'LinkedUp: Breaking Boundaries Podcast' an Interview with Narda Pitkethly, Part One

On LinkedUp: Breaking Boundaries Podcast, Jamie Saponaro and Jerri Kemble are two lively ladies who are passionate about education. Recently, Jamie and Jerri spoke with Narda Pitkethly about the Nardagani Reading Program. Read part one of Narda's interview and watch the video.

Announcer: Welcome to LinkedUp! Breaking boundaries in education, a podcast that focuses on what is happening in education today connecting everyone to the movers and shakers that are breaking boundaries in the education arena.

Jamie: Welcome to LinkedUp breaking boundaries in education, it's Jamie (Saponaro) and Jerry (Kemble) here. You know this is an education podcast, so we have lots of connections and people that we know in the education world. But many of our guests have come from an event that Jerry goes to annually called, DENT.

Jerri, can you explain it a little bit, because our guest today is one of those amazing guests, who you happen to have met at DENT. So, tell us a little bit more about that.

Jerri: My pleasure to talk about DENT. DENT comes from the idea… Steve Jobs has a quote, “That you can't change the Universe, but you can put a dent in it.”

DENT is a gathering of people that all want to make a difference. They are people from all walks of life. They’re all very innovative, very inspirational, and they're ready to make a dent. They're all ages. I love that about it as well. So we gather together, and it's a conference where it's like TED talks. But then after the TED talks, you go to dinner with these people, you have happy hour with them. You spent a lot of time getting to know them. 

Jamie: You mentioned a cocktail party for one of them. I thought you met them at DENT, but I get it!

Jerri: So, you really get to know these people, and it becomes almost like a family. I  meet people at DENT that I stay in contact with constantly. It's really exciting.

Now, I want to tell you how I met our guest today. We actually met in a class at DENT, where we were learning to pick locks.

All of us at this table just bonded immediately, because we were all so excited when we got the lock to open, and the enthusiasm and excitement was just amazing. And so I met Narda Pitkethly, picking locks. 

We are so excited to have you here today, because, as I said earlier, most of the time, as Jamie said earlier, most of our guests are educators, but this is a story that can change people's lives and it is about teaching people to read.

So Narda, Let's get started with you telling us just a little bit about your background and how you got started with helping people learn to read, when you weren't an educator. 

Narda: Yes, it's a very interesting story, how I ended up here, teaching people to read and developing a program that's very simple. My father was a doctor in the army and so we moved a lot. Which I loved.

One of the places we lived, that has to do with creating this reading program—was in Japan. When I was a little girl, we lived in Japan for two years and I really enjoyed being in a different country for the first time in my life, as a young girl. Then we came back to the states and I finished up my childhood. I ended up going back to Japan after college. 

I stayed for three years in Japan and that's really the beginning of my story. I’m actually an artist. I'm a glass blower. 

I went to Japan to teach English and live there. When I got there, I realized I needed to learn Japanese.

Jerri: That must have been be difficult?

Narda: Well, the Japanese have created a simple way to learn to read. They said first learn to read. I said: “Wow! That sounds kind of crazy, but okay if that's what you think.” So I did. 

The Japanese devised a simple system to teach people to read. They have 2,000 characters for kanji—their main written word. But, it was so hard for young people to learn enough kanji that they could really read proficiently. It took years and years of schooling. 

So, they developed a very simple program called Hiragana. One simple symbol for each sound in Japanese. They organized them in these columns that were similar to each other, similar sounds. They said, “Here's the chart. Every morning when you wake up, do your writing of these characters and sounding them out, and then when you go out in your day, find them—everywhere. Underneath the kanji—they live under the kanji. Then at night, before you go to bed, do the same thing.”

Everyday, I did this and I could recognize more and more sounds and more and more kanji with the hiragana under it. By the end of the week, I could read everything. 

Jerri: By the end of the week?

Narda: I could read everything I saw by the end of the week. I didn't know what I was reading. But I learned Japanese very quickly through this visual path, because I’m very visual. So I picked it up quite quickly after that.

So then, fast forward, I leave Japan, I come back to the United States to Ketchum and Sun Valley, Idaho and start putting down roots here. I got married. We had kids. Our daughter, in the first grade, was a challenged reader. I thought, that is so interesting. I learned to read Japanese in a week, a foreign language, and my daughter is English as a first language and we only have 26 letters. How can this be?

So, I started dissecting and exploring the alphabet and the sounds. I discovered something quite amazing.

What I found is that of our 26 letters, 12 make only one sound and those are the easy letters. Here are the 14 that make multiple sounds. 

H, alone, and with other letters, makes six different sounds. Then h by itself, also makes the “h,” like horse. 

But look at the vowels. The vowels  are the worst! The a makes four, e makes four, I makes four, o makes five, and the u makes four. Of course, a lot of people know, about the four sounds of y. But, a lot of people don't know about the three sounds of c, d, e, f.

Here is an example of the four sounds of s. In our program, every letter has a main sound and the main sound of s. The most common one is snake, but the s also makes the “sh” in sugar and sure. That symbol is everybody's favorite symbol: The square is your lips the line is your finger and the sound it makes is sh.

Then one of the second most common sounds of s is the z: Is, was. There I simply put a letter under the letter, instead of creating another symbol because that kept the program simple. Look at television, right? That's an another sound.

Jamie: This is interesting! So, again you took that concept of reading Japanese with the visual components and applied it to reading English.

Narda:  So people would know what sound the letter makes.

Jamie: By looking look at combinations and not having to try and guess, but here they have a very simple visual representation of what the sound makes. Let's look at another one.

Narda: So this one is e. This is the four sounds of e and the first is e: Tree. Right. That's the main sound of e and then e has an elbow, and that's a little smile. We call that a smile symbol.  Then the most common sound in the English language is often called the schwa (/ə/). We call it the up arrow and every vowel can make this sound. It’s a very common sound. Then we make ooh as in grew.

One of the things I want to tell you, while we're looking at this slide, is that I was able to create this program with only 12 symbols. Only 12, because i use letters under letters, whatever I can to keep it simple. The way the program starts is that we teach people the the main sounds of every letter and then we start teaching the easiest symbols first. 

We play games and do exercises and actually we read a book that only has those sounds that they've learned. It is minus six sounds of the English language. I was told you can't write a book with minus six of the English language. I managed to write a very funny book, because I love humor, doesn’t everybody love humor? A very funny, simple book, so that students could practice sounding out words without having to wonder what letter sound the letter makes. And because I’m not an educator there's no combining letters except where they have to be combined like th and sh and ch. I don't have blends and I don't have rules—it’s just very straightforward. The student learns every sound of every letter in six one hour lessons, basically.

Jamie: What age group do you find mostly leveraging this?

Narda: Four years old to adults who never learned to read. Six lessons is basically a challenged reader that doesn't have any other real blocks. For a severe learning challenge or a very young student—we break the lesson in half and it takes 12. Then there is reading and practicing your skill. Basically we stretched out to about 15 lessons is how we do it. We have an online program, where I’m teaching. I’m teaching the parent or the teacher how to teach the program in about an hour and then we’ve got the six lessons. Everything is included and it's very simple for people. You can see on the testimonial page of our website that people learn to read in less than a month or come up to grade level. 

Jerri: This is so important, because Jamie and I were both middle school teachers and, although, I was Language Arts, I would get students that could not read in sixth grade. I had no idea what to do with them and how to catch them up quickly. This is amazing.

This could be something that would get them with the rest of the with their peers quickly. Also, I can’t imagine what it does to self-esteem.

Part Two of ‘LinkedUp: Breaking Boundaries’ Podcast’s interview with Narda Pitkethly will be continued on our blog shortly.