Everything Education

What is Phono-Graphix®?

It is simply the most well respected reading method around and we have trained over 5000 students to read easier at The Thinking Center since 1998.

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Phono-Graphix® is a reading method researched and developed by Read America, Inc. It is based upon extensive clinical experience with children and rigorous research in the fields of reading, cognitive psychology, learning theory, child development, motivation theory, and linguistics.

Phono-Graphix® has been shown to be 98% effective in helping all readers regardless of learning disabilities, to bring their word identification and word attack test scores up to grade level after an average of 12 hours of one-on-one training.

Phono-Graphix® addresses the true phonetic nature of the English language.

The English written language is a phonetic code, meaning that each sound in a word is represented by a symbol or sound picture. This is surprising to many people, including teachers, who believe that our written code is chaotic. We can see that our code is completely phonetic, however, once we understand.

Written English uses some sound pictures that are one letter, such as those in the word cat; each letter represents one sound. Other sound pictures are made up of two or more letters, such as the oa in oat and theou in out.

Some sounds are shown with two or more letters.

There is variation in the code.

Most sounds have more than one way in which they can be represented. The sound 's', for instance, can be represented in these ways: sat city voice house

Sound pictures are sometimes reused. The same sound picture that spells the sound 'ee' in beach spells the sound 'e' in bread and the sound 'a-e' in steak.New readers must learn to try each possibility when they encounter unknown words with sound pictures that represent more than one sound.		There is overlap in the code.

Segmenting is the ability to separate the sounds in spoken words.

To understand and use our sound picture code, we must be able to access the sounds.

To read a sound picture code, we must be able to connect isolated sounds into meaningful words.

Blending is the ability to blend sounds into words

Phoneme Manipulation is the ability to pull sounds in and out of words

We need this skill because a sound picture can represent more than one sound. We must be able to try the various sounds that a sound picture might represent. For example, ow can be both "oe" and "ow." As the reader decodes an unknown word, for example brown, he or she may try "oe" first. When "broen" doesn't make sense, he must slide out the "oe" and slip in the "ow" to get"brown."

Children learn best as active participants in discovery. Phono-Graphix® lessons engage the child in active discovery helping him to build up solid understanding of the nature of the code and to become adept at the skills needed to use it

"The child only really understands that which he has created." - Jean Piaget

For more information, ask a Thinking Center Reading Specialist or Amy F. Weinberger, the Director.