Samuel L. Blumenfeld (1926–2015)

After meeting Sam Blumenfeld at a Saturday conference I purchased several fo his books including the now out of print The New Illiterates. The first part of that book went into a detailed examination of the Dick, Jane and Sally readers that many of us remember growing up with. I’m not a teacher and have three wonderful grown children who have no reading problems but these books kindled in me a desire to help someone learn to read. It didn’t take long for me to find that first student.
My co-worker at the dry cleaners where I worked as a pant presser had a sixteen year old son who dropped out of high school with everyone’s blessing. I sat down with him and the Blumenfeld assessment test and it was clear to me that he couldn’t read even the first block of words because he had never been taught to read with phonics.
I made him a deal. I would teach him to read with phonics. I would never ask him to do anything new until he had mastered the old and if at any time he wanted to stop, he could fire me. I worked with him at his home for five months using Blumenfeld’s Alpha-Phonics system. I would select books from the library that matched his interests as he went up to the higher lessons. In the beginning he couldn’t read “the cat sat on the mat” if you wrote the words on a piece of paper. Five months later, working twice a week for forty-five minutes, he was reading at a solid fourth grade level.
Several years later he asked me if I would tutor him so he could get his GED. I did and he made more progress but failed the test at that time. He told me a story about how he went to visit his teacher from sixth grade and showed her the Harry Potter book he was reading. She was amazed and went to get her old mark book from when he was in her class. He clearly read that she had marked him as having a fourth grade reading level. In parenthesis she wrote (-1) for reading level. No wonder school was so frustrating for him.
Another friend had a daughter in second grade who, according to her teacher, needed an Individual Education Plan. I worked with her twice a week for forty-five minutes at a time and she went from total illiteracy in September to reading at a seventh grade level by the end of June. I never met her teacher but she told the mother to keep on doing whatever she was doing. The best thing about Alpha-Phonics was how the word lists filled out the pathetic phonics lessons in the public school text books. I saw my student come home with a list of words that used two different spellings for the long “e” sound. There were ten words in all . I would go to Alpha-Phonics, bring up the page with long”e” sound spelled with “ee”. There were more than seventy words in the list. Then I looked up the long “e” sound spelled with “ea”. That list was also over sixty words long. My matching the word lists in Alpha-Phonics to the worked lists that came home in the public school workbooks, my student had ten times the practice decoding words than her friends did. Go to the back of any text book and count the number of words in the glossary. It will not come anywhere near the over 3200 words in Alpha-Phonics. There is no better word list book in or outside special education programs than Alpha-Phonics. It is essential if you want to have your child get a firm foundation in phonics to have them use Alpha-Phonics.… (mais)