Operation Reading Snowball

Each One Teach One

It’s no secret that our country suffers from a low literacy rate. This isn’t good. It limits us, both individually and nationally, and it needs to be changed.

‍ ‍Operation Reading Snowball is based on the “Each One Teach One” model for the social development of literacy, This method was conceived by the missionary Frank Laubach, who created alphabets for hundreds of people groups around the world, and used these personalized alphabets to teach people how to read and write in their own language. He also created literature so these new readers could read stories, traditional lore and histories which, until then, had only been passed down by mouth.

Laubach encouraged the people to teach others to read, and people who had barely learned to read themselves began teaching others.

We hope to follow in the Laubach tradition by creating products that will help parents and caregivers teach their preschoolers to understand how the English Alphabet works and how to use the Alphabet, and its sounds, to read words.

With this purpose in mind we’ve added a new Alpha-Phonics resource titled, The Get Ready to Read Book: Identifying, Sounding Out and Blending the ABC’s.

This pre-school level book contains Letter Sound Charts, Decoding Puzzles, Enunciation Drills (using Short Vowel Sounds), and beginning word lists. Students learn to distinguish between letter names and letter sounds, and they learn to blend the sounds into simple words.

After completing this reading-readiness (phonemic awareness) course, the learner is ready to start using Samuel Blumenfeld’s Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers, which takes a student all the way through the various letter sounds, or letter-combination sounds, while simultaneously introducing simple sentences. After mastering the Blumenfeld course, students are ready to begin reading independently, and their ability to read continues to grow through practice.

So how do we plan to get the Snowball’s rolling?

We are in the process of making The Get Ready to Read Book available on our website as a downloadable pdf. This pdf will be available soon.

Until then, the book is available through Amazon.

Be on the lookout for new products and opportunities for becoming part of Operation Reading Snowball.

Meg Rayborn Dawson