The effectiveness of the Three Owls Reading Method was tested, using 53 children from a Head Start program. The Three Owls system combines sight, phonic, and linguistic reading methods with movement and touch modes of instruction. After a pretest for phonic letter recognition, the students were matched and assigned to one of two classes in a crossover design. Group Alpha received 12 five-minute sessions in the Three Owls system, while Group Beta completed five minutes of nonreading activity on the same days. Tests were completed immediately following and nine weeks after this initial instruction. The process then was reversed, giving instruction to the Beta class, and both groups were retested. Letter recognition ability did not vary as a function of age, gender, race, or residence among the pupils. After instruction with the Three Owls system, both groups were able to identify letters correctly by sound and semantic association. Although a steady loss of ability occurred between instruction and the last posttest, all the children still identified more than 20 associations nine weeks after instruction. These results support the study's hypotheses and demonstrate the effectiveness of the Three Owls Reading Method. (RL)