Joan Parrish is currently working full time for Reading Horizons as a national trainer. She holds a bachelor's degree in early childhood and elementary education from Utah State University. She has been an elementary teacher for 13 years, during which time she has developed excellent skills in teaching various reading strategies. She is trained in curriculum compacting and completed an Idaho Comprehensive Literacy course as well as a 6 Traits of Writing course. She is certified in phonics instruction and has spent nine years training teachers of Kindergarten through sixth grade in phonics, reading, and language instruction throughout school districts in Idaho and Utah. She is the co-author and publisher of various teaching materials, including phonics posters and activity books in spelling, reading, phonics, and language skills. She has written and received reading/language grants in Idaho from Albertson’s, the Governor’s Innovative Reading Grant, and the Idaho Community Foundation. She received the Teacher of the Year Award from the Idaho Masons in 1997 and participated in Teaching with Technology in 1999.
She says, “As a result of using this phonics program daily, we see children using the phonetic skills they have been taught when they come to a word they don’t know. The testing on reading we have done at grade level has shown them higher than ever before. The children use their decoding skills to help them spell words. I rarely have more than three children who don’t get 100 percent on the spelling test. In using this program daily, the children’s printing skills and creative writing skills have improved greatly. As phonetic sounds are introduced with words, the children learn other meanings for words, and we use that in comprehension skills. Dictation of sentences has become a breeze because (the program teaches) punctuation along with the phonic skills. I have become an avid fan of Discover Intensive Phonics and would never go back to anything I taught before.”