Celebrate Children’s Book Week by teaching children to read

nick cowen, 3 October 2007

Civitas has marked the start of Children’s Book Week (www.booktrusted.co.uk/cbw/) by making available for the first time in a commercial edition a phonics-based reading course that has achieved sensational results with children from all backgrounds, including the most deprived.
Irina Tyk wrote The Butterfly Book in 1993 to make available to other teachers and parents her method of teaching reading using phonics – a system that teaches children to read by recognising the 44 sounds that make up the English language.

This was the period during which the education establishment had abandoned phonics – the traditional method of teaching reading for hundreds of years – in favour of other approaches. Teachers who still used and believed in phonics operated what was almost an underground movement to keep the old skills alive. For over a decade Irina Tyk produced privately printed copies of The Butterfly Book in what could be compared to a samizdat operation for those who valued the obvious benefits of phonics.

The new Civitas edition, attractively designed and competitively priced at £9.50, now brings the approach to a wider public. By following the simple instructions contained in this book, parents and teachers can quickly learn how to give children the excellent start in life that literacy will always confer.

Now that the pendulum of educational fashion has swung back towards tried-and-tested methods, teaching reading by phonics is required in every state school as of this month.

At Holland House School, of which Irina Tyk is the Head, children are expected to be reading independently after three terms. The Butterfly Book is the standard reading text book used in supplementary schools run by Civitas for disadvantaged children, as it has proved most effective in overcoming problems with reading in children of all ages and backgrounds. At the 2007 Civitas summer school the average reading age of the children increased by one year and nine months in just two weeks of morning lessons thanks to the Butterfly Book (table of results).

Irina Tyk explains in the book’s introduction that when she first become a head teacher in 1989:

‘… learning to read had become something of a hit and miss approach that relied on the memorisation of whole words and the application of contextual cues often in the form of pictures. Such reading strategies reflected the widespread opinion that the English language contained too many exceptions and too many spelling anomalies to be taught in a coherent and systematic fashion. The exceptions had overwhelmed the consistencies! And so I found myself among a small number of like-minded teachers and educationalists who continued to teach children to read as our grandparents and great-grandparents had once been taught. Long before modern theoreticians rethought the matter, there was neither mystery nor enigma in how children were taught to read at their mother’s knee or in their first year at school… I wrote The Butterfly Book so that children may be taught to read easily, quickly and with a lot of pleasure.’