We are a new, innovative company combining the fields of entertainment and education in order to improve children’s literacy skills. Our professional backgrounds include over thirty years in the field of speech-language pathology and ten years in educational theater.
Our mission is to use research-based information to create original, entertaining projects to help school-aged children primarily in the areas of language and literacy. We aim to emphasize speech sounds so that children can decode words (break words apart into their individual sounds) rather than memorize. In essence Phonics Fantasy Dance™ is a “dance of phonemic segmentation”.
A few years ago, Elaine worked in an urban middle school in Baltimore, MD. One of her students in the self-contained special education class was unable to follow one- and two-step directions, verbally respond to simple questions, or engage in intelligible conversation. She was quiet and shy, rarely smiling. Then, one day, while walking in the school corridor Elaine found this student dancing the latest hip-hop steps and singing words to a song. Motivated, smiling and eager to show off to her friends, she followed directions in sequenced actions, excelling in the very skills that were lacking in the classroom. It was a startling revelation that this student was capable of remembering the dance steps and the words to the song because she was having fun. Another student from the same class would avoid attending classes in which he was expected to read because he read on the primer level.
Older, at- risk students, as well as, special education students (as the two mentioned above) who had experienced failure seemed to be “turned off” to learning to read. Various social forces appeared to create a negative or apathetic attitude, especially in middle school students. While she continued to work with these students, trying to motivate them, she couldn’t help but think about her younger students in the elementary school level. Would they have a similar future? She did not want her younger students to experience the same negative emotions and poor attitudes toward reading. She knew she needed to first focus on her younger students in the hopes of motivating and teaching them the necessary skills for a literate future. She wanted them to have a greater chance of academic success by the time they reached middle school. Research indicates that phonological awareness, phonemic awareness and phonics, are critical to reading success. Phonemic awareness, especially phoneme segmentation, and phonics have been identified as two of the five necessary components in learning to read (National Reading Panel, 2000). If students in kindergarten and first grade had difficulty acquiring phonological awareness skills, there is a great likelihood that they would be identified as poor readers by fourth grade (Torgeson, 2004).
Wanting to motivate her younger students and make her lessons entertaining, she brought speech sounds “to life” through stories and puppets. The key to internalizing the concepts involved in letter-sound associations and improved speech articulation is to heighten the students’ kinesthetic awareness by concentrating on the “feel” of the speech sound. Therefore, emphasis is placed on how the speech sound is produced, using the tongue/lip/teeth in the sound category it belonged, i.e., “stretch” sounds [s-z, f-v, th-th, sh-zh] or “stop” sounds [p-b, t-d, k-g]. In this way, speech sounds develop attributes or “personalities” to be compared and contrasted. Such examples include the “quiet” or unvoiced sounds [p, t, k, s, f, sh, ch] versus “noisy” or voiced sounds [b, d, g, z, v, zh, j]. Often, when she instructs her young students to make a stretch sound she has them move their arms, as if stretching an imaginary exercise band. The children elicit the speech sounds with greater accuracy and remember them from session to session. Often her students omit the /s/ in /s/ blends, (st, sp, sk, sl, sw). To help them learn and retain the concept of the continuant or “stretch” /s/ sound, she has her students run their fingers along their arm while saying the /s/. They then stop and tap lightly while saying the second sound of the consonant blend, the /t/ (“s-s-s-s-s-s-t”). They appear to enjoy the success they experience from this multi-sensory approach. By adding the kinesthetic (movement) and tactile (touch) feedback, to the auditory (hearing), her students achieve quicker, more accurate results. She wanted to develop this kinesthetic approach for not only speech articulation but for phonological awareness for all general education elementary school students.
She, then, approached her daughter, Leya, an educational theater specialist, to collaborate with her by writing an original play that partnered knowledge from the fields of speech-language pathology through the teaching methods of educational theater. Leya had taken a class in African Dance and felt through what she had experienced that it would be the perfect fit for their project. In time, the original musical extravaganza of Alice’s Phonics Fantasy was born. The objective of the play is to motivate students in grades pre-kindergarten through 2nd grade by watching Alice develop phonological and phonemic awareness and phonics in a fun and entertaining way throughout the show. In addition, live theater enhances their cultural knowledge of the performing arts.
Since most children need multiple repetitions in an interactive format to internalize and remember concepts and facts, a DVD was created to reinforce the skills that the character, Alice, learns in our show, and so Phonics Fantasy Dance™ DVD was created. The DVD works well to supplement any ready program by previewing and/or reviewing concepts involving phonological skills, phonemic awareness and phonics.
Elaine received her BA in Speech Pathology from State University of Buffalo and her MS in Communicative Disorders from University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned her Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech Pathology from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association in 1976. She has been a school-based speech-language pathologist in urban and suburban schools for numerous years.
Leya holds a B.A. in Theater from Florida State University and an M.A. in Educational Theater from New York University. She has been teaching school aged children for numerous years.
