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Phonics Series – A Closer Look

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Kinney Brothers Publishing Phonics Series

A solid phonics program is the cornerstone of many pre-K through elementary classes. Focused phonics lessons and phonemic awareness improve pronunciation, listening comprehension, and give students the confidence to read and understand English. The Kinney Brothers Publishing five-book Phonics & Spelling Series is designed to teach kids the fundamental sounds and spelling of English in a multi-year, step-by-step ESL program.

The Phonics & Spelling Series series is also published by Independent Publishers International (I.P.I.) in Japan and available with a special discount through David Paul’s ETJ Book Service.

You’ll find an abundance of support materials for this series in our online store, Donald’s English Classroom.  Visit for downloadable flashcards, charts, games, and activities.

A to Z Kinney Brothers Publishing
Phonics & Spelling, Book 2 Kinney Brothers Publishing
Phonics & Spelling, Book 3 Kinney Brothers Publishing

Kinney Brothers Publishing offers a wide range of textbooks including a Communication Series for upper elementary through high school language learners, an Easy Sight Words Series, and Trends for adult English language learners. If you’re looking for more support materials, be sure to check out Q&A, Cursive Writing!, and a treasure trove of games, charts, and flashcards in Donald’s English Classroom!

Communication Series – A Closer Look

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The Kinney Brothers Publishing Communication Series is designed to extend students’ skills and interest in communicating in English. The four-book series includes Stories For Young Readers and Dialogues For Young Speakers. The textbooks work in tandem to provide students with exercises in reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Each textbook is detailed below with links for downloadable previews and purchase.

In Japan, The Stories For Young Readers series is published by Independent Publishers International (I.P.I.) and available through Nellies English Books and David Paul’s ETJ Book Service.

You’ll find an abundance of support materials for this series in our online store, Donald’s English Classroom.  Visit for downloadable audio files, Lesson Packs, and Teacher’s Answer Keys. You’ll also see links for Lesson Packs on Google Slides for online courses and Kindle Books for your digital library.

Kinney Brothers Publishing offers a wide range of ESL textbooks including a Phonics Series that begins with your youngest students, an Easy Sight Words Series, and Trends for secondary and adult English language learners. If you’re looking for more support materials, be sure to check out Q&A, Cursive Writing!, and a treasure trove of games, charts, and flashcards in Donald’s English Classroom!

How to Teach Children That Addiction Is a Disease, Not a Moral Weakness

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Teaching Children about Drug Addiction by Patrick Bailey

Many thanks to Patrick Bailey for this month’s guest post! Photo credits: Pixels.com

Children living in homes where parents or other family members are struggling with addictions need to be taught that addiction is a disease and not a character weakness. Children who are not living around others with addictive personalities also benefit from understanding how addiction can produce mental and physical disorders.

In the same way that educators, parents, friends, and family members teach children about behavior expectations, growth changes, moral choices, and other illnesses, people can educate children on the disease of addiction and the problems it could create.

It is helpful to educate children on the different types of addictions, symptoms of addictions in others, and ways to recognize addiction in themselves. When children have this information, they feel more secure in their environments and in making their own life choices. They don’t grow up stigmatizing addiction, which could create barriers to treatment that could hurt them or others.

Explaining Addiction-Related Changes

Changes in behavior are some of the first signs children may notice in people with addictions. Children might learn that when an adult struggles with alcohol or drugs, they might break promises, not remember appointments, or miss work.

Children can also see changes in people who abuse drugs, which may include slurred speech, extreme fatigue, or extremely high energy levels. If a child is around a person struggling with an addiction, discussing these signs could help children understand how drugs and alcohol could affect the body.

Conversations about addiction are important. They can help children understand that none of an adult’s behavior is the child’s fault and also to help the child avoid personal challenges related to an adult’s behavior.  

To reduce judgment surrounding addiction, educators, parents, family members, and friends can use person-centered language when speaking about addictions. Instead of calling someone an addict, they can refer to him or her as a person with an addiction.

Second, they can explain to children that addictions such as alcohol use disorder are medical diagnoses and refer to people who have a brain disorder, not a moral weakness.

People with addictions do not choose them. Instead, addiction is a disease that changes the way people’s bodies and brains respond to alcohol and drugs, making it difficult for them to stop seeking out the substances.

Third, adults could teach children that not everyone responds the same way to drugs and alcohol. Different people might be more susceptible to addiction and its challenges, and the susceptibility toward addictions might be higher in some families.

Using these approaches can teach children that they do not need to fear for their own future. When they understand addiction is a disease and not a moral weakness, children might understand that there are treatments for the disease.

Discussing Addiction

Teaching Children About Addiction by Patrick Bailey

Adults can discuss treatment options and explain that group or individual therapy, select medications, and family support can all be essential tools to help a person with an addiction.

When discussing the treatment of alcoholism, for example, adults should consider speaking of it in the same terms used for the treatment of other diseases or conditions. Let children know the person with an addiction is seeking treatment for the disease and will be working with a doctor or therapist. This can reassure children that the person with an addiction is getting the help he or she needs.

Once a person begins treatment and the child begins to see healthy behavior, an explanation of the difference between a moral weakness and a disease might be helpful. For example, a moral weakness is typically characterized as knowing the right thing to do, but choosing to do the opposite thing.

In the case of drinking alcohol, many people can drink in moderation. Many people can enjoy a glass of wine with dinner and not drink to excess. For a person with an addiction, one glass of wine has the potential to open the door to a night of excessive drinking.

But a person with an addiction who can’t stop drinking isn’t choosing to do something wrong by continuing to drink. Instead, their body and brain chemistry make it nearly impossible to stop drinking. Their ability to choose is taken over by the body’s response to the substance.

Even children who do not live in homes with people with addictions benefit from understanding that addiction is a disease. Children might grow into teenagers and young adults who could meet people who struggle with alcohol or drugs.

The more people who understand that addiction is not a choice, the better society becomes at supporting people with addictions. Learning about addictive behaviors as a child can help eliminate the stigmas surrounding addictions. Those changes can help people with addictions feel less shame and feel better about finding the help they need sooner rather than later.

About the Author

Patrick Bailey

Patrick Bailey is a professional writer with a focus in the fields of mental health, addiction, and living in recovery. He stays on top of the latest news in the addiction and the mental health world and enjoys writing about these topics to break the stigma associated with them. You can connect with Patrick on his website, Twitter, and Linkedin

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Sources

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – Personality Profiles of Substance and Behavioral Addictions
adultchildren.org – Welcome to Adult Children of Alcoholics®/ Dysfunctional Families
niaaa.nih.gov – Alcohol Use Disorder
niaaa.nih.gov – Treatment for Alcohol Problems: Finding and Getting Help
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov – Addiction Is a Treatable Disease, Not a Moral Failing

Fun Facts About English #90 – Airport Codes

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IATA Kinney Brothers Publishing
IATA

From 17,678 commercial airports worldwide on roughly 100,000 scheduled flights, about 6,000,000 passengers travel somewhere every day. Every day.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), an airline trade association based in Montreal, Canada, assigns an airport code to each airport. Some airports, like LAX or JFK are known colloquially by these initials. The IATA codes are an integral part of the travel industry, its electronic applications, and essential for the identification of an airline, its destinations, its cargo, and travel documentation.

Airport coding first began in the 1930s, and airlines typically chose their own two-letter codes. This order only allowed for a few hundred letter combinations. By the late 1940s, as the number of airports grew, the system shifted to the three-letter code we know today. Several U.S. airports simply added an ‘X’ to their old code. The ‘X’ is a placeholder and has no meaning outside of this use. Los Angeles International Airport, for instance, was originally LA but became LAX in 1947. Other examples include Portland International Airport (PDX) and Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport (XNA).

The three-letter system allows for 17,576 permutations. To avoid running out of codes, only major airports use three initials and smaller airports often incorporate numbers, such as Osage City, KS (53K), and Cle Elum, WA (S93).

Some airport codes are easy to decipher. Miami International Airport is MIA; Athens International Airport is ATH. Other codes are a bit more difficult. Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport is MSY, an industry nod to pioneering aviator, John Moisant. Chicago O’Hare International Airport was assigned ORD, as it sits on what was previously known as Orchard Field.

Nav.com offers complete FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) airport details that include management, conditions, and ownership. For example, click here for everything you need to know as a pilot for Cle Elum (S93), a single public runway in rural Washington State.

With just three letters, it was inevitable that some codes would be… well, memorable.

  • LOL – Derby Field Airport in Nevada
  • OMG – Omega Airport in Namibia
  • PEE – Russia’s Bolshoye Savino Airport
  • POO – Brazil’s Poco De Caldas Airport.
  • BAD – Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana
  • GAG – Gage Airport in Oklahoma
  • DIE – Arrachart Airport in Madagascar
  • SUX – Sioux City, Iowa Gateway Airport

Sioux City has embraced its unfortunate assignation by partnering with a local retailer to offer a popular line of travel souvenirs with the slogan ‘Fly SUX!’ – turning a lemon into lemonade.

You might also be interested in reading about the explosion in the use of acronyms, who regulates the spelling of place names, or why the U.S. doesn’t have an official language!

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Fun Facts About English #88 – Autology

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autological Kinney Brothers Publishing

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “autological” is from the rare 17th-century noun “autology,” meaning “self-knowledge or the study of oneself.” In the 20th century, we use it to describe a word having or representing the property it denotes, e.g., “noun” is a noun, “English” is English, and “pentasyllabic” has five syllables.

The dictionary’s earliest recorded use of “autological” is from a paper by F. P. Ramsey published in 1926 in Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society:

F.P. Ramsey Kinney Brothers Publishing

Since adjectives describe things, including words, most autological words are adjectives. Nouns and verbs can also be self-descriptive, such as “abbrv.” and “read” when read. Phrases can be autological as well, e.g., “three words long” is three words long.

A word’s status as autological can change over time. “Neologism” means “a newly coined word or expression” and is no longer autological as it was attested in 1772. “Olde,” on the other hand, will continue to be autological for the rest of time.

The opposite of autological, as Mr. Ramsey stated above, is heterological – a word that doesn’t express a property of itself, e.g., monosyllabic, yellow, or square.

Here is an entertaining short-list of autological words:

  • polysyllabic
  • CAPITALIZED
  • portmanteau
  • unhyphenated
  • prefix
  • real
  • visible
  • fifteen-lettered
  • numberless
  • typed
  • black
  • bold
  • link
  • is
  • readable
  • noun phrase
  • end

Finally, to confuse matters a bit, what’s known as the Grelling–Nelson paradox, emerged from the definitions of autological and heterological.

The question:

“Is non-self-descriptive non-self-descriptive or self-descriptive?”

The paradox:

If it is self-descriptive, then non-self-descriptive is non-self-descriptive. But if non-self-descriptive is non-self-descriptive, then it does describe itself, so it must be self-descriptive.

If you enjoyed this post, you might check out these posts about contronyms, acronyms, eponyms, and capitonyms!

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Fun Facts About English #89 – Collective Nouns

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Kinney Brothers Publishing nouns of multitudes

Collective Nouns

Collective nouns, also known as nouns of assemblage, nouns of multitude, group terms, terms of venery, and veneral nouns, are words used to define a grouping of people, animals, objects or concepts. We use many without a second thought:

An array of magazines.
A batch of cookies.
A crowd of people.
A bevy of options.
A collection of coins.
A bouquet of flowers.
A string of pearls.
A school of fish.

As perfunctory or generic as some may be, like group or bunch, many of the nouns used for collectives convey meaning. A batch, whether cookies or car parts, indicates something made or manufactured. A string of pearls, insults, or lawsuits suggest a number in succession. Cleverly assigned collectives such as “an idiocy of drunks” or “an embarrassment of teenagers” colorfully illustrate circumstance, behavior, or character. Creating apropos nouns of multitude has been the pleasure of writers for hundreds of years. Though some will find their place in dictionaries for future reference, most will not.

venery – “hunting, the sport of the chase,” early 14c., from Old French venerie, from Medieval Latin venaria “beasts of the chase, game.”

For animals, many terms of venery, like “a crash of rhinos,” date back to the 15th century. The longevity of these classifications rests in part on their repeated publishing over the centuries. Such terms have present-day authority in that they’ve been attested in numerous documents and dictionaries over time. They are not, however, compulsory. A “flock of crows” will (blandly) serve the collective-noun purpose if murder is not to your liking. When speaking of giraffes, there’s no sense in arguing whether a tower, a corps, or a herd should take precedence as all are acceptable.

The Legacy

English Timeline

In their original context, medieval vernery developed terms that had a very practical intent: to classify animals, their droppings, and the noises they make. The earliest known hunting treatise on these topics is from the mid 1200s by the Anglo-Norman writer, Walter Bibbesworth. The Venerie of Twiti is another Anglo-Norman treatise that named only three different terms for herds of animals.

Throughout the 1300s, veneral terms were translated from French into English and were intended as a mark of erudition for the English gentleman who used them correctly. It became a fashion in the courts to creatively expand the vocabulary. By the 15th century, this “fashion” had reached exaggerated and even satirical proportions.

Boke of Seynt Albans Kinney Brothers Publishing

It was in this period that Juliana Berners, a Benedictine prioress of the Priory of St. Mary of Sopwell, published the Boke of Seynt Albans (1486) and introduced “the compaynys of beestys and fowlys.” Her translations of French treaties on hunting and hawking included a whopping 164 terms of venery as well as humorous human classifications. The “boke” was very popular and became a requisite read for gentlemen of the nobility. Over the centuries, the title was repeatedly edited, printed, and scrutinized for authenticity. Five hundred years later, we still find great appeal in Ms. Berner’s “asylum of loons,” and “unkindness of ravens.” Her tongue-in-cheek human groupings, like “a sentence of judges,” “a blast of hunters,” and “a gaggle of women” continue to convey a sardonic medieval wit.

So, whether you’re writing for classification or fiction, one’s assemblages can be colorfully termed. The license of the poet is yours.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in reading about proverbs that are often misconstrued, the Power of X, or idiomatic phrases coined by famous writers!

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