Information About The Author
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My name is Kathy Davis. I am a retired teacher. I started out as a nursery school teacher in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, when my children were little. Later I began working as a teaching assistant in the resource room at my children’s elementary school in 1985. It was there that I fell in love with teaching children who were having trouble learning to read. After moving to Johnson City, Tennessee I taught kindergarten, first grade, and second grade, during a ten year period at Ashley Academy. Most of those years were in first grade. I was fortunate to receive training in the Slingerland method during that time. I also obtained materials from the Total Reading program and the Dekodiphukan program and integrated those methods into my teaching. During this time I entered the Master Of Arts In Teaching program at East Tennessee State University and received my degree in 1992. After leaving Johnson City, I taught nine years in first grade at Macon-Hall Elementary School in Cordova, Tennessee. Along the way, I tutored many children individually as well.
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I wrote the materials on this site to supplement the basal reading curriculum I used for teaching reading during those years. My goal was to create materials that will work for many types of students, including dyslexic students, gifted students, and mixed groups. I wanted all of my students to learn to read well, even those who were not sure of themselves at first. As the years went by, I revised the original materials and added more books, workbooks, and games.
The materials and teaching methods on this web site helped my students develop their reading skills for many years. I used the Sound City Reading program successfully to teach regular public school and private school early elementary classrooms for a total of nineteen years and also to tutor individual students from the preschool to middle school level. They have worked so well I'm sharing them in the hopes that they will work with your students.
I've given the name Sound City Reading to the phonics materials I've developed to help children learn to read and write. I've used this name because I added roofs to the first letter charts I put on my classroom wall to make them look like a row of houses in a city.
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These are pictures of the first "Sound City" sound charts. Unfortunately, they were taken with an instant print camera in 1992, and they have faded to the point that they are mostly illegible.
