Allographs™ I Dictionary Common English Words: Linguistic Spelling Program

I am utterly confused by the print quality of this book. The font is ancient-think pre word processor. It has an ugly layout. It is cluttered, but most offensively, it is poorly printed! The pages look like they were printed to order on an old printer. The letters are not crisp. People who make copies understand that you need to start with a strong blackline master. It seems that the book was printed off a copy of a copy because the ink on the letters didn't make full contactt. This gives the words a sort of blurry, moving effect. I loved McGuinness's book and purchased this strictly on that basis, but this "book" is unacceptable.

The Allographs Dictionary is a valuable part of the whole Allographs program. I am new to these materials, but so far I am starting to see a confidence in my lowest readers that I haven't seen before. Part of the theory behind the Allographs program is: 1) It's much less confusing to go from the spoken word to the written word than to go from the written word to the spoken word. I thought this was questionable when I first read D. McGuiness's books on reading, but as I work with these materials, I am thinking she might be right and 2) writing words by saying the sounds (not the letter names) as you write the word, goes into the memory in a more stable way than just seeing the word, even with repeated exposures. My frustration has been that although we were teaching children to sound out words, they were clearly reverting to a sight strategy when they got to difficult words. I am hoping that the Allographs program helps to prevent this from happening.This is a spelling program that is designed to help children who are poor spellers and poor readers. Spelling a word helps to slow children down, and see the holes in their sounding out.So far, my students are enjoying doing the spelling. They appreciate the clarity of it, and they tell me that they are feeling more confident. They are starting to sound out words automatically, where at the beginning of the program I had to insist that they say the sounds as they write. Now they want to, and they are pleased when they are able to figure out how to spell a word that they have never read. I recommend this program.The stories are a bit bizarre, but I appreciate that they have some real action. So many phonics stories are simple statements of boring things. In the Allograph stories, there are bad guys and heroes, which is good for low readers.

I love the dictionary in principle. Unfortunately, the typeface is not very good, sometimes aligning poorly with underlines and other markups used in the printing. This sometimes makes an "i" look like an "r" or something even more confusing. It would definitely be worth retyping with a modern word processor. The other books in the Allographs I series (the teacher's manual and the workbook) are free from this problem. I would also suggest adding tabs to the main sections for more easy thumbing.