay Patterson. His children are homeschooled and his oldest son was using Sing, Spell Read & Write. He did okay with it until third grade when he hit a roadblock and simply couldn't spell. Jay, an English teacher, pulled every rabbit he knew out of the hat. Nothing worked. Finally Jeanne Patterson heard about the WRTR and dragged Jay to a workshop given by a RIGGS Instructor. Jay was a skeptic going into the workshop, thought "this may work" coming out, tried it with his son with great success and became a believer. This next school year he was assigned the "Assurance of Mastery" students (those who are testing below passing) and decided to take them through the WRTR. The results were awesome, and with time students were on a waiting list to get into his classes. He also ended up taking his honors English students through the WRTR, finding that although these students appeared not to struggle, they too benefited greatly from the multi-sensory approach of the WRTR because they were forced to use their weak learning channels and to think through that which had come intuitively for them. Jay teaches at the Jr. High level and his school district is a dedicated "Whole Language" School. Just this year the Jr. High Principal took the gutsy move of having ALL the Jr. High Students go through the WRTR with either Jay or another teacher (it is a small district so two teachers can cover all the students) while in the Jr. High. Isn't it sad that these students have to remediate at the Jr. High Level because they are in a Whole Language schools at the Elementary Level. The Catholic School in this small town has likewise been trained by Jay Patterson to use the WRTR, from the beginning years. Jay has been teaching a WRTR workshop for a number of years (perhaps 8?). He originally used the RIGGS material, but with time found it too cumbersome since he had to make a lot of clarifications and corrections. So he wrote "Reading Works". The real advantage of RW is that it was written with the homeschooler in mind, but has the experience of a classroom teacher backing it up (broad range of experience with actual students). Jay starts out with the handwriting program, which is the foundation for the WRTR. Even Jay's honors students begin with handwriting. Jay's adaptation of Spalding Handwriting is extremely detailed and leaves nothing to guess about. The strength of "Spalding Manuscript" is the multi-sensory approach of dictating the letter formations to the students, nearly every other handwriting program on the market is only visual in orientation. The student's learn the sound/symbol relationship of the letters through this handwriting program and it serves as a strong foundation for future reading and spelling skills. After just 54 phonograms are reasonably mastered by the students, Jay then takes us word-for-word through the analysis of words on the spelling list until he is confident we know how to proceed on our own. He then gives us "troubleshooting" hints for each and every section of the spelling list, drawing from his own personal experience teaching the course. For further vocabulary building Jay offers a course of study and an additional 1700 words which he correlated from numerous reputable word lists. Combined with the spelling/vocabulary list in the WRTR, Jay's list will give students a working knowledge of 95% of the words they will encounter on a daily basis. In a nutshell, the WRTR is a handwriting/phonics/reading comprehension/vocabulary and spelling curriculum which your students will use through elementary school and into Jr. High (depending on how long it takes him/her to work through the additional list of 1700 words) Benefits reaped will be life-long due to the analysis skills he or she will obtain, these skills will allow your student to excel into higher-level reading comprehension skills when most of his peers are unfortunately hitting brick walls. (95% of 17 year olds cannot read well enough to accomplish higher level thinking skills - according to Dr. Sylvia Farnham-Diggory, a reading expert with the University of Delaware. This is documented in the foreword to the WRTR.) The benefits of the WRTR are actually more than in the English department, the logical thinking process taught in the WRTR can be carried over into other academic subjects, and the "soft-skills" taught through the WRTR process will reap benefits for your students outside of the classroom and work environment. These character building skills include:
The WRTR is a genius of a program and Jay Patterson does more to help users of the WRTR see this than anyone else out there that I know of. Not only does he tell us in 50 detailed steps "how to" implement the WRTR, his RW manual is virtually a cheerleading squad in print. Jay gives us the background information on reading theory and the WRTR program to get each of us personally excited about the unique possibilities of this program. He encourages us in our every step and his writing style is filled with humorous little antidotes to keep this material from feeling dry and stiff. You feel like you are peeking in on his classroom as you read along. To learn more about the WRTR simply email the Pattersons and Jeanne will send out a small brochure to you. You will probably learn much more from the WRTR-Teachers list about RW than you will from that brochure. Pattersons are working on a website but it is not up and running yet. My "promotion" of RW is entirely voluntary, I simply want to share with other homeschoolers what I feel is the BEST companion program on the market for the WRTR (and I have the RIGGS material as well as "Teaching Reading at Home" on my shelves.) Patterson's email: gramwrks@prtel.com (They also have "Grammar Works", which is available from any major bookstore through special order, and a number of homeschooling catalogs. It is rather new on the market and is a grammar program which dovetails the WRTR and RW.) Susan Davis (MN) Prov. 3:5&6 sued@sihope.com Encouragement
from Jay Patterson | Reading Works | Fun
With the Program! |
Reading Works is self-published locally here in
Minnesota by the author Jay Patterson and his wife Jeanne. It is really a
syllabus for his Writing Road to Reading (WRTR) workshop - but extremely
detailed and I believe it is over 400 pages. Many people are using it w/o the
benefit of the workshop. Jay and Jeanne are always available to answer questions
as am I . In fact, I started a WRTR-Teachers email list and you can join by
going to www.onelist.com and searching for
WRTR-Teachers. Let me know if you have trouble finding it and I will send you
the direct link to the page.