2021 Zoo-phonics Catalog

Research

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Four-Year-Old Students’ Alphabetic Knowledge - Full-Day Program

Pre-Test

Mid-Term

# of Letters

Year-End

Animal Names

Animal Names

Letter Names

Letter Names

Body Signals

Body Signals

Letter Sounds

Letter Sounds

Lowercase

Uppercase

Figure 3. Lowercase and Uppercase Alphabetic Proficiency for 4-Year-Old, Full-day Preschoolers

A cohort comprised of 413 four-year-old low income, multi-ethnic preschoolers was used in this study. Students attended one of four district-operated preschool programs in the Putnam City School District (PCS), in Oklahoma and the Franklin County School District (FCSD), in Tennessee during the 2015- 2016 and 2016-2017 school years. There was no significant difference in scores between genders.

Gender Study

Boys

# of Letters

Girls

Animal Names

Animal Names

Letter Names

Letter Names

Body Signals

Body Signals

Letter Sounds

Letter Sounds

Lowercase

Uppercase

Figure 4. 4-Year-Old, Full-day Preschool, Year-End Alphabet Proficiency for boys and Girls

The trend of girls performing better than boys is essentially eliminated with less than one letter difference in lowercase letters and no differences across the uppercase variables. Boys and girls effectively performed equally by the end of the year. Mean scores indicate that near-mastery in all alphabetic knowledge was achieved for almost all four-year-old students regardless of gender or low SES. Kindergarten data shows the same trends.

Famous Researcher’s Grandchild Loves Zoo-phonics!

“My oldest grandson, Andrew, went to kindergarten in Redondo Beach,California, where his teacher was using a program called Zoo-phonics to introduce the students to the alphabet and reading. Andrew’s family came to Tallahassee that year for Christ- mas, and Andrew’s dad told a funny story about something that had taken place two weeks earlier (first week in December). Andrew had brought home from school one of the decodable books that are included with the program to read to his

parents. These books are written to provide practice for children in using the letter-sound relationships they have learned in class to identify words in printed text. They are not always great literature, but they do help students learn how to use “phonics” skills to decode unfamiliar words in text. Well, Andrew was reading along quite nicely, since he was already learning to decode quite well, when he came to one of those words that “don’t play fair.” Some programs call them “outlaw” words, or irregular words - words that

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