Before the appearance of the first Dick and Jane stories, reading primers "generally included Bible stories or fairy tales with complicated language and few pictures." After the Elson-Gray series ended in 1940, the characters continued in a subsequent series of primary readers that were later revised and enlarged into newer editions. "Dick" and "Jane" originally appeared in Elson-Gray Readers in 1930. Campbell did most of the early illustrations. Gray and others wrote the Dick and Jane stories illustrator Eleanor B. Sharp named the characters, selected and edited the storylines from ideas that others submitted, and supervised production of the books. In addition, Sharp developed the main characters of "Dick" and "Jane", the older brother and sister in a fictional family that included "Mother", "Father", and a younger sister named "Sally", their pets, "Spot" (originally a cat in the 1930s, but a dog in later editions), and "Puff", their cat and a toy teddy bear named "Tim". She worked with Gray to develop the readers after noting the reduced reading ability of children and urged the use of a new reading format for primers. Zerna Sharp, a former teacher, came up with the idea for what became the Dick and Jane readers for elementary school children while working as a reading consultant and textbook editor for Scott Foresman. Gray's vision was to tie "subject area" books in health, science, social studies, and arithmetic (each discipline having its own series of graded texts also published by Scott Foresman) with the vocabulary mastered in the basic readers, thus vastly improving readability in these same areas. Gray's research focused on methods to improve reading instruction using content that would be of interest to children and develop their word-recognition skills. Elson the Elson Basic Readers (renamed the Elson-Gray Basic Readers in 1936), which Scott Foresman published in Chicago, Illinois. William Scott Gray (1885–1960), director of the Curriculum Foundation Series at Scott, Foresman and Company and dean of the University of Chicago's college of education, co-authored with William H. The predecessors to the Dick and Jane primers were the phonics-based McGuffey Readers, which were popular from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, and the Elson Basic Readers. The Dick and Jane primers have become icons of mid-century American culture and collectors' items.ĭespite criticisms of the stereotypical content that depicted white, middle-class Americans and despite the "whole-word" or "sight word" ( look-say) method of teaching reading on which these readers are based, they retain cultural significance for what they tell us about literacy education in the mid-twentieth century. For a generation of middle-class Americans, the characters of "Dick", "Jane", and their younger sister "Sally" became household words. The Dick and Jane series were known for their simple narrative text and watercolor illustrations. Although the Dick and Jane series of primers continued to be sold until 1973 and remained in use in some classrooms throughout the 1970s, they were replaced with other reading texts by the 1980s and gradually disappeared from school curricula. These readers were used in classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used them. The characters first appeared in the Elson-Gray Readers in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books through the final version in 1965. Fun With Dick and Janeĭick and Jane are the two main characters created by Zerna Sharp for a series of basal readers written by William S. For the 2005 film remake, see Fun with Dick and Jane (2005 film). For the 1977 film, see Fun with Dick and Jane (1977 film).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |