Hundreds of area children are learning to read by dancing.

And by repeating silly rhymes.

And by saying "underwear," which, when you're 6 years old, is a word that brings giggles.

That's all part of the Phonics Dance, and if you watch students in Sylvania, Perrysburg, Oregon, Wauseon, and other area elementary schools do its copyrighted chants and motions, you'll say a cheerleader must be behind this effort to give children an easy way to decipher hard words. But you'll be wrong.

The creator of the Phonics Dance, who will be instructing more teachers in her methods in Swanton on Feb. 11 and in Perrysburg Township next month, is a first-grade teacher named Ginny Dowd, who is from Troy, Ohio. She was never a cheerleader.

But your first guess wasn't far off the mark because Mrs. Dowd comes across as enthusiasm embodied when she talks about helping children figure out big words by finding "hunks and chunks" of letter combinations they know from her dance.

Phonics Dance was born 10 years ago when Mrs. Dowd returned to the first-grade classroom after teaching older students. The push in elementary education at that time was to interest beginning readers with acclaimed children's literature, rather than asking them to plow through the practically nonexistent plots of Dick and Jane.

But those interesting books had lots of words that are really hard for first-graders who in previous generations would have read "See Spot run."

There were words such as "neighbor" that try as you might you could never sound out if you didn't remember that "eigh" sounds like "a."

Mrs. Dowd decided her pupils were going to need some help. So, remembering her late Italian grandmother who had entertained her as a girl with silly rhymes, Mrs. Dowd wrote chants to help children remember letter sounds and the sounds that various vowel combinations often make.

And, because she understands what it's like to be little and full of energy, she linked motions with the chants, which children perform standing up.

"Remember being 5 or 6 and thinking, 'If I can't get up and move, I'm going to scream?' " she said.

She came up with ditties such as this one which aims to help children remember how the combination of letters o and w often sound:

"You have an O. And you have a W. But they're very active. And they never look at what they're doing. So they always crash into each other. And they saw ow! Going down. Going down. D/O/W/N," the children say as they make a big sliding motion with their arms. "That's the way to get down. So we say O - W - Ow."

The results, some area educators say, are phenomenal when kindergarten through second-grade teachers take about five minutes every day to do part of the Phonics Dance with their pupils.

The knowledge children use from the dance in figuring out new words when they're reading is amazing, said Rachael Sterling, who has led the Phonics Dance for two years in her first-grade classroom at Woodland Elementary School in Perrysburg and did it earlier in Dayton, where she taught first and second grades.

"They come with all these tricks in their hat," she said.

Plus, children tend to adore the dance, which has a Halloween-themed set of rhymes to do in October and which gives them a chance to say "underwear" every day when they get to the U sounds.

"They just crack up. They love it," Ms. Sterling said.

The dance helps bring an energy and a charge to the classroom, said Julie Marciniak, who teaches first grade at Coy Elementary in Oregon.

There's a simple reason for that, said Troy Armstrong, principal of Leggett Street Primary School in Wauseon.

"Research is showing us kids need to move and kids need to be active in order for their brains to function well during the day," he said.

And the benefits stretch quickly beyond reading to writing.

"First graders use a lot of inventive spelling," Mr. Armstrong said. "These students, you can tell, are no longer inventing spellings."

Mrs. Dowd, who said she has trained some 4,300 teachers in the dance, charges $130 per person for her seminars. Sometimes school districts pick up the cost.

Sometimes teachers pay for it themselves and attend on their own time. Sometimes it's a combination. In Fulton County on Saturday, Wauseon Exempted Village School District will pay the registration fee, but teachers are going on their time.

Contact Jane Schmucker at: jschmucker@theblade.com or 419-337-7780.

First Published February 5, 2006, 12:38 p.m.