Beyond Blend Phonics

I have followed Don Potter’s website for years. He has been a teacher and tutor for a very long time, and he has tried it all. He knows what works for children. Years ago, through trial and error, he discovered a reading program that was easy to use, and he re-published it in 2003 as a free e-book on his website where it is still available. The book is called Reading Made Easy with Blend Phonics for First Grade, by Hazel Logan Loring. The program is commonly referred to as “Blend Phonics.” Mr. Potter has used Blend Phonics with great success for over fifteen years. I downloaded the e-book many years ago, and I regularly use Blend Phonics as a supplement with my own students. I recently purchased a print version of the book on Amazon, along with Mr. Potter’s two follow-up books, Blend Phonics Lessons and Stories and Beyond Blend Phonics. I have been using them daily in my work with struggling readers. Mr. Potter’s Lessons and Stories provides much needed practice opportunities for students to apply newly-learned decoding skills, and his Beyond Blend Phonics is a good reference book for teaching and reinforcing prefixes, suffixes, and root words. Mr. Potter has been, and remains, a credible voice in literacy education.Faith Borkowsky, Certified Dyslexia PractitionerFounder of High Five Literacy and Academic CoachingAuthor of:Failing Students or Failing Schools? A Parent’s Guide to Reading Instruction and InterventionReading Intervention Behind School Walls: Why Your Child Continues to Struggle

This is a must read for any teacher. It is incredibly useful in explaining morphology and word origin to children of almost any age. The book is straightforward. It has lists of prefixes and suffixes separated by language of origin and then again by syllable type (only in the romance prefix section). In the back of the book is a very accurate and reader friendly explanation of how the English language developed.I couldn't be happier with this book and am planning to order a few more as gifts for my colleagues.