Empowering all with the ability to read and comprehend easily.

Directions:

For each unfamiliar word, locate the first letter or single sound letter combination of the word on the Letter/Image Chart, pronouncing the name of the letter so as to sound out the letter or letter combination in the word and pronounce the entire word.

How was Butler-Bender Interactive Reading Method Created?

After twenty-five years of teaching at-risk students, with great success, I was asked to teach accelerated reading to gifted, advanced, and accelerated first graders.

My classroom was to be made up of the top 15 first graders at my school. My principal suggested that I take only 12 first graders, leaving room for 3 new students. I would not have the luxury of an assistant in the classroom. Even though my students were at the top of their first grade class, they were on different reading levels. The students had no difficulty reading memorized stories and they knew their alphabets. To my surprise, they did not know the sounds of the alphabet. The students could not sound out any new word. 

This prevented me from having small reading groups without interruptions. This made instructions written on the board difficult, silent sustained reading impossible, and I was not able to individualize reading.

My classroom was noisy, disruptive, and nonproductive! I synthesized reading skills from past and present reading programs, inventing a new method and device for teaching and learning reading, which I later patented. BBIRM is so easy to use! My students waited in line at my desk to get their Butler-Bender Interactive Smart Chart so they could go back to their desks, sit down, and read. My classroom became very noisy, but a happy noisy! The students were filled with excitement as they called out words. The student could pick up any book in the classroom and read it.