I was born in Aberdeen, South Dakota and moved to Salem, Oregon when I was four. As a young girl, I struggled with reading. When I got to the eighth grade, I wanted to prove I was a good reader. One day, I overheard one of my classmates, who was in the top reading group, say that he was not going to read The Last of the Mohicans because it was too hard. I decided if I could read this book, I could read any book. I read the book and actually enjoyed it, and from then on, books became my friends. Over the years, my love for writing and reading poetry and composition has grown. Although I pursued a career in nursing, which I found to be very rewarding, I have always come back to reading and writing as a hobby and am now pursuing my dream as an author. I taught my grandchildren preschool, and it is this experience which inspired my first book, A Colorful Journey Through the Land of Talking Letters. I currently live in Salem, Oregon with my husband and am happy to have the rest of my family close to me to share in my journey as an author.
In 1985, my fourth daughter was born, and my other three daughters were still in school. At that time, I took classes on how to teach Dr. Orton’s multisensory phonics method. Mrs. Romalda Spalding had worked with Dr. Orton in his research on learning disabilities and wrote The Writing Road to Reading, which is a manual on how to teach the 70 phonograms (the first 26 phonograms are the 26 letters of the alphabet). Dr. Orton developed these phonograms to help children learn to read. I taught this method to parents, teachers and students. I was so impressed with the results and have been sold on it ever since. During the 1980′s, several documents came out regarding whole word (sight reading) verses phonics, which I read with much interest.
If you would like to learn more, just contact me with any questions or comments. You can also go to my blog to receive updates about upcoming events I will be attending, read blog posts about my personal journey through the land of talking letters, and find pertinent information about teaching reading and writing. Refer to the reference tab for a bibliography of my resources used in several of my discussions and to inspire my book.
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