Soundabet

2012 Price Increase

2012-01-07T08:57:00.000-08:00

Over the holiday I went to my suppliers to restock inventory for next year. It's probably not a surprise to you that I found prices to have gone up. So, though I don't often do this, I've had to increase the prices of Soundabet materials for 2012.

Because I believe in relocalizing our economy, I now use only very local (like in my own home town) suppliers in favor of sourcing my production overseas. The result is much higher costs to me, higher prices for you, and the feeling that I'm doing the right thing overall. My choices make work for people who live nearby me and somehow that helps me sleep better....

Back on the Job

2011-08-23T06:07:00.001-07:00

If you ordered during the time I was on vacation, thank you for your patience.All of you, I will be stopping by the Post Office today after work to send your orders in the mail.Don't ask how early I got up this morning to finish completing your orders.I don't even want to know!

On Vacation

2011-08-03T21:42:00.000-07:00

Please be patient with orders placed in August. I'll be back at the desk filling orders starting August 22.

Vacationing

2011-06-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

Hi,

Those who've ordered early in June have had a long wait because—YEAH—I took some time for vacation. I'm back now and all caught up with the orders.

If you sent in your order in late May through mid June your order is on its way and should be in your hands by tomorrow.

Dan

Emailing Me

2011-03-24T21:54:00.001-07:00

Please note that my email address has changed. It is now:

dangurney51 (at) gmail.com

I'm Okay

2011-03-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

I'm okay!

If you get an email from my account describing some overseas distress, please ignore it.

Someone hacked into my email account and is posting false information about me. Don't send any money!!

In reality, I'm fine and at work. Well, as fine as one can be when their email has been hacked.

Take care,

Dan

No Phone

2010-08-21T13:21:00.000-07:00

In my effort to slow down (slowing down is something that I need to do) I'm giving up the phone number for Soundabet.

Actually we're keeping the same number, but it will be used only by my wife as her City Council phone number.

So....

Please contact me either through U.S. Mail:

Dan Gurney's Soundabet
P.O. Box 2255
Sebastopol, CA 95473

or via email:

dangurney (at) yahoo.com

If you've left a phone message for me in the past few weeks, assume I didn't get your message, as the answering machine got unplugged and all the messages were lost. Sorry!

Someone Asked Me

2010-07-09T17:02:00.000-07:00

The other day someone asked me if I'm still doing Soundabet. Yes, I am. Mostly former customers. I still get email from people who use it and find it helpful. Here's a paragraph from an email I got the just other day from Patti F.

Subject: Soundabet helped my class get high test scores

Hi, Dan--
I think I’m your biggest fan right now (and I know you have a lot!). I wanted to tell you that my kindergarten class scored sky high in its reading test scores for our SATs (like STAR) and I attribute a good deal of it to the Soundabet program. Just got the results in this week and my principal was very happy.

—Patti F.

So, Yes, I still fill orders from new and old customers who wish to order Soundabet.

Spring Update

2010-04-03T21:32:00.000-07:00

Well, it's spring now, and just about everyone in the class has got the Soundabet under the belt. A few of the new arrivals are still working on it. But the vast majority of the kids in kindergarten know the Soundabet (or at least the vast majority of it) and can read and write pretty well now.

When it comes to learning to read and write, the difference between learning the Soundabet and learning the alphabet is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

80% by the Winter Break

2009-12-20T09:35:00.000-08:00

It's winter break. Kindergarten is not yet half over.

I've got 29 kindergartners in my class. 23 have mastered the Soundabet. That's about 80%. Of the 6 kids who have not yet fully mastered the Soundabet, all but two are mostly there. The 2 kids who aren't almost at mastery are "pulled" out for EL instruction while we're doing Soundabet. They'll have a lot of catching up to do, but I'll make sure it gets done....

The real story here is that so many have gone on well past Soundabet mastery and are now reading books to their moms. I got this email from one of the moms in my room:

Hi Mr.Gurney,

I wanted to thank you. Jacob just read me his first of many books to come, The Foot Book by Dr.Seuss. I always knew this day would come, I never thought he would be reading after his first few months of Kindergarten.
I can't say thank you enough. I want you to know how truly amazing you are. You certainly are a gifted Teacher. I am blessed to have you teaching my son and if I am lucky, my daughter.

Thank you,
M. L.

That's what teaching the Soundabet can do.....

Kids Who've Mastered Soundabet

2009-11-11T06:51:00.000-08:00

The number of students who've mastered the Soundabet has climbed to seven now, in mid-November, with a bunch more kids coming within range of mastery.

It's really exciting for me to see so many students cross this most important threshold into the land of literacy. It's going to be an exciting winter and spring!

How to Order Soundabet

2009-10-30T22:10:00.000-07:00

I get a number of emails asking how to order Soundabet like this one.

Hi, Dan,
I would like to order 1 set each of your king and queen cards. I have looked on the internet and could not find the site to do this. I am not sure if this will get to you, so I'll send this off. I ordered a lot of your materials a few years back and I love teaching your Soundabet. The children love it too and learn it so easily. Please advise me as to how to order more of your materials. Also, are you giving a workshop in the bay area any time soon?
Thank you!
D. S.

To help make it easier to see how to order, I've placed the explanation at the top of the column to the right.

I've very happy to hear from my past customers who've found Soundabet helpful to them.

Two Soundabet Masters, and it's not even Halloween yet

2009-10-25T13:25:00.000-07:00

It's not even Halloween yet and two of my students have mastered the whole Soundabet in both upper and lowercase forms and are reading mid-first grade level.

With those two out of the starting gates, I now have a half dozen more students begging to demonstrate their Soundabet knowledge to me....

Life is good!

Another Testimonial-Sept, 2009

2009-09-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

Here's another testimonial, this one from a couple of days ago.

Hi Dan,

My name is Tere Fieldson and I teach kindergarten at Hopkinson in Los Alamitos, California. It's my 26th year of teaching kindergarten and I LOVE IT! I feel very fortunate to have seen you present Soundabet for our district

about 10 years ago. Ever since that presentation, I have helped other teachers new to kindergarten, learn the

"Dan Gurney Soundabet." In fact, the other teacher that helps me, brings a banjo to kick it off! I truly must say

your Soundabet has added an incredible, fun tool to my program. My students love shouting, "Soundabet Alert!"

Thanks again for sharing (so enthusiastically) this great reading and writing tool.

Please send me an order form so I can order some things for our new K teachers.

Sincerely,

Tere Fieldson

12 Days into the Year

2009-09-04T21:22:00.000-07:00

I'm frequently asked when I introduce the Soundabet in kindergarten. I don't know why, but people are often surprised when I say, "On the first day."

This is what the basic Soundabet song looks like as it is sung in my classroom very early on in the year. This video, shot yesterday, shows you how it looks 12 days into kindergarten.

The students seem to be engaged and having a good time with it.

What do you think?

Questions I'm often asked....

2009-08-01T07:47:00.000-07:00

I'm often asked to answer questions like the ones S. asked me this morning.

I thought to post the questions and my answers here, since others are probably asking similar questions:

I was thrilled to receive my Soundabet materials! I've watched the DVD and now I have a few questions to get me started.

1. Do you start the year writing everything in the king capital letters and then progress to a mixture of king and queen letters for names and sentences? Am I right in understanding that the kids started with the king deck for mastery and then progressed to the queen deck?

2. I'm not familiar with the sounds changes to QU, R, W, and Y.. Could you explain a little about that?

3. Is the Y ever sounded as /y/? I thought the kids said EE whenever they went through the Soundabet.

4. Is the king U sounded as long u and the queen u as the short u?

5. Is the Q alone sounded as /kwa/ and the QU as /coo/?

Hi—

I'll try to answer your questions:

1. I start with the king's capital letters to avoid the bdpq ambiguities. How quickly I move to the lowercase depends on the kids, but I start there. I don't like to confuse kids.

2. When Soundabet was born, I used the same sounds for QU, R, W, and Y that I had been taught in first grade back in the fifties. In 2002, I presented Soundabet to a roomful of speech and language specialists who suggested I try coo for QU etc. I tried their suggestions and found them to be significant improvements, so I made the switch. However, Soundabet works with the old sounds, too, (the kwuh for QU, etc.) I used as a little guy, and so I accept either the old sounds (the parents in your class will teach the old sounds) or the new ones that Soundabet uses.

3. Say yellow really slowly (or yes, yell, whatever). See if yellow doesn't sound like: "eee -e-ll-ow." And, of course, Tony, Danny, Nancy, and Yvonne will totally get ee for y. The other sounds Y usually makes are borrowed from I long i as in Kyle and short i as in myth. If you never teach "yuh" your kids won't be harmed one tiny little bit. Yuh, after all, is just ee with a schwa. (eeuh)

4. U makes two sounds in Soundabet, long as in unicorn and short as the medial sound in sun. The two sounds look exactly the same. I did this on purpose to force the kids to read the prompting word at the bottom of the card. I wanted the basic Soundabet to include this visual ambiguity to force students to understand you have read and apply contextual clues to know what sound to make. Windy. A windy day, or a windy road?

5. The Q alone appears in very few words. I teach QU as a unit because it almost always appears that way. Al Qaeda is the only exception that comes to mind, and I'm not likely to teach that word in kindergarten.

Good luck with Soundabet. Trust yourself to experiment with it, make it yours, and employ your own creativity with it...your creativity with Soundabet is what will make it really fantastic in your classroom.

Dan

And another

2009-07-31T14:31:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Gurney,

I teach at Lafayette Elementary School, in Lafayette, California. We have used your Soundabet cards/songs with our kindergarten students for the past four years. It has been an amazing journey with the children and your Soundabet song and cards are an integral part of our program. This coming year, I will be teaching First Grade and would like to order additional sets (both king and queen) for use in my classroom.

-Christina N.

Another Testimonial--July 2009

2009-07-30T10:16:00.001-07:00

One of the great things about doing Soundabet is getting e-mails like this one from Mrs. Westover. It's the sort of message that will keep me around doing a small, slow business for people who dig enough to find me and are patient enough not to expect same day rush-rush service. Slow foods is good for us eaters; slow business is good for us shoppers, too.

I asked her if I could post her email here, and she said I could.

It makes me happy to think that some people are getting such wonderful results with Soundabet (19 out of 20 bests the ratio of success in my own classroom!)

Here's her letter, I mean email---

Dear Dan:

Last year, I bought your system and have had remarkable success with my kindergarten class. 19 out of my 20 students knew their letters and sounds by the first trimester. 19 our of my 20 students were able to write several sentences in their journals without any help! I attribute much of my success in my classroom to your program. I was forced to teach the Houghtin Mifflin program, but I added the "Soundabet" as part of my daily routines and it made a big difference. Could you please be kind enough to send me a blank invoice or purchase order so that I may be able to order more of materials? Another teacher used this program also had similar success! Thank you for such a great program, keep up the good work! Please don't close your business! We need you!! :)

Sincerely,

Mrs. Westover

Summer Workshop and Sale

2009-07-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

I just got back from doing a Soundabet Workshop in Southern California. It was fun for me.

It's stirred up some renewed interest in Soundabet both for me and for the people who use it.

So I thought I'd do a summer Back-to-School sale. I'll go through the Soundabet order form and revise the prices downward a little, effective July 20.

By the way, the Flash Cards will henceforth be shipped with the Story Starters on stickers to affix to the back.

Another Testimonial

2009-07-20T14:41:00.001-07:00

One of the great satisfactions of having created Soundabet is hearing from people who've used it and felt inspired to tell me. Here's one from Michelle Emra:

Hi Mr. Gurney,
We've never met, but I order your soundabet kit and I can't tell you how much fun we had this last year. I was fortunate enough to teach fullday kindy, and I only has 23 students. (that's low for oregon) We use the Treasures curriculum and between district mandates and your ideas, 20 of my students left kindergarten above grade level. 22 were reading and 22 were writing 2 or more sentences. (Actually about 15 were writing several sentences over 3-4 pages.) I had the most successful year; my test scores were through the roof, which got a lot of recognition from our district office and some principals around the district.
It was my 2nd year in kindergartern, my 17th year in education and I loved every minute of it.
So, when I got politically bumped out of kindergarten and will now teach a 1/2 blend, I cried for 2 days. I plan on using a lot of your ideas since they lend themselves so well to the struggling learner, I just hope to be able to head back down to the place where my heart sings.
Have a blessed summer. You helped me so much. thanks!!!!

I hope you get a chance to return to kindergarten, Michelle!

Soundabet Assessment

2009-03-02T18:56:00.000-08:00

You'd think after 28 years of teaching that HANDS ON would have occurred to me before today.

But it took that long for me!!

Here's a YouTube clip of Brandon going through his mid-year Soundabet Uppercase assessment. You'll notice, if you watch closely, that he corrects himself on CH (his initial response is /H/) and that he says /ee/ for the Y, which is what I teach as the sound for Y. Towards the end of the clip he skips the /er/ sound.

No big deal. Brandon knows so much about letter sounds that he's definitely going to be fine in first grade. This single assessment tells me much more than anything else, yes, including DIBELS, than any other indicator of basic early reading skill.

I'm delighted to be able to share this with the world over the internet!

Another Testimonial

2009-02-20T06:29:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Gurney,

I attended your workshop about 6 years ago and LOVED IT!!! I used Soundabet the next day in class and each day since! It's wonderful, hats off to you!!

I am now a stay home mom (love teaching my little 3 year old) and have been searching frantically for my Soundabet board with the letters on it and can't find it. Can I purchase the cards from you? Thanks a million!

Sincerely,

Diane

February 28 Last Day of Half Off Sale

2009-02-18T18:05:00.000-08:00

Be sure to send your Soundabet orders off by February 28 (post marked by that date) to take advantage of the February 1/2 off sale.

Testimonial

2009-02-09T11:29:00.000-08:00

Hi, folks!

I got another nice email from a past customer, Kate. I asked her if I could use it on the blog and that if she did, I'd offer her a half price deal on whatever she ordered.

I guess it's only fair to do the same for other folks who've used the products and have nice things to say about Soundabet (based on actual use of the materials). So, if that's you, email me and ask for the same half off deal.

dangurney "atsymbol" yahoo.com

And, as to why everyone isn't using Soundabet, I think part of the answer is it's not "research" based. That is to say, I'm not a big publisher who lobbies the Department of Education to make rules that keep teacher-created materials out of classrooms.

Anyway, here's what Kate had to say:

Hi Dan,

I'm interested in buying some or all (depending on cost) of your soundabet products if you are still selling them. I taught Kindergarten about 8 years ago and used Soundabet with my class after taking your seminar. I LOVE the program and would like to use it at home with my 4 year old son who is beginning to become obsessed with letters, letter sounds, and reading. I don't know why everybody doesn't use this program....It's so awesome!

Thanks for your time,

Kate Gillespie

See a Video on YouTube

2009-01-07T19:06:00.000-08:00

Here's a video—really quick and unedited—showing the Soundabet being sung with the class in January, 2009.

I'm pretty excited right now because so many of my kindergartners know the whole Soundabet and have begun to read with a good deal of success on their own. When they've mastered the Soundabet before the halfway point in kindergarten, I know they're going to have success in first grade.

So, here it is, my second YouTube video, and the first one about Soundabet.

And another...

2008-11-21T05:52:00.000-08:00

At this stage of the game, the best thing about my itty bitty Soundabet business is the nice feedback I get from those who've found Soundabet helpful in their teaching practice.

If you have an idea to share with your teaching colleagues, I encourage you to use the internet to make it available to others. It may turn out to be a very small business indeed, but one that brings large feelings of satisfaction of having helped others.

Dear Dan,

In previous years of teaching first grade, I’ve had success with Soundabet. Now I am in a new school, (I had to leave my materials at my previous school), and I find myself noticing a decline in reading confidence with in my kiddos. If you are still selling materials, I would appreciate the opportunity to purchase them.

Thank you,

Amber Shoupe

Bonner MT.

Nice Letter

2008-10-30T16:42:00.000-07:00

One of the nicest things about having this little Soundabet business (and it's gotten much smaller since I've put it back in the dark ages by not taking credit cards or online orders) are the nice messages I get — both via e-mail and handwritten ink mail — from fellow teachers in the gardens of kinderland.

Here's one that came recently.

Dear Dan,

Received my order this afternoon and promptly looked at the DVD. LOVE the fact that real classroom situations are depicted and not some sterile, never-in-my-classroom scenes!

Thank you so much for including the Game Cards as a gift. You are a kind soul.

With appreciation,
J. K.

The Story of Ee

2008-10-08T20:05:00.000-07:00

"I'd like some waffles for breakfast this morning," said the king.

"OK, I'll make some for you," offered the Queen.

But on the way to the kitchen the Queen changed her mind and decided instead to cook up a breakfast of scrambled eggs. She got a carton of eggs out of her refrigerator and while carrying them to the counter, she dropped one on the floor. It broke. You can see it there in the picture.

When the King came downstairs, he was thinking to himself, "Mmm. Waffles. I hope she's going to serve them up with real maple syrup from Vermont and some whipped cream." He was so lost in his thoughts he didn't watch where he was stepping and his foot went right in the egg on the floor. He tracked raw egg through the kitchen, and, as he entered, he realized that he didn't smell waffles cooking; he smelled eggs.

"Oh, King! Look what you're doing! There's egg all over the floor now."

"Where's my waffles?"

"No waffles today. I made eggs. Aren't you going to clean up after the mess you've made?"

"Mess I made?" argued the King. "I didn't drop the eggs. You did."

They continued to argue all day long. When the King made his E it looked like this: E

The Queen's looked like this: e

Did they get along that day?

The Story of Dd

2008-09-25T05:49:00.001-07:00

Dd

“I’ll be back for lunch,” called the King to the Queen as he went out for a walk in the royal forest with his favorite dog, Dasher. He had his camera with him; he liked to go with Dasher because Dasher helped him spot birds to photograph.

It had been raining the night before and the trails through the forest had gotten muddy. Mud clung to the King’s boots and to Dasher’s paws. This did not stop the King and his dog from staying out all morning.

The King took many photos. Towards the middle of the day, just before lunch, he and Dasher walked back to his castle. As they arrived at the back door, the King carefully took off his boots and left them outside so as not to track the mud inside the castle. In stocking feet, the King went to the washroom to clean up for lunch. He forgot to tie up Dasher at the back door and when no one was looking, Dasher ran inside, muddy paws and all, and tracked footprints all over the downstairs rooms.

“What’s for lunch?” asked the King as he pulled his chair up to the table.

“Mopping up’s for lunch, that’s what!” said the Queen

“Mopping up? What are you talking about? I asked you what’s to eat?”

“A Dozen Duck Dumplings.But Dasher tracked mud all over the downstairs. You’ve got to clean it up before you get the lunch I made.”

Ask: Do you hear all the /d/ sounds in what the Queen said? (Repeat her reply.) (Yes.)

“OK, I’ll clean it up.” But the King was rich and lazy, so he told his servants to clean up the mud that his dog tracked in. The Queen ate the whole dozen duck dumplings and didn’t leave any for the King.

He drove to a drive-in diner for lunch.

Ask: Do you think he went to Denny’s or Wendy’s? (Denny’s) Why? (It starts with a D. )

That night they made the letter D. The King made his look like this: D. The Queen like this: d. Ask: Did they get along the day they made D? (No)

The Story of Cc

2008-09-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

Cc
Ask: Do you think the King and the Queen will get along today? (Yes.)

At breakfast the King looked up from his plate of waffles and he noticed something moving out in the garden. “Is that a gray fox?” he wondered. He put down his knife and fork and picked up his binoculars for a closer look. “No, it’s a stray cat,” he said to himself, “and a friendly-looking one at that.” He called to his wife, the Queen, to come see.

She peered through the binoculars and remarked, “That’s a fine looking cat, but skinny! We’ve been wanting a pet now that our children have grown up and left the castle. Let’s care for him. I’ll get a brush to brush his fur.”

“I’m sure the cat is hungry. I’ll go chop up some meat from spareribs leftovers that we ate last night.” said the King as he walked to the royal pantry. He chopped up a nice bowl of meat and put it out on the back step. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Here, kitty kitty, kitty. Breakfast time!” he called.

The cat, who hadn’t eaten any proper food in days came running at the King’s call and, purring, ate the meat that the King had chopped up. When the King pet it, it purred loudly. I’ll bet you’re a good mouser, too,” said the King, who knew that they had need of a good mouser.

Ask: What do you think the King meant when he said, “I’ll be you’re a good mouser?” (He meant that the cat would be able to catch mice.)

The cat followed the King into the parlor where the Queen had found an old brush to groom the cat’s fur. The cat purred even more happily and then curled up in the Queen’s lap. Its purred so much and so loudly it sounded like it had a motor going inside. “I think we should call this cat ‘Motor Mouth’ because it sounds so loud when it purrs.”

“That’s a good name, Queen. We’ll call our new cat ‘Motor Mouth’ or ‘Motor,’ for short.”

The King and the Queen loved their new cat Motor and they decided to make a letter for the first sound in the word, cat. The King made his look like this: C. The Queen made hers look just the same, only smaller, like this: c.

Ask: Did the King and Queen get along that day? (Yes.)

Soundabet VoiceBox Books

2008-09-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in what I'm up to in my classroom in regard to Soundabet Activities, link on over to my Misterkindergarten blog where I discuss the VoiceBox today (Sept 23, 2008).

I may make the pdf files available to people who want to do a DIY Voicebox kit.

The Story of Bb

2008-09-21T21:14:00.000-07:00

Ask: Look at the King and Queen’s Bs. Do you think they’re going to get along? (No.)

Ask: Why do you think that they won't get along? (Because the King’s B and the Queen’s b don’t look the same.)

One bright and sunny day the Queen looked out the window and said, “Here he comes again! And he forgot his hat.”

“Who?” asked the King.

“The boy with the boat and binoculars. He forgot his hat. H's is going to get sunburned,” said the Queen.

“I’ve got a hat I can loan him,” said the King.

“I don't think it would fit him. Grab some sunscreen instead. You can put some on his face and arms and legs when you get to the pond,” said the Queen.

"I don't think he likes sunscreen," said the King, who had gotten to know the boy quite well and enjoyed spending time with him.

"Well, don't let him talk you out of it," said the Queen.

Ask: Do you think the King will put sunscreen on the boy? (No.)

The King felt happy when he saw the boy with his boat. He enjoyed being near the water’s edge whenever he could, and being with the boy made his enjoyment even keener. The water seemed to sparkle with happiness. The royal pond was large, a lake really, almost a mile across, so big that you needed binoculars to see across it to the other side. The King got his hat, his binoculars and joined the boy at the edge of the pond.

“Hi boy,” said the King. “I’ve got some sunscreen for you.”

“I don’t like sunscreen. It makes my skin feel funny,” said the boy.

“Well, are you sure? The sun is awfully bright today.”

“Yes,” said the boy. “Let’s launch my sailboat.”

The boy and the King spent a happy afternoon sailing the boat back and forth across the pond. Three hours passed in what seemed to both of them to be only minutes. Late in the afternoon the Queen came out of the castle and walked down to the pond to find the boy and the King still sailing the model boat. She noticed that the boy’s face, arms, and legs were bright pink.

She walked up to the King and asked, “Did you put sunscreen on the boy?”
 “No, I didn’t. He said it made his skin feel funny, and he didn’t want any,” said the King.

“I thought you hadn’t. Look. He’s sunburned. We’re going to have to go in now before it gets any worse.”

Later that evening when it was time to make the letter B, the King made his letter look like a line with two loops, one on top of the other. The Queen made only one loop, the loop on the bottom. She left off the loop on top, just like the boy didn’t have a hat on top.

Ask: Did the King and Queen make letters alike that day? (No.)

Soundabet Display Cards

2008-09-20T21:05:00.000-07:00

Soundabet Display Cards are intended to show the Soundabet as a whole.

I mount mine to a Display Board like those you see in a science fair --- three panel boards that open up to a 4 feet wide by 3 feet tall rectangle.

Mounted this way, you can put it within reach of your students and move it around the room.

The cards themselves are similar to the Flash Cards in terms of the images on them. But the Display Cards are half the size of the Flash Cards and cannot be used as easily to sing the special song.

Here's my Soundabet Display Cards mounted to an X-Acto Display Board in action.

You can use this photo here as a guide for laying out your Display Board.

The Story of Aa

2008-09-20T20:40:00.000-07:00

Before telling the story ask the students to look at the A and the a. Are they the same shape? (No) Tell them that since the shapes are different, they must have not gotten along really well in this story.

One day in late summer the Queen woke up from a happy dream about apple pie. She decided to make an apple pie for herself and the king to enjoy at tea time that afternoon.

She went to the royal kitchen and found all the ingredients she would need to bake her apple pie except the most important ingredient of all.

Ask: What do you think the most important thing you put in an apple pie is the most important ingredient? (Apples.)

The Queen knew that you can use any kind of apple in an apple pie, but she preferred green apples in pies more than red apples because green apples are more tart. Green apples taste better when you bake them in a pie.

She asked her husband, the King, to hike out to the royal orchard to pick some apples for her pie. Whisper: She forgot to ask for green apples. But she did tell him to get twelve nice apples. “Get fresh crisp apples,” she reminded him. “Twelve of them.”

The king met many people who wanted to talk with him on his hike up to the orchard on the hillside behind the castle. It took him a long time. When he finally arrived at the orchard he noticed that the best apples were near the top of the tree. He could see that he needed a ladder to reach them. So the poor King had to walk all the way back to the castle to get it. Using his ladder he was able to pick the twelve of the freshes and most crisp apples in the kingdom. He put them in his bag and he walked home happy to have done his work so well. He did not get back to the castle until the middle of the day.

“I’m home,” he called as he came through the door, tired from the hike.

“Did you get twelve nice apples?” asked the Queen.

“Yes, I sure did. I got a dozen apples. Twelve of them, fresh and crisp just as you asked,” replied the King. He opened the bag. “Aren’t they beauties? I had to use a ladder to reach them.” He felt proud of himself.

The Queen looked into the bag of apples. "They're RED!" she exclaimed. "Didn't I tell you to get green?"

"I don't think so," answered the King, but he wasn't sure.

Ask: Did the Queen ask him to get green apples? (No, she forgot to say what color to get.)

It was too late to get green apples, so she baked the red apples into the pie. At tea time they sliced off the right side of the pie and tasted it. It tasted disappointingly bland. No one asked for more.

That night, when the King and the Queen went upstairs to make the letter A for the first sound in the word apple /a/, the king made his like this: A so it looked like the ladder he used to pick them.

The Queen made letter a like this: a. Her a looks round, like a pie that no one would finish.

Did they get along? Do their letters look the same? (No.)

About Soundabet Flashcards

2008-09-20T20:07:00.000-07:00

Soundabet Flash Cards are for showing your class the Soundabet Sounds one at a time.

The Flash Cards are similar to the Display Cards in terms of their images and content. Display Cards are meant to present the Soundabet all together as a whole.

By contrast, Flash Cards are intended for a deeper journey into each Soundabet sound individually.

I've found what seems to work best is to introduce just one card each day beginning with the letter A. I begin early in the kindergarten year with A.

On each successive day, I do a quick review of all the letters presented beginning at A and going through in ABC order until we reach the letter of the day. I deliberately scramble the cards we have yet to look at so that we see (very briefly, and in passing) other letters.

Thus, let's say we're on the nineteenth day of the program and letter S is the one we're going to talk about today. We'll review the first eighteen letters quickly, A, B, C, D, E, and so on all the way to R. But guess what? The card behind R is not S! It might be any letter. I just quickly name it and keep going until S finally turns up. (I've put S near the end of the stack so we have to look through almost all the remaining cards to find it.)

When we finally find the letter of the day we sing it, then tell it's story.

First Sing the Song

You can use them in any way you wish, but I suggest singing a song set to the tune of "London Bridge" to introduce each sound. The song for the card pictured above goes like this:

Look at the /s/ we hear in soap,

/s/ /s/ /s/ soap, /s/ /s/ /s/ soap

Look at the /s/ we hear in soap,

/s/ /s/ /s/ /s/.

Next Tell the Story

I've written story starters for each of the Flash Cards. The purpose of the stories is to explain why the upper and lowercase letter forms sometimes match in form (as they do with Cc, Oo, Pp,
Ss, Uu, Vv, Ww, Xx, Yy, and Zz).

As you will see in the stories, the King invents the uppercase forms while the Queen invents the lowercase forms. On days they get along, they invent very similar forms. But as couples sometimes do, they sometimes have difficulty getting along with each other. On those days, they invent forms that differ in form (as with the rest of the letters, Aa, Bb, Dd, Ee, Ff, Gg, and so on).

These story starters used to be printed on the backs of the Flash Cards. Now, to keep the price of the Flash Cards from becoming astronomically high, I just e-mail the story starters to you.

The story starters are intended as just that: a jumping off place. What I really hope is that you will use your imagination to add detail and fill in the narrative with details that fit your students well.

As time allows, I will post here the stories as I tell them to my students. They're more fully developed stories. I'll begin with the story for the letter Aa.

Flash Cards and Display Cards are Back!

2008-09-08T19:16:00.000-07:00

If you want to order Display Cards and/or Flash Cards, they are now back in stock.

The Flash Cards no longer have the stories on the back. However, I can e-mail you the stories. In the weeks ahead, I'll post longer and fuller versions of the stories here on this blog.

To order, these or other Soundabet materials, send me an e-mail:

dangurney (at) yahoo.com

I'll pdf you an order blank you can fill out and mail to me.

I'll post more about these products and talk extensively about how to use Soundabet in your room beginning in about a week.

Stay tuned.

Soundabet's Back

2008-09-06T19:26:00.000-07:00

I've been getting a lot of requests to reopen the Soundabet business. But in just one month off I've been camping, sailing, hiking, kayaking, and reading. I haven't felt so good in YEARS. I've lost some weight and feel a whole lot better.

Having your own business is HARD work!! I can't work that hard anymore.

But... I do have some leftover stock of DVDs, CDs, and King's Queen's, and Game Cards. Look in the photo.

I'll sell them the old-fashioned way: by order blank. E-mail me at dangurney (at) yahoo.com. By return e-mail, I will send you an attached PDF file that is the order form. Print it, fill it out, send it to me a purchase order from your school or a check or money order to my PO Box:

Dan Gurney's Soundabet
P.O. Box 2255
Sebastopol, CA 95473

I'll fill it pretty quick, maybe in the evening after I've folded my sail, and send it by US Mail to you.

O.K.?

Early Beginnings, Part 3

2008-09-06T19:23:00.000-07:00

In the last post I talked about how pressure began to build on kindergarten teachers to teach basic early literacy skills. In 1996 I went to a workshop where I learned to use a pre-reading assessment tool developed by Roland Good III and Ruth Kaminski at the University of Oregon. Their tool is called Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy, or DIBELS, for short.

Kaminski and Good had reviewed the research that identified the skills that beginning readers use as they become good readers. The research made it clear that students who would become good beginning readers could do three things much better than students who would later struggle with beginning reading. The three skills are:

Alphabet Naming:
The ability to quickly identify the names of letters, in both upper and lower case forms.

Initial Sound Fluency:
The ability to identify the first sound of a word.

Phoneme Segmentation Fluency
The ability to take words apart into their component sounds.

Kaminski and Good’s contribution was to develop a test of these three skills that could be used by classroom teachers with a minimum of fuss and training. The idea was to help teachers identify students who would be likely to struggle in early reading lessons and help them before they experience trouble. I thought that this was a great idea and I began using DIBELS with enthusiasm right away.

DIBELS results confirmed what I had guessed intuitively about which of my students were struggling, and DIBELS gave my intuition solid-seeming numerical scores as evidence of my concern for them.

The other gift DIBELS brought to me was to bring into clearer focus just what phonemes English employs. In the phoneme segmentation subtest, I would ask students to break simple words into their component phonemes. I would say a word like “March” and the student would be expected to break it into its three phonemes: /M/ - /AR/ - /CH/.

You’d think someone who had been teaching kindergarten for some years would be able to tell you exactly what sounds our language has, but I couldn’t do that, and DIBELS helped to bring me closer.

As I gave students the tests, I became acutely aware that I was testing skills I hadn’t taught them. It felt unfair to do that.

So I began, haphazardly, to teach my class those “extra” sounds that English has. Most of these sounds are usually spelled with two letters. Their written forms are called digraphs, and they will look familiar to you: /NG/, /TH/, /SH/, /CH/, /OU/, /OO/, /OY/, /AR/ and so on. I noticed immediately that when I taught my students these sounds they could do better on the DIBELS assessments.

It felt disorganized, though. I presented these letters one by one to the class, and sometimes I felt like I was giving too much emphasis to some of these sounds while ignoring others. The dissatisfaction I felt about the disorganization lasted more than a year.

One day, as I was driving to the hardware store, for whatever reason, I was thinking about the ABC song. Someone long ago must have felt much the same way about the letters of the alphabet themselves. They decided to make a song out of it, borrowed a children’s tune written by Mozart (Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star) and made a memorable song, the ABC song. We all know it. It gives the letters a fixed order from A to Z and helps us rehearse it until we know it.

Like a bolt of lightning, the solution to my problem struck me: The genius of using a song to hold the ABCs together, I realized, could be extended to include all these extra sounds. Within an instant Soundabet was born. I felt like a new father. It seemed to me to be an earthshakingly good idea. It would make learning to read so much easier for students if they were taught all the sounds they might be expected to decode, from the start.

I spent the next few weeks thinking carefully about exactly what sounds Soundabet ought to include and which sounds I ought to leave out. I carefully considered which spelling to include for the various sounds. I consulted several books on the subject, especially Diane McGuinness’s Why Our Children Can’t Read.

Over the next year I began to use Soundabet in my classroom. The results were spectacular. Parents got excited. People began to talk. It wasn’t long before the Sonoma County Office of Education’s Reading consultant, Kevin Feldman visited my room. He saw Soundabet in action and asked me to do a workshop at the County Office of Education.

I agreed to do it, thinking back then there would be only one workshop. About 25 teachers showed up at that first workshop and a few tried Soundabet in their own schools. Their enthusiasm led to another workshop, then another, and another and soon I was asked to do a CD and a video, and before long I opened an Internet store.

Soundabet Beginnings, Part 2 of 3

2008-09-06T19:22:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I told about the confusion I felt in 1967 when I first attempted to teach reading as a high school volunteer. I learned that being able to read is not the same as knowing how to teach reading.

Fast forward nine years to 1976. I was reading Dr. Seuss’s Hop On Pop to a three-and-half year-old boy named Eric.

“Let me do it!” Eric told me.

“Do what?”

“Read Hop on Pop. I know it.”

“Really? OK, here.” I handed him the book. “You read it to me.”

And he did. Fluently. Page after page.

I was impressed because learning to read had not come easily to me. I could not read as skillfully as Eric until far into second grade. “Perhaps,” I thought, “he isn’t actually reading. Perhaps he simply memorized the book.” I pointed to a word on the page and asked him to tell me what it was.

“Town.” he told me, correctly.

“Wow. That’s right. It is town. How do you know that, Eric?”

“I just know it,” he told me.

Was Eric born literate? I wondered. Of course not. Someone must have taught him. His dad was an English instructor at a nearby junior college. Probably his dad taught him to read. I wished I knew.

I found myself pulling books off the education shelf at the public library. I studied Jeanne Chall, Rudolf Flesch, Romalda Bishop Spalding. I immediately saw that there was disagreement between the “look say” and the phonics camps. How to teach reading was controversial!

Like many other educators, I saw value on both sides. Eric seemed to read whole words. But when he came to a word he didn’t know, he sounded it out. He could sound out nonsense words.

It seemed to me then—as it does now—that the key to reading is sounding out words, as the phonics camp insisted. How did Eric learn the sounds?

I was pretty sure that Eric had not been through a formal phonics curriculum. He had not done worksheets. He could not recite any phonics rules. He simply seemed to know the sounds letters might (and might not) make.

Though I had no reason to teach reading, I wanted to know more. I thought that someday I might like to try to teach it. Of all the books I read, Romalda Bishop Spalding’s book, The Writing Road to Reading, seemed particularly helpful. Studying it, I became vividly aware that the English language has far more sounds than letters. English had sounds I didn't even know it had!

For example, I didn't know that the /th/ sound in "with" is not the same sound as the /th/ sound in "the" because the first sound is unvoiced and the second is voiced. They are related to each other in exactly the same way that the sounds /f/ and /v/ are related, as minimal pairs. Because the two /th/ pairs looked the same, I thought they were the same. But they aren't. Spaulding advocated a method of teaching reading by emphasizing sounds—by writing them—using their various spellings. It's a good approach, and if you click on her name, above, you can visit a website about her approach.

Fast forward another five years. I was in charge of my first kindergarten class at Dunham School. Kindergarten was different then. I was not expected to teach students to read, but simply introduce them letters and numbers. There was no pressure to do much else.

In early February, on the 100th day of school in my first year of teaching, we were popping 100 kernels of popcorn in oil in a pan, the old-fashioned way, before microwave ovens. I felt immense pride when one of the most advanced readers in kindergarten that year, David, looked at the words on the cellophane bag. His eyes widened and he sounded out his first word. “P-O-P-C-OR-N popcorn.” I felt immense pride and success as a teacher. David's performance in February would not put anyone at the head of any contemporary kindergarten class.

By 1996 pressure began to build on kindergarten teachers to cover pre-reading skills called phonemic awareness. I went to a workshop that gave me a tool to measure phonemic awareness skills called Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy, or DIBELS for short.

It was using DIBELS assessments that led directly to the invention of Soundabet.

Earliest Beginnings

2008-09-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

Soundabet first began more than 40 years ago when, in high school I served as a volunteer teacher in East Palo Alto's Saturday School. Gertrude Wilks started the school to help primary students who were falling behind in reading and math.

I did not know how to teach reading.

I remember two things quite clearly. First I remember the opening assemblies that kicked off the day. They felt almost like a church service: a sermon and some singing. Everyone gathered to hear a pep talk delivered by Ms. Wilks expressing her faith in the power of education followed by a rousing sing-a-long featuring "We Shall Overcome" "Down by the Riverside" and other anthems of the Civil Rights era.

The second thing I remember is the confusion I felt as I tried to help my third grade boy.

Saturday School didn't train us to teach reading. It was assumed, reasonably enough, that if we could read, then we could teach reading.

The confusion on his face ... was painful to see.

First-hand experience, however, taught me this: Knowing how to read and knowing how to teach reading are two entirely different things.

I knew I could read. I knew I did not know how to teach reading. I remember trying to explain to my poor student that the letter "o" made the short u sound and the letter "f" made the v sound in the word, "of." The confusion on his face as I tried to explain this to him was painful for me to see.

At that point, I thought that it was simply a matter of me learning the skills of teaching reading. In 1967 I would not have guessed that there was a good deal of disagreement about how people learn to read. I could not have known then that over the course of my lifetime much would be discovered about what's going on in brains as they learn to read.

Back then I didn't worry too much about any of this. Back then I had no idea I'd spend a good part of my life working on this problem.

Next Saturday I'll talk about the earliest days of my teaching career.