I am enormously excited about teaching Spanish to all the students at the Odessa Christian School. This will be my second year teaching Spanish. I was an elementary bilingual teacher for the Ector County Independent School District for fourteen years. For two years, I taught secondary first and second year Spanish a the Bowie Junior High. I have my ESL, Spanish, regular elementary, and bilingual certification.

English Language Resources for Parents - Especially First Grade Parents

1. Hazel Loring's Reading Made Easy with Blend Phonics for First Grade explains the blend phonics technique. I have produced a Reader to supplement this fantastic phonics program: Blend Phonics Reader. The Reader is especially designed to preven or cure whole-word dyslexia. Here is a Blend Phonics Certificate of Completion. I can do Blend Phonics workshops for public schools, private schools, and home school organizations. Contact the Odessa Christian School for setting up a workshop. Here is my Blend Phonics Unit Chart. I have a whole page now dedicated to Blend Phonics. Also see my new web site: www.blendphonics.org. This is my nationwide campaign to get Blend Phonics into the hands of every first grade teacher in America. I also have a new web site dedicated to promoting Blend Phonics: www.blendphonics.org.

2. Audio instruction and materials for teaching phonics-first: Natural Phonics Primer™. This is my instructional material for teaching Rudolf Flesch's 72 Exercises published in 1955 in Why Johnny Can't Read and what you can do about it. The Exercises were published separately in his 1956 Teaching Johnny to Read. Click on the 1955 title to purchase a copy of Flesch's book.

3. Read, Write and Type. This wonderful computer program teaches both touch typing and basic phonics to children as young as kindergarten. I recommend using this with your children before any other computer reading program. Children should not be hunt-and-peck typing. Correct strokes should be taught before children are allowed to write anything on a computer. It is a proven program for teaching phonemic awareness (speech sound discrimination). Every kindergarten and first-grade class should have this program.

4. Back in 1913 Florence Akin publish an excellent phonics program, Word Mastery for the First Three Grades. Anyone can use this to teach their children to read. It can be used to supplement any good phonics program being used in the classroom. I published this in 2004. It gets around 30,000 hits each month. A lady in New Jersey recently earned her Ph.D. teaching this method to kindergarten students.

5. For those interested in an in-depth study of the issues concerning how reading should be taught I recommend the following articles by Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld: Can Dyslexia be Artificially Induced in Schools? and Muscue Analysis: Teaching Normal Children to Read Like Defective Children.

6. I have republished Noah Webster's 1824 American Spelling Book as a FREE easy-to-read edition. Parents who want to start using it with their children can download it by clicking on the title above. I have also published an mp3 audio file to help parents with the sounds. This can be used by beginners or older students. As far as I am aware, it is the only program available for teaching polysyllabic (multisyllable) words classified according to difficulty and accent. I have been using Webster's great program more and more my teaching and tutoring. I am find it to be far and away better than any other method available. I hope to start doing workshops to explain how to teach Webster's Syllabary and his system of coding the English speech sounds with numbers.

7. Here are my YouTube educational videos: Don's YouTube. These are only about 10 minutes each but very informative.

HANDWRITING

It is a little known fact that manuscript handwriting was introduced to the mainstream American classrooms beginning in 1923 when a lady by the name of Wise brought it to our shores from England. I have published a small essay by Sam Blumenfeld with some additions of my own concerning the advantages of teaching cursive first: Cursive First. The Peterson Handwriting Company has made available a review copy of their Handwriting: A Complete Guide to Instruction that covers both manuscript and cursive. The A Beka Book company is the only educational publisher I am aware of that teaches cursive-first. Christian schools everywhere will welcome this traditional cursive-first approach to good penmanship. Good instruction in cursive-first will go a long way toward preventing and curing whole-word dyslexia. I speak from experience when I recommend cursive-first because Mrs. Pearl Monroe, my beloved first-grader teacher, taught me cursive-first just like she did my dad. .

Those interested in promoting private education will appreciate this "Testimony before the House & Senate Committees on the Proposed Department of Education" (1926) by J. Grecham Machen (1881 - 1937). Machen was a stalwart of conservative Christianity. His views on the establishment of the "Department of Education" may come as a surprise to those of us who attended and taught in public schools. I find it very revealing that the private schools across America use textbooks that are superior to those used by the public schools, although the public schools have the tremendous advantage of government financing. Over the years, I have supplemented my textbook adoptions with materials generally used by private schools and homeschool parents because of their obvious superiority. An example of good textbooks available to Christian Schools and home schoolers is the A Beka Book and Rod and Staff Curriculum.

Dorthy Sayres wrote a very important essay on education, The Lost Tools of Learning, concerning the Trivium. Harvey Bluedorn has published fine material explaining how the Trivium can be applied by what he calls Classical Christian Education.

Page last revised 7/31/08.