[lainie]

I have a book that combines the merits of phonic and sight reading, saying all these pooh-poohers who strictly adhere to phonic teaching ignore the fact that not all English is phonetic.

Anyway, I have six publishers (certain years only), a Seventh-Day Adventist publisher, and an Amish set of readers. I found and purchased the Amish set because they're based on farm life and character building (and they were very cheap). I'll go ahead and post the series I'm searching for, on the off chance that freepers have sources.

Economy Reading Series (1975)
HBJ Reading Program (1979)
Holt Basic Reading System (1977)
Macmillan Reading Series (1970 or 1983)
Scott Foresman Basic Readers (1956)
Ginn Reading 720 (1976)

[Slyfox]

You might try Powell books in OR. They have a website. Also, thebackpack.com or any of the rare/used book websites. Some really good readers are the Bob books and the Let's Read set from Educator's Publishing Service.

[expatpat]

Both phonics and word-recognition are OK. I 'taught' my two daughters to read by reading to them on my knee so they could follow the words above my finger as I read.

One of them clearly 'taught herself' by word recognition and the other clearly used phonetics. The first acquired a bigger vocabulary quickly, but the second one was better able to handle new words seen for the first time.

[BamaGirl]

Hi Lainie,

Have you heard of something called the "McGuffey" set of readers? They were an alternate set of readers we used in conjunction with our usual reading book.

I remember how in third grade (1983) we thought they were REALLY ADVANCED readers, because they had fancy new words like "vivid" and "effloresce."

In retrospect I get the feeling that those books were the real deal, and everything we have now is an incredibly dumbed down version of the McGuffies.

BamaGirl

[ladylib]

Here's a site that offers out-of-print children's books:

http://www.alibris.com/subjects/editorial/out-of-print-childrens-books.cfm