Two Parent-Teacher Guides — offered at nominal cost — contain specific suggestions for ensuring success using the BASIC READING SERIES with your children. All these suggestions will be relevant at some time during the program, but from the outset the authors call special attention to five points of particular importance. These points, which are basic to the BRS philosophy, concern everyday practices that can maximize the effectiveness of the program. Briefly summarized here, they are discussed in more detail in this guide.
Each Parent-Teacher Guide — one for Levels A, B and C and the other for Levels D, E and F — contains detailed, page-by-page Teaching Plans with suggestions on how to implement the BRS program with a group of children or a single child. For greatest effectiveness, the authors urge parents and teachers to adhere to the program’s philosophy, explained in the Guides. Order the Parent-Teacher Guides from your homeschool supplier, educational bookstore, or Amazon.
The BASIC READING SERIES consists of readers and workbooks at six different reading levels: Levels A to F. Beginning readers will, of course, begin with Level A, A Pig Can Jig, Part 1. But what about children with prior reading experience? At which level should they begin? For these children, the authors devised the BRS Placement Test.
The test consists of having the child read words and sentences selected from the Level A to F readers. This is especially necessary when a child comes from a reading program that is markedly different from BRS in its fundamental features. Testing the child on the various levels is like a series of graded steps that they try to climb, seeing how far they can climb comfortably, safely, and with confidence. The parent or teacher makes note of the climbing effort to be able to later give advice to the child. The test also enables the child to look back down their own path to see how far they have come and to establish realistic goals for the future.
The BASIC READING SERIES is carefully programmed to ensure that children get off to a good start in reading. The books build success upon success, ensuring that children increase their confidence at every step. Following are the new elements introduced at each of the Levels A to F.
Level A, Parts 1 and 2: A Pig Can Jig
A Pig Can Jig, published in two colorful volumes, is carefully programmed to ensure that children get off to a good start in reading. The books build success upon success, ensuring that children increase their confidence at every step.
The key phonic elements introduced in Level A, A Pig Can Jig, are the short vowels a and i, 17 initial and 10 final consonants in two- and three-letter words, compounds formed from those words, and 14 exceptional words. In addition, the books contain detailed instructions and teaching suggestions to aid parents and teachers in implementing the BASIC READING SERIES program.
Example: I hid the cat in Dad’s hat.
Level B: A Hen in a Fox’s Den
The Level B reader is programmed to ensure that children build on the success they experienced in Level A, Parts 1 and 2. The most important new element is the introduction of three new vowel sound-spelling relationships: e as in pet, o as in pot, and u as in cut. The words in which these relationships are used follow the same pattern as the words in Level A: they are three-letter words in which a vowel appears between two consonants. As before, each letter represents a single speech sound. With the addition of g as in get, y as in yet, and the letter x, the presentation of all the most regular consonant sound-spelling relationships is completed in Level B — with the single exception of the letter q.
Example: “Get in, Red Bug! It is fun in a cobweb.” But the red bug did not get in.
Level C: Six Ducks in a Pond
The Level C reader introduces words of four and five letters using two consonants in succession (blends and digraphs). These include the doubled consonant that represents a single speech sound (as in bell); two different consonants that represent a single speech sound (as in kick); and two different consonants that represent separate speech sounds (as in bend and dust). At first the use of two consonants together is confined to the end of words, but the last four sections introduce words in which the two consonants occur at the beginning (as in skid and span) and words in which they occur at both the beginning and the end (as in black and crack).
Example: “Mrs. Frog,” said the fox, “what a big sack of plums you have! Just two of them are as big as you, and you have a sack of them!
Level D: A King on a Swing
The Level D reader introduces several new sound-spelling patterns in which two consonants occur together. These differ significantly from the combinations of consonants that appeared in Level C. That level introduced words in which one sound is represented by two letters, such as ll and ck, and words in which two sounds are represented by two letters such as sk and nd. At Level D, however, two consonant letters for the first time represent a single sound that is different from the sound represented by either consonant singly. (For example, the sound represented by sh is not that which children have previously associated either with s or with h. Other combinations of the same sort are ch, th, ng, and wh.)
Level D also introduces nk as in bank, in which the letters nk represent two sounds. Although these letter combinations are new to the program, the sounds they represent are not new to the children, who use them regularly in ordinary speech and therefore need no training in vocalizing them — only in recognizing how they are represented by letters. Note that a three-letter, one-sound combination also occurs at this level: -tch, as in match.
Other new elements in Level D include two-syllable words formed by adding -ing to one-syllable pattern words, the letter q in combination with u as in quick, and several new contractions, including combinations of verbs with personal pronouns and verbs with not.
Example: “I don’t have any milk for lunch, Ann,” said Mrs. Chen. “The milk truck hasn’t come yet. I think it’s in the next block.”
Level E: Kittens and Children
The number and variety of sound-spelling patterns introduced in a particular section of the BASIC READING SERIES have been gradually increasing as the children’s capacity to assimilate them has increased. In Level E, the reading vocabulary of the children is extended considerably. Levels A through D introduced one-syllable words representing four distinct sounds or fewer. The first sections of Level E include longer words representing five or more distinct sounds, as well as multisyllabic words. The latter are generally those in which the first syllable is stressed and the final syllable is a rather common suffix. Examples of such words are asked, batter, and flatten.
The middle sections of the Level E reader introduce words with vowel digraphs, such as beet and rain, and words with diphthongs, such as boil and lawn. The final sections introduce the “long” sounds of the five vowels in the vowel-consonant-e pattern (game, mile, bone, etc.) and in miscellaneous other patterns (words such as baby, music, toe, tomato, and many others). These sections also add words with an unstressed first syllable, such as about, begin, and remember.
The stories in Level E are longer and more detailed, and they cover a broader area of subject matter than those in earlier levels. The sentences and paragraphs are also of a more complex structure than those the children have been accustomed to reading.
Example: Winter was coming, and the trees were yellow and red in the mountains. As the wagons went up and up, it got colder. Soon there was snow. But there were spots between mountains where the travelers found shelter from the cold and snow.
Level F: The Purple Turtle
Level F completes the presentation of sound-spelling patterns that enable a child to decode almost all written English. Like Level E, Level F presents many sound-spelling patterns in each section, since most children can digest larger quantities of new material at this point.
The first section of Level F introduces words in which various vowel letters are followed by the letter r. Note that a given vowel letter when it is followed by r usually represents a sound different from the one it represents when combined with other consonants. (Compare cat and car, not and nor, cut and cur, hen and her.) Also, the greatest dialectal differences among speakers occur in words spelled with the vowel-r combination.
The second section introduces infrequent vowel sound-spelling patterns (such as the ou in touch, the ea in dead, the u in pull). The last two sections include words in which a number of consonants represent sounds different from any presented thus far (such as the c in cent, the g in large, the s in sure). The final section of Level F includes patterns in which two or more consonants represent a single sound and in which one or more consonants appear to be silent (such as the k in knee, the b in dumb, the w in wrap).
Example: Although Mara didn’t say anything to her brothers and sisters, she thought that one day she might be part of the act. She would often disappear behind the circus wagons. There, in the bright sunlight, she would practice dancing where no one could see her.
Authors Donald Rasmussen and Lynn Goldberg drew their inspiration for the BASIC READING SERIES from the work of Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949), an American professor of Germanic languages who created the field of linguistics as a branch of science. In studying such non-Western languages as Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines, Bloomfield realized the futility of trying to fit all languages into the format of Latin grammar as was the common practice in his time. He was one of the founders of the Linguistic Society of America in 1924 and wrote an article for the first issue of its journal.
Bloomfield’s concern with the use of linguistic knowledge in the teaching of reading apparently began in the 1920s when he prepared some materials to use with one of his sons. Bloomfield touched upon this practical application of linguistics in his monumental book, Language (1933), followed by an essay “Teaching Children to Read” from which he extracted the article “Linguistics and Reading” (see link below), published in 1942 in two issues of The Elementary English Review. In 1963, after his death, Bloomfield’s student and friend, the lexicographer Clarence L. Barnhart, produced Let’s Read, a series of readers, workbooks, and manuals based on his word lists.