I’ve written a lot of stuff over the years related to teaching reading. I’ve noticed a push lately to discuss how teachers aren’t really taught in teacher school how to actually teach reading based on research. I think I’ll start sharing some of my writing and some links. To start it off, here is a Quora response of mine to the question “What are the best ways to teach kids to read?” If you manage to read all the way through there is a bonus link to an excellent podcast.
There is often this idea that children best learn to read on their own. Of the roughly 130 children I taught in first grade, there were under 10 of them that learned to read on their own. One of them was reading at the 6th-grade level. She was awesome. And one often hears adults telling how they learned to read on their own by age three, so it does happen.
But then there were the children that barely knew how a book worked. And there were a lot of them. The idea that those children are going to learn to read on their own or “when they are ready” is false. They don’t have the tools to make it happen.
Then I discovered a program called “The Writing Road to Reading” which very explicitly taught 70 phonograms and their 108 associated sounds as well as around 30 spelling rules. The change was amazing. Children could now learn at their own speed. Once they learned the sounds and were able to blend, they started reading books at their level and took off. Even the children that struggled improved markedly with hard work. People often question this method as if it somehow stamps out the joy of reading.
Substitute teachers in my classroom marveled at how well my students read. We did a presentation for the school board and I was told that was the most impressive presentation one member had seen in 20 years. I don’t share this to blow my own horn, trust me. I was not getting such feedback prior to using the phonograms.
I absolutely acknowledge the need for children to be read to and talked to and have reading modeled for them by the adults in their life. This is all of the utmost importance in learning to read and should be done for years before they are ever introduced to the phonograms.