OnTrack Reading

My name is Rodney Everson, but I go by Rod. In 1998, I read a review of Why Our Children Can’t Read by Diane McGuinness and ordered the book from Amazon. That decision changed my life. If you have a child who is a poor reader, it is my hope, and my intention, that this website will help you change your child’s life.

Now, Ms. McGuinness has strong feelings about reading problems and expresses them clearly in her book. Her main point is that poor or non-existent phonics instruction is responsible for most reading problems. While I now adamantly disagree with her on that very point, I acted on her recommendation in her book to investigate the Phono-Graphix method, which was developed by her son and daughter-in-law, Geoffrey and Carmen McGuinness.

Fortunately, they had published their own book, Reading Reflex, which was a reasonably complete parent guide to the Phono-Graphix method that they had developed. Amazon soon received another order from me and I continued my reading on reading. When I put this second book down, I said to my wife one morning, “I’d like to find someone to try this out on, because it seems to make a lot of sense.”

Well, you’ve really got to know my wife to appreciate what happened next. She listens, and she acts. She came home that night and her first words were, “I’ve got you three kids!” And she did, three brothers, all experiencing difficulty learning to read.

Note: The three brothers are real but, due to privacy considerations, most of the kids I discuss on this website will be fictional composites used to illustrate actual behaviors and issues that I have encountered in real life experiences while attempting to teach children to read.

The ending to this story has yet to be written, but it progressed from those three brothers, to formal training in the Phono-Graphix method, then to opening a reading instruction business under the name of OnTrack Reading, and then to a close relationship with a local vision therapy department in La Crosse, Wisconsin, and now to the establishment of this website, OnTrackReading.com

The website is currently composed of two primary parts. The “Home Page” is a blog where I comment on what I’ve just added to the site and also address comments from readers. The more useful part of the site is the “Guide to Overcoming Your Child’s Reading Problems” that occupies the Sidebar on the right side of every page. This “Guide” holds the permanent content on the site and is broken down into several topics as you can see by examining the Sidebar.

Next: Three Brothers, or return to the OnTrack Reading Home Page