The Beginning - Initial Teaching Alphabet

Where to begin... Well certainly not at the beginning, that will have to come later.

Why a blog ?  I'm not really sure, I think I might have something worthwhile to say, but others will have to be the judge of that.  What better place to put musings and partial thoughts than in a blog.

First off, I am not a writer.  Science and math are more my cup(s) of tea than medieval French poetry or Shakespeare.  I am a terrible speller.  I am scanning the top edit line now for a spell checker, but not seeing one.. oh there it is ... that's better.  My lack of reading, writing and spelling abilities could be traced to my schooling. 

I started grade school in the mid 1960's in a small town in the lower Hudson Valley of New York state.   This town is just a few miles from the famed Washington Irvin's Sleepy Hollow.  My town has a historic light house, it's own Revolutionary War battlefield as well as a local Revolutionary War hero General "Mad" Anthony Wayne [look him up].  But, I digress.

In my hometown, we did not learn how to read and write using the normal alphabet, no that would have been too easy.  Mine was a "progressive" school.  We had something called the "Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA)" or as it was told to us five and six year old's, the "magic" alphabet.  This was learning to read and write based upon phonetics.  We learned this dribble in kindergarten and first grade, and then in second grade (YES, read my lips, SECOND GRADE) we transitioned over to the normal alphabet.  Here is a sample of the "magic" alphabet below.

It reads something like this

• can you draw the children
• at your school
• do you play with the children
• at your school
• what do you play
• draw the children
• playing with you
• write
• the children are playing with me

There were 44 "letters" in the ITA (see below).  Some of these letters were compound letters of the normal alphabet such as "ng", "wh" and two type of "th" (I loved those when I was using it way back when).  Other compound letters were vowel sounds such as "oe" "ae" and "ee".  Then there were the "w" letters (curly-q and non curly-q) that represented the "ooooo" like moon [mwn] or the "ook" sound as in book [bwk].  Another factoid about the ITA was that there was no capitalization, all lower case ( although one example book cover below breaks this rule). Words that would be normally capitalized had the first letter in the word in bold type (like jorj in "cuerius jorj").

So this is how I learned to read and write.  Pretty amasing, huh !  In addition to the school text book, childrens books were even translated into ITA, such as "Curious George".  These books were in the class room and could also be purchase through the monthly book orders we had at school [ scwl ].  You can still find these stored away in the archives of larger libraries and universities.  Here are the covers of a couple of books I found for sale on ebay.

"nobody listens to andrew"

Sammy Seal of the circus

curious george



Did I mention I am a terrible speller ? I have spoken to a number of people I grew up with and they too are terrible spellers.   I did some research recently on the ITA and found that it was abandoned by most school in the late 1960's and early 1970's and shown to be a terrible failure.  It was the "new math" of it's day.

Well that's my thought for the day.  I will be curious [cuerius] when I get my first legitimate visit on this blog and my first official or unofficial comment.  I'll try not to hold my breath.  LOL.

[If you would like to see the full text and pictures of cuerius jorj in ITA follow this link]