Why Jonny Can Read

Henny Wenkart, wife of an electronics engineer in Cambridge, Mass., was sure that their four-year-old son Jonny was ready to read because he knew all the letters and relished their sounds. So she bought some standard primers and set out on her own to teach him--only to find that Jonny couldn't read.

The reason, she soon saw, was the primers' "look-say" method of teaching. Rather than sound out letters to form words, Jonny had to memorize long "sight" words like airplane. It was too much for him. "I was so sorry I'd started," recalls his mother, "but I couldn't stop and let him think he'd failed. It was awful."

Henny Wenkart, who has two smaller children and is working toward her Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard, learned about reading techniques and decided to write and illustrate her own primer. Since Jonny knew letter sounds, she converted them to sentences of readily decoded words, for example, "O, I am so ill." Since vowels make so many sounds, she focused first on consonants and on only two vowel sounds: "I told Jonny that when two big round o's get together they look at each other and say 'oo!' and I taught him short a as in cat. Then I figured out sentences--A kangaroo has a hoola hoop. A rat and a fat raccoon. Dad has a bamboo hat. Can I pat a baboon?"

When Jonny breezed through the 23-page result, At a Zoo, his delighted father paid for printing several hundred copies and launched Henny Wenkart as a publisher. Her 85-c- paperback sold out fast at the Harvard Coop, which reordered, sold out again. Sensing a phonetic gold mine, Author Wenkart wrote The Man in the Moon, which adds the and short i in such sentences as "The moon looks as if it is an igloo." Using the principle of adding new sounds rather than new words, three subsequent Wenkart primers tackle u as in fun, o as in rock and e as in desk, plus the silent e that gives vowels a long sound as in pipe and cave.

Since sound is stressed, Wenkart sentences can be odd--for example, "The song of the toot root has made the princess snore." But kids like the fancifulness more than the doggedly homely prose of ordinary primers, and as a bonus they get a sound start on correct spelling. Author Wenkart has plenty of proof that parents hunger for her products. With almost no advertising, the books now sell briskly in nearly every state. They help teach literacy-hungry preschool children, but are also being used by such topflight private schools as New York City's Brearley. Sales to date: more than 20,000.

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