Six-year-old Carla Maki Stehlik looked up at the calender and tried to decipher the name of the month for her kindergarten class.

With a flick of the wrist, she had it. "Mmmaaay," she said, the sounds seemed hooked to a line on her wrist as she moved her hand away from her mouth.

Carla, along with the rest of her class, uses visual phonics to help herself read.

Kate Ulwelling, teacher for the deaf and hard of hearing for Austin Public Schools, is responsible for introducing the system into Austin public schools.

"It helps them discover words," she said. "It helps them think about words in a different way than they ever have."

Visual phonics is a system of hand signals and written symbols that represent specific sounds. Hand signals mimic the movements of the mouth, providing students a means to both see and feel the sound they are making. The written symbols are representations of those hand signals.

The method was developed by a mother of a deaf child and was initially used for deaf and hard of hearing students or developmentally and cognitively delayed (DCD) students. Ulwelling said to many students, human speech sounds like it is being spoken underwater.

"Visual Phonics is very helpful for students like that because they don't hear sounds like we do," Ulwelling said.

Southgate kindergarten teacher Val Cipra has been using the system in her classes for about 10 years. At first, it was only used with deaf and hard of hearing students, but it quickly became apparent that there were other possible applications for the system.

"It turned out everybody was benefiting from it, so we figured we didn't need to limit it just to the hearing impaired students," she said.

Cipra said students learn to blend sounds more quickly by using Visual Phonics. Also, using more of the senses works as an effective memory aid.

Ulwelling said people learn in many different ways, and Visual Phonics provides the best connection for students who learn in unconventional ways.

"It's almost like this completes the circuitry for them," she said.

Max Deyo, a student in Cipra's class, said sometimes he forgets the hand signals and sometimes he forgets the sounds, but using different kinds of learning tools gives him something to fall back on in each of those instances.

"Even if I forget the Visual Phonics, I could do the sound of it," he said.

Learning a new system sounds complicated, but most kids catch on right away, Cipra said.

Jeremy Olmsted joined the class about two months ago.

"I learned it really quickly," he said.

Ulwelling said most of the teachers in the lower grades have implemented Visual Phonics into their curricula. Her next goal is to implement the written symbols into the middle and higher grades. The written symbols act as pronunciation cues, which students associate with the different letter combinations.

Ulwelling thinks the schools have just begun to realize the potential for Visual Phonics.

"The implications for its use are, I think, monumental," she said.

Matt Merritt can be reached at 434-2214 or by e-mail at :mailto:matt.merritt@austindailyherald.com