I dug around on the net, and it appears I was wrong about the McGuffey Readers having the phonetic markings. The first books I read at home were very old, at least my mother's first books, posssible her mother's. Those books had phonetic markings. I'll have to look around and find them. I inherited a bunch of old books when mom & dad passed on a number of years ago.
I wonder if whole word reading comes back in fashion as they see some of the brightest kids pick up reading that way at first? I found this in the website I linked,
Whole language or whole word teaching was implemented as an untested theory. It sounded good on paper, and it seemed to work for young 1st and 2nd graders. Young children can memorize words rapidly, but it takes a bit longer to teach them rules and how to blend sounds together. Whole word methods seemed to produce young children who learned to read quickly; however, it was only the illusion of reading. With the whole word method, textbooks used by students included only the words these children had already memorized. However, once children got into the 3rd or 4th grade, the 1,000 to 2,000 words they had memorized were insufficient for reading at an advanced level, and they had no way of sounding out new words.
I wonder if that's why so many teachers think the kids "all level out about 3rd-4th grades"?
