Thursday, August 30, 2012

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]

8 comments:

  1. Testing comment section

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  2. OK, that ITA seems kind of... crazy. Why teach one alphabet when you're just going to have to teach another? I grew up in NYC, but went to school a few years after you, and we didn't use this! Thank goodness...

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  3. Thank you for posting. I am a librarian at an elementary school in Ohio and learned to read using ITA in school (a small town in Pennsylvania). I was looking for something to share with the children in my school - to understand those troubled readers. ALL my students grades 2-4 are going to see your blog and listen to Thank You, Mr. Falker (the author was a troubled reader). I think it is a great way to let kids know they don't all learn the same way. Thank you for sharing.

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  4. I have just acquired a ITA version of the original Curious George (Cuerius Jorj) story. In the next several days I will make a new blog entry of the pages of that book.

    Thanks for your comment !

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  5. I have a facebook page for people who experienced the ITA experiment. Please feel free to drop by and comment. I have a number of books, some of them complete. I have just acquired sammy seel ov the sircus and have borrowed your cover image temporarily if you don't object. I collect the books from eBay and biblio as a bit of a hobby. I met ITA in the early seventies. You can find my page here: https://www.facebook.com/InitialTeachingAlphabet

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  6. Amazing to see this all these years later. I was taught this in school in England in the late 70s I was born in 1970. I have struggled all my life with spelling and alphabetical order, in recent years believing that I am maybe dyslexic but all I can say is its amazing that I can read and and write at all!!!

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