Access your downloads at our archive site. Visit Archive
Alpha Phonics Primer 1
Blog

Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers

"Blumenfeld's Alpha-Phonics" is a practical instruction program that anyone who wants to teach reading can learn to use without the need for special training.

Spiral Bound Book

  • Samuel L. Blumenfeld,
Share this

Blumenfeld's Alpha-Phonics was created to provide parents, teachers and tutors with a sensible, logical, easy-to-use system for teaching reading. It is an intensive phonics instruction program based on the author's many years of research and experience in the reading instruction field. It answers the need for a practical instruction program that anyone who wants to teach reading can learn to use with no special training required.

The Workbook teaches our alphabetic system - with its 26 letters and 44 sounds - in the following sequence: First, the alphabet, then the short vowels and consonants, the consonant digraphs, followed by the consonant blends, and finally the long vowels in their variety of spellings and our other vowels.

This program can be used to teach reading to beginners of all ages, older students in need of remediation, non-readers, adults who wish to improve their reading skills, dyslexics, the learning disabled, and non-English speakers who wish to learn to read English and improve their pronunciation.

It can also be used as a supplement to any other reading program being used in the classroom. Its systematic approach to teaching basic phonetic skills makes it particularly valuable to programs that lack such instruction.

All of the lesson pages were carefully designed to eliminate distraction and help the learner focus his of her attention on the work at hand. The program, as a whole, is flexible enough so that any parent, teacher, or tutor can adapt it to his or her own teaching style or situation.

If you have never taught reading before in this sensible, systematic way, you will be pleasantly surprised by the results.

The Instruction Manual is a lesson by lesson guide which walks you through the process of teaching someone how to read. This manual can be found in the back of the primer.


  • Samuel L. Blumenfeld

Samuel L. Blumenfeld (1927–2015), a former Chalcedon staffer, authored a number of books on education, including NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education,  How to Tutor, Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers, and Homeschooling: A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Children

He spent much of his career investigating the decline in American literacy, the reasons for the high rate of learning disabilities in American children, the reasons behind the American educational establishment’s support for sex and drug education, and the school system's refusal to use either intensive phonics in reading instruction and memorization in mathematics instruction.  He lectured extensively in the U.S. and abroad and was internationally recognized as an expert in intensive, systematic phonics.  His writings appeared in such diverse publications as Home School DigestReasonEducation Digest, Boston Magazine, Vital Speeches of the DayPractical Homeschooling, Esquire, and many others.

More by Samuel L. Blumenfeld