About Us
Origins of Reading Revival
Helena Rogers is a qualified teacher and head teacher, who has taught in primary schools across the educational spectrum, from small village schools to the largest primary school in the country. She has spent time tutoring children requiring one to one extra-curricular coaching support, as well as guiding children with special needs and learning difficulties. Although she taught a range of general subjects to different ages, her sweeping successes at inspiring children to read developed into a speciality.
When Helena began her career in the early 1960s, the standard teaching tool was the ‘Look and Say’ method, where the child was taught through matching words one to another – which is, of course the basic mechanism of reading. Over the years the reading schemes she was using in schools became unfashionable and use of phonics (word sounds) came more to the fore.
However Helena noticed that not only was the time taken to teach children to read increasing, but so were their feelings of frustration and demoralisation. She realised that if she and the children were to re-acquire the same levels of success and enthusiasm that were commonplace in the 1960s she would have to design her own reading scheme to meet the high standards she had come to expect whilst using the now less fashionable methods.
Back to Basics
Drawing on the hundreds of hours she has spent in closely observing how individual children respond to the different teaching methods, Helena devised a scheme of her own that appealed to children, and vastly improved the time it took them to grasp the fundamentals of reading. The Reading Revival scheme strips the reading process back to basics, using the ‘Look and Say’ process as the main approach, and introducing a low-key approach to phonics.
Look and Say
The ‘Look and Say’ method focuses on making the most of the child’s instinctive pattern-matching abilities and natural desire to learn. It is simple and effective with speedy results, enabling a child to quickly develop a high level of enthusiasm for reading. In turn this gives them the confidence and willingness to move on to more complex reading skills.
Word Cards
Word cards are a good tool at the beginning of the reading process to introduce the words of the first reading book, but once a child has displayed the ability to learn words on sight, and has begun to read, they are unnecessary and may even serve to undermine confidence if reintroduced later on.
Phonics
It is absolutely crucial that as a child embarks on the road to reading, the experience does not give them feelings of failure, discomfort or unhappiness, as a reluctance to read at this stage can have a profoundly negative impact on the future appetite for learning. Phonics are an integral part of reading but they are also complicated, with many English words not conforming to basic phonetic rules. Introducing phonics at the initial stages of reading often causes needless confusion, when the child is much better served by concentrating on learning words as a whole. This back to basics approach results is a positive, relaxed process whereby the child is thrilled by their rapid reading progress, and the confidence this brings together with a momentum and keenness to read is a joy to behold. Enjoyment of the process; learning that is introduced in manageable segments and a relaxed environment is all crucial to success.