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High Hat Comes Back!
Sounds & Symbols breaks out with a whole new attitude
by Susie Keithahn
Many moons ago, in 1971, AGS published the Goldman-Lynch Sounds and Symbols Development Kit. Authored by
Dr. Ronald Goldman and
Martha E. Lynch, the kit was originally designed to put children on the path to reading with early phonics training, speech improvement, and speech therapy. This research-based program helped children learn to discriminate sounds, determine sound positions, segment or sound out syllables and words, delete and substitute sounds, and blend the sounds and symbols into words and sentences.
A few moons later, in 1986, the program was revised under a new name, the High Hat Early Reading Program. Today, a great number of people still use both versions of High Hat, but many of them continued to beg us for a revision and new materials.
We aim to please, and last month we completed the next generation of this popular program, blending the best of both editions, into the
Sounds & Symbols Early Reading Program.
To produce the new Sounds & Symbols, we listened to the comments and suggestions from users who contacted us over the years. We also formed a focus group of kindergarten teachers from a school in North Minneapolis that has used the High Hat program, very effectively, with its diverse population. This generated many solid ideas about how to make a good thing even better.
For this latest version of the program, we've written more stories, and edited the existing ones. We created wonderful new art. All of the activities have been updated and streamlined, along with creating convenient reproducible masters, to help classroom teachers save time. We did a little gender and racial balancing of the characters and made new puppets and a bag to contain the program. All of the stories and songs were recorded on CD. We even gave the High Hat character a head-he had merely floating eyes and a mustache under his
hat before! The new Sounds & Symbols can be used with children from pre-kindergarten age through third grade.
It's been a lot of work with numerous pieces to coordinate,
but of course we did it. All materials hit the warehouse stage on or near August 17. Now we can proudly tell our customers once again that High Hat-
unlike Elvis-has returned to
the building. (Thank ya, thank
ya very much.)
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