If you are of a certain age and learned to read in America, chances are good that you were taught how with Dick and Jane.
Dick and Jane were the main characters in a popular series of American reading books that taught children how to read from the 1930s through the 1970s. Before Dick and Jane, it was the phonics-based McGuffey Reader that taught kids how to read by learning to decipher words and sentences. The McGuffey Reader, first published in 1836, sold an estimated 122 million copies over almost 90 years before new theories behind teaching replaced it going into the 1930s.
The Dick and Jane stories were created by educators who favored the “whole word” or “look-say” method of reading. The creators believed that early readers could recognize the word, “house” or “down,” more easily than they could sound it out, so kids were taught to look at a word as a whole unit. It also helped that illustrations accompanied whatever word was being introduced: If the new word was “dig,” a picture would show Dick shoveling a hole in the earth with a spade while Jane would say, “Dick digs a hole.”
It was riveting stuff.
But it worked. The Dick and Jane stories launched millions of readers, including us. By the 1950s, the height of the series’ popularity, 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used the books to learn how to read. And for all anyone knows, the series might also have been the first exposure that some children got of a purebred dog. In the 1930s, “Spot” was originally a cat, but in later additions, Spot had not only become a dog, but was described as a Cocker Spaniel! The phrase, “See Spot run! Run, Spot, run!” is still one of the most iconic lines from the series, and it is remembered by millions of adults as being one of the first sentences they could read on their own. We remember with fondness, too, that the books set examples of positive attributes: The children did their chores, the family was helpful to other people, and they were all kind to each other.
We pivot here to our neighbors to the north. The Dick and Jane (and Spot) series was also used in Canada with some adaptations: French language versions were issued in the 1950s, and the main characters were renamed Jeanne, Paul, and Lise, but most consider the real Canadian equivalent to the American Dick and Jane series to be Mr. Mugs.
The Mr. Mugs books were used extensively in Canadian elementary schools during the 1970s and early 1980s to teach children how to read. The namesake of the books was Mr. Mugs, an Old English Sheepdog who lived with two children named Pat and Cathy. Written by Martha Kambeitz and Carol Roth, the Mr. Mugs series consisted of three different series with seven levels within each, including the Ginn Integrated Language Program, Light and Life Reading Series, and Sharing Points in Language Arts.
This image is from the seller’s page on the site, Abebooks (a great source for used books):
Among the children influenced by Mr. Mugs is Louis Ferreira, a Canadian actor, who credits the Mr. Mugs book series with helping him learn to read as a child. He returned the favor by narrating the first volume in the Mr. Mugs Starting Points in Language Arts reader series, “Mr. Mugs,” as a special 2015 birthday feature. You can hear the reading here.