I’ve always loved teaching reading, the rewards are unparalleled. One day a resource teacher said to me, “I have been working with this student for years and he has never read in class. Yesterday he read. What did you do?”

I began to tell her about all the programs I had studied. We came to the conclusion that I needed to take everything I know and put it into a box that I could hand to her. This is that box.

The core piece of research behind this program was that students with reading disabilities need massive repetition and multimodality. All of the spelling programs I looked at had lots and lots of rules to learn, so I couldn’t do massive repetition with them. I had to find a way to simplify English.

One of the hardest things about English is that five vowels are used to make eighteen sounds. I animated that into the seven syllables. Then I looked at what happened to English that made it so confusing. I found a pattern of rules and boiled them down to seven. So there it was - seven syllables and seven rules that could explain the spelling of every word in English!

To address the need for multi-modality, after animating the syllables and rules I wrote a book, made a CD and posters.

The 7 Syllables Program contains:

Instruction manual, DVD one-hour feature The History of English According to Bob, Teacher’s Manual, Student Workbook, CD of the 7 Syllables, Tales to Tickle the Rules storybook, comprehension Cards, and a set of 15 posters!