Parents were asked to read a Phonic Faces Alphabet Storybook and a comparable emergent literacy storybook. Pretest shows that only during the Phonic Faces reading did parents point to print or mention letter-sounds, rhyme, or phonemic awareness. The charts reveal that children read to by their parents and Head Start children read to by teachers both began to focus on the letter made by the Phonic Faces book character and make the associated sound as a natural part of reading the story. For both groups, this spontaneously occurred by the end of the first bookreading. The adults then were shown how they could also point out rhyme, sounds-in-word positions, letters within words, and letter-sounds. Following a 5-minute model, parents began to point to print and rhyme during reading for both types of books, but quickly forgot to address print after 6 or 7 pages for the traditional storybook. Phonic Faces books make it easy to remember and find words that can naturally be used to teach phonemic awareness and print knowledge, resulting in statistically greater responses for both pretraining and following the 5-minute modeling. The same results were obtained for Head Start Teachers reading to their children. Results were statistically significant (ASHA national convention, 2003).
