Just Finished: Seeing Stars by Nanci Bell

Seeing Stars: Symbol Imagery for Phonemic Awareness, Sight Words and Spelling by Nanci Bell


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Excellent book on an exciting method to teach reading. It's a supremely well written book with superb examples throughout so that you can really see how the whole method is done (no pun intended).

In brief this is a method to help students learn to read by creating pictures in their minds of letters and then associating the sounds with them. It starts with individual letters or sounds (sh and similar combos are their own 'letters') and moves on to simple and complex syllables. It also has a sight word component. Underlying the whole process is the theory that the students need to learn to hold an image of a what they are reading in their heads so that they can compare and self monitor as they read. This skill is specifically taught on easier levels and then students earn to apply it to their more complicated reading material.

My co-worker has used this and we have really seen it work. I just started using it with some students and I am pretty excited about it.

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Additional information: The Seeing Stars Program