“Phonics They Use: Words for Reading & Writing”
by Patricia M. Cunningham
Review by Merri Rosenberg

It’s hard to imagine this slender volume as a radical text. But on many levels, it is.

For someone whose children attended elementary school during the 1990s, when whole language was the watchword of reading programs and phonics was banished (except among reading resource teachers whose job it was to help struggling readers), I admit to a certain guilty pleasure at finding this in my mailbox.

What’s refreshing about Patricia M. Cunningham’s approach is that her phonics method embraces strategies and techniques that more strict constructionists might not include, like allowing pre-readers to use inventive spelling. She recommends a slew of rhyming books that would be fun additions to any classroom (removing phonics from the dreaded basal reader association that it has for we baby boomers), and offers a host of creative and diverse activities that any teacher could use successfully in his/her classroom.

I particularly liked her recommendations that teachers use rhymes and riddles, even rap, to access the sounds of words, adopt a multi-sensory approach by having students clap out the beats of words, and play a variety of games to enhance their acquisition of literacy skills.

The book also offers specific activities that teachers could bring into their curriculum, from spelling activities, working through roots, prefixes and suffixes, and setting up take-home word walls to learning common rhyme patterns and even assessments to measure a child’s reading fluency.

This is certainly a text that belongs in any elementary school teacher’s classroom; too bad its message wouldn’t have been as welcome a decade ago.#