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Book 'Em Judy

A Walnut Creek Literacy Expert Revolutionizes Reading
appeared in the Diablo Magazine, December 2002, by Kerry Tremain

AFTER TEACHING THOUSANDS of people to read, Judy Kranzler can spot a faker. It's the young girl who shoots her hand up in the class first, gambling that the teacher won't call on her. Or the boy who needs to go to the restroom at strategic moments.

"I even catch adults who teach reading and can't read," she says. "One had a master's degree and taught third grade. I told her, 'I know you like I know myself. You could be a great teacher. But you need to admit to yourself and other people that you can't read.'"

See, Kranzler was a faker, too. She was the girl who shot her hand up, secretly panicked that the teacher might actually pick her.

As an adult, she has pioneered a method to teach literacy and founded four East Bay reading centers and a Walnut Creek company, Reading Revolution, that has trained more than 1,500 teachers. But all throughout grade school, the words in her textbooks might as well have been written in Aramaic. She couldn't translate them.

It wasn't for lack of trying. Even today, Kranzler, a 51-year-old woman with bright eyes and an athletic build, exudes the energy and enthusiasm of a teenager, one who finds everything fascinating.

As a child, she attended school in Palo Alto. By third grade, she knew something was wrong. "They made you read out loud. It was obvious I couldn't figure out the words."

For years, she managed to hide her problem. Kranzler memorized the Dr, Seuss books her mother read out loud. She recruited neighborhood friends to help. She'd ask the other kids the wrong question to elicit the right answer, such as, "Wasn't Merlin the main guy in the chapter?," to which the kid would reply, "No way, it was King Arthur."

When teachers finally cottoned to her problem, they placed her in an experimental program that projected words on the wall. Since she couldn't "see" the words quickly enough, this only frustrated her. Kranzler now believes most reading problems are due less to dyslexia than to what she calls "dys-teachia."

There are multiple pathways to our brain's knowledge centers, she explains. Almost all reading programs favor students who learn visually. But many students, like Kranzler, learn primarily through other faculties, like hearing or movement. "Think of how you remember a friend's phone number," she says. "Do you usually 'see' it on a mental movie screen? Do you say it out loud? Or do you remember by punching it out on the keypad?"

Kranzler's Reading Revolution utilizes every pathway. For each sound, students learn an easy-to-remember hand movement, like rubbing their tummies for the "mm" sound. To form syllables, they make verbal "ice-cream sandwiches" - symbolically smacking together ice cream vowels between cookie consonants.

This year, Kranzler launched a video series called Fletcher's Place, for kindergarten students, with videos for older kids in the works. At Jack London School in Antioch, one kindergarten teachers uses the Fletcher's Place program to transform her class of fidgety five-year-olds into a tiny chorus line of rhythmic readers. Instead of being forced to sit still, they move with the sound-and, the teacher says, they love it.

To Kranzler, that's the point. She is constantly inventing games, songs, dances, and rhymes to make reading fun. Kranzler has never failed to teach a student to read, even though teachers often refer their most difficult cases to her.

Recently, she helped a sweet-faced eight-year-old named Jeremy steadily sound out a word using his hands: "fan...tas...tic." Although he is a bright boy, Jeremy suffers severe language impairments that prevented him from speaking until he was four. When Kranzler met him earlier this year, he couldn't identify letters by name or sound and still spoke in toddler phrases like "me go do it." He was frustrated and angry in class.

But Jeremy likes physical activity and art. He sings to himself. By playing to these strengths, Kranzler taught him 26 sounds in a week and basic reading in three. When he returned to his school, he demonstrated the Reading Revolution™ technique to his classmates and told them, "This will make it easier for you, too."

Back for a return visit this summer, Jeremy watched a Fletcher's Place segment designed to teach the "k" sound. As the characters on screen complained about the mess under Fletcher's bed (the caramel, crushed candy, and cups), Jeremy mouthed the words, unconsciously moving his hands. Afterwards, he read a chapter from a book - a real book, he pointed out, not a kiddie book, and smiled at Kranzler. He was genuinely happy, and there's no faking that.