Book Review: Word Matters: Teaching Phonics & Spelling in the Reading/Writing Classroom
Sadie Elliott

Gay Su Pinnell and Irene C. Fountas are some of my most favorite authors to study as a first grade teacher. The techniques they present in their book Word Matters continue to provide practical information and helpful ideas for primary teachers. In the past few years I have returned over and over again to the chapters in this book to ensure that I am creating a balanced and quality program for my students. This book is designed to help teach so that students become highly literate, loving to read and write.

The sections in this book are useful and practical. They address an approach to teaching writing by integrating phonics, spelling, and oral language. The lessons and concepts include well-designed, focused experiences that help children attend to and use information from letters, sounds, words, and parts of words. It is a broad framework for literacy learning that is content rich in focus.

Within every chapter, you will find that the instructional ideas are interesting, fun, brief, and active as opposed to passive drill. Teachers who use the ideas in this book to supplement their writing curriculum will find that it helps address the needs of high fliers and still provides support for late bloomers as well. Their philosophy focuses on promoting interest in words and motivating children to investigate letters and sounds. While using this approach, I have seen high payoff in terms of studentsí transferring the skills taught during writing to other contexts in reading and writing.

Overall, this book is an excellent professional development resource. At the end of each chapter are suggestions for further reading and resources. As a jumping off point for creating a balanced literacy program, this book is key. School teams could also use this book to create benchmarks for student progress and design grade-level pacing guides for instruction. It is both an informative and empowering read for any primary grade teacher.