Anyone remember learning to read with ITA ?

After my time , but aware of ITA!
Janet and John rings a bell but so does a reading book called
Mack and Tosh!? Anyone remember that or is it a figment of my imagination? Seem to recall the cover was a red and blue tartan design . I did grew up in Yorkshire not Scotland!

I could read before I started school but I have vague memories of Janet and John. ITA must have been awful to work with!

My MiL was a reception class teacher and a new headmistress introduced it in the school, my MiL hated it.

Qhite a number of the children in her school came from a an area of housing with a high level of poverty and deprivation. Children she described as 'talked at, talked over and talked through, but rarely talked to'. They started school with a limited vocabulary, unfamiliarity with books or pens and pencils.

She said ITA was fine for the bright children and those that were virtually reading already, they quickly learnt how to read both ITA and normal script, but she said for those children without an enriched home background and the less able, it probably set them back years and could have left them illiterate because it would be, at least the second term before they were ready to start reading, and they had barely started to grasp ITA when they moved on and then had to make the transition.

It also meant that when learning to read they could not do the random reading and recognition of words in the environment round them. I can remember my DC going through a session of reading road signs as we drove along, in the same way number recognition came on fast because they would walk round the supermarket reading prices off the shelves.

Thankfully after only a couple of years that headmistress moved on and the new headmistress didn't like ITA and everything went back to normal.

I remember seeing it, but luckily never had to teach it. My schools did Janet and John, or the Ladybird series, Peter and Jane.

I remember learning to read (back in 1950!) from books about Jack and Jill, but no-one else seems to have heard of them.

I missed ITA thankfully - Janet and John for me.

Friends who did get caught by the ITA fad have terrible trouble with spelling.

I taught in a secondary school and could always tell which children had come from feeder schools using ITA by their spelling.

M0nica

My MiL was a reception class teacher and a new headmistress introduced it in the school, my MiL hated it.

Qhite a number of the children in her school came from a an area of housing with a high level of poverty and deprivation. Children she described as 'talked at, talked over and talked through, but rarely talked to'. They started school with a limited vocabulary, unfamiliarity with books or pens and pencils.

She said ITA was fine for the bright children and those that were virtually reading already, they quickly learnt how to read both ITA and normal script, but she said for those children without an enriched home background and the less able, it probably set them back years and could have left them illiterate because it would be, at least the second term before they were ready to start reading, and they had barely started to grasp ITA when they moved on and then had to make the transition.

It also meant that when learning to read they could not do the random reading and recognition of words in the environment round them. I can remember my DC going through a session of reading road signs as we drove along, in the same way number recognition came on fast because they would walk round the supermarket reading prices off the shelves.

Thankfully after only a couple of years that headmistress moved on and the new headmistress didn't like ITA and everything went back to normal.

This reminded me of when I was training and we were sent out on teaching practice, a friend was placed in an ITA school in a very poor area much like you describe.She was very concerned because the children had not transitioned at the age they were supposed to, when she raised this with her tutor he just said he wasn't surprised and some of them would never transition!

It was Dick and Dora, Nip and Fluff.
I learned to read with Old Lob and an assortment of farm animals.

ITA was a good idea, in principle, because it was based on using one symbol for each of the 44ish sounds we use in spoken English words. something that our 26 symbol English alphabet can't do.

But of course, it wasn't practical because of the fact that to implement it properly would mean that the entire canon of English texts would have had to have been rewritten using ITA, and those not taught to use it would have had to have relearned a whole new alphabet. An utterly impossible task.

It did have some good spin offs in that it made some teachers look differently at the then 'conventional' Look and Say method of teaching reading, whereby children were expected to memorise words as 'wholes'. this is actually an impossibility as the human brain is only capable of memorising some 2 - 3,000 words like that and the English language contains at least half a million words...

Sue Lloyd, co-author of Jolly Phonics, taught it and she says that it helped her to understand how English words were constructed and to develop her phonics programme based on that knowledge. Phonics being the teaching of the symbols used to 'spell' each of the sounds in a word.

I learned to read in the '50s, way before ITA was tried out. I can't remember at all how I was taught, I was just one of the lucky ones who picked it up easily. But at least 25% of children struggle without being taught explicit structured phonics.

My eldest learnt to read with ITA and reads for pleasure now. My second learnt with Biff and Chip, I asked her once if she had her reading book…..‘it’s okay Mum, I know the words’! Good memory but shocking reader! She is very dyslexic!

I have always been able to read, can't remember a time when I couldn't. My daughter was taught ITA and we both hated it, but because she was bright and we had loads of ordinary books she soon learnt to read properly - I am sure she could read before she started school, so was a backwards step

Dick and Dora, Nip and Fluff for me too.
I also had to teach reading with it as a young teacher. Our authority had given up the ITA but someone I know who has educational special needs still uses it they cannot make the transfer many years on.

MaizieD

ITA was a good idea, in principle, because it was based on using one symbol for each of the 44ish sounds we use in spoken English words. something that our 26 symbol English alphabet can't do.

But of course, it wasn't practical because of the fact that to implement it properly would mean that the entire canon of English texts would have had to have been rewritten using ITA, and those not taught to use it would have had to have relearned a whole new alphabet. An utterly impossible task.

It did have some good spin offs in that it made some teachers look differently at the then 'conventional' Look and Say method of teaching reading, whereby children were expected to memorise words as 'wholes'. this is actually an impossibility as the human brain is only capable of memorising some 2 - 3,000 words like that and the English language contains at least half a million words...

Sue Lloyd, co-author of Jolly Phonics, taught it and she says that it helped her to understand how English words were constructed and to develop her phonics programme based on that knowledge. Phonics being the teaching of the symbols used to 'spell' each of the sounds in a word.

I learned to read in the '50s, way before ITA was tried out. I can't remember at all how I was taught, I was just one of the lucky ones who picked it up easily. But at least 25% of children struggle without being taught explicit structured phonics.

This perpetuates the falsehood that "Look and say" was ever regarded as the only way to teach reading. It was always combined with phonics, and was never to my knowledge used exclusively. It was used to explain why children found words like aeroplane easier to read than some much more common shorter words. I taught reception, what is now year 1 and year 2 for a lot of my career and all the children I taught had some knowledge of phonics. They were not however obsessed and dominated by them and they didn't expect to be able to sound out every word which was just as well because English is not a phonetic language.

When my children started school, 'Look and Say' seemed to be limited to the first 20 words only, then the children had a book using only those 20 words and had the joy of being able to read a book. Not sure what happened after that, both mine were good readers when they started school, so never really went through those early stages at school.

For the same reasons I am not sure what happened when I started school, but I do remember that our reading books throught out infant and well into junior school were a series called 'Beacon Readers', all had stripes on them, different colours for different levels. They were very common because I went to 8 primary schools and they seemed to be used in all of them.

There used to be a reading scheme called "The Gay Way". It was renamed!

Oh, "The Gay Way" - that rings a bell when I was trying to remember what I learned with. Thank you Glorianny!

My younger brother had the ITA inflicted on him and had difficulty in reading and spelling for some time after that (he's not dyslexic). I used Peter and Jane to teach our DC to read, and it worked very well.

Some of the DGC use/d the Biff, Chip and Kipper books, and I've always wondered who decided on those names. They may be easy to read, but realistic??

Oh Glorrianny, you are so right. I am infuriated when patronising " experts" talk about phonics as if I had never heard of them in 40 years in Early Years teaching. ITA was another of those ideas inflicted on teachers and children by a non teacher with a bee in their bonnet. Everyone's an expert on teaching and learning!

OMG I've just discovered there is a website showing reading scheme books from 1950s-70s. I'm going to count up how many of them I used. If anyone is interested schoolreading70sbooks.weebly.com/

Oh it's got the Douning readers which were ITA Here's a page to challenge you!

Goodness me! I'm surprised that anyone learned to read with that to start with and then trying to transfer to normal books.

I’ve no idea how I learned. I was 5 in 1951. I do remember spending hours reading though as a child. Books were my world.

Wheniwasyourage

Goodness me! I'm surprised that anyone learned to read with that to start with and then trying to transfer to normal books.

I remember my friend's daughter learning with that method, that would have been in the late 70s. Thankfully my DD went to a different school.

Glorianny

Oh it's got the Douning readers which were ITA Here's a page to challenge you!

Easy to read but it looks a bit like Old English!

My younger sister did. It was disastrous. Took her ages to read properly. Thank goodness it was binned.

That’s the first time I’ve actually heard what ITA means!

As far as I’m concerned I could always read. I don’t remember learning. My mother told me I “taught myself” when I was four.