In The Beginning There Was Whole Phonics But First There Were Drawings and Paintings

The author was fortunate to spend one of her high school years in Japan where a neighbor friend taught her to read and write Katakana, a simple form of Japanese writing, each character representing a syllable, so that she could read the signs at the rail stations, as she had a long commute to school every day. Sadly though, she was not a good student, as academics went, and she dropped out of her senior year to get married. When her daughter was four years old she wanted to teach her how to read and was inspired to use the syllable method she'd learned in Japan, but modified with English vowels and letters. It proved to be so easy, and her daughter learned to read and write so quickly, in under three months, that she was gradually led to finish school and work towards a teaching degree with the sole purpose of teaching more children to read. In her first year of teaching for public schools, Marsha was unable find suitable reading materials for her class of non-reading 3rd graders, so she began to write her own, employing the same method that she had used with her daughter. Over the years it grew into more and more pages. She used it exclusively in the first few months of school to get her students started. They loved "owning" their own copy and the parents were very impressed with the children's enthusiasm and confidence over this big heavy book with lots of words and no pictures. She sent the material home with each student over Christmas vacation and when they came back to school in January, having practiced over vacation, they could read just about anything at their grade level. One mother reported that her first grader was also reading the newspaper. Outside of her family, home, church, and husband's business, the development of this book, IN THE BEGINNING, has been the rest of her life.