Teaching Kids to Read

A booklet on reading instruction by Ted Hirsch, Assistant Principal K-12 at the South Shore Charter Public School in Hull, Massachusetts; member of the founding family of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

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Excerpt from the Introduction

Literacy is the single most important skill children learn at school. By means of literacy, children expand their world and enter any subject or realm on earth. But they must first master the skill of translating visual symbols into speech sounds. Only then will they be able to master the still more difficult skill of comprehension.

A great advantage of teaching in a Core Knowledge School is that the structure of the curriculum already answers some of the thorniest issues of literacy. Background knowledge is necessary to comprehend complex ideas and concepts. In a Core Knowledge School, every aspect of the curriculum is designed to impart to children broad background knowledge. From Kindergarten on, the children in Core Knowledge Schools are amassing important and significant information that writers assume their readers know.

Accumulating the vocabulary and intellectual capital necessary for deep understanding is not the only challenge that needs to be met in learning to read. There is no way to get to true literacy without first meeting the initial challenge of acquiring the skills of decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling). This booklet is concerned with describing what goes on during the processes of encoding and decoding, and why effortlessness in these processes is so important for effective reading and writing.

The methods described here are based on the work of many predecessors, including the great early reformer Maria Montessori; the reading specialists Marilyn Jager Adams, Nina Traub, and Dianne McGuinness; and the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. They are also based on my own experiences, both in my childhood and now as an adult teacher. As a child I was labeled as dyslexic. I spent ten years working one-on-one with a reading tutor. Learning to decode and encode was much more difficult for me than for many others and because of these difficulties, I have actively thought about decoding and encoding for the past twenty years. Now, as a teacher, my experiences in my own classroom continue to shape my ideas on how best to teach reading and writing.

Contents

• Why It Is Hard for Some Children to Learn How to Read
• New Advances
• The Need for Speed
• Applying The New Insights In The Classroom
• The Alphabetic Principle: Why English Is Written the Way It Is
• Phonemic Awareness
• Benchmarks
• The Importance of Quantity to Achieve Quality
• Classroom Management of Reading Instruction

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