Can you imagine what Dick and Jane would sound like today?
http://www.box.net/shared/dm9hi7ep28
Back in the 60’s, or so my mom tells me… 😉 ‘Dick and Jane’ were the way kids learned how to read. If you happen to fall upon one of these books, take a look and see.
There was tremendous controversy about these books. Imagine being a child sitting on the floor of your kindergarten classroom, while your teacher was letting you all take turns reading these simplistic, picture-limited vocabulary stories.
It took the President of the United States to encourage this company to add a minority family to the series! So along with Dick, Jayne, Sally, Spot, and Puff, came the African-American family Mike, twins- Pam and Penny, with their parents.
The Scott, Foresman primer, introduced only a few words at a time to readers and used pictures and repetition to make sure children learned the meaning of each word. People felt this method did not properly teach children how to read or to appreciate literature, because of its limited vocabulary and overly simplistic stories.
Soon after, the books were pulled from the shelves due to this tremendous controversy! The reading was too simplistic!
These were Kindergarten kids! I guess the world was missing terrorism, and didn’t have enough political mayhem back then, and needed something to FOCUS on!
Feel free to go to either of my websites www.robinmarshallvo.com or www.JayneFM.com to hear more stories on my podcast!