I have vivid memories of Saturday mornings in the mid-80s. I remember sitting in my pajamas on the navy blue checkered couch in the family room of my childhood home watching cartoons. I remember the dread I felt at the start of that interminable what-felt-like-forever two-minute commercial break (a feeling my own kids will never understand) as I waited for Reading Rainbow or Rainbow Brite to return. As I suffered through the commercials, I can see a pig-tailed girl on TV smiling back at me exclaiming: “Hooked on phonics worked for me!” I remember this commercial like it was yesterday, which really just means either I watched a lot of Saturday morning cartoons or that commercial got lots of air time.
Reading instruction has strayed far from phonics since the 1980s and those commercials. Since then the approach known as “balanced literacy”, that was not research-based was the status quo approach in most early childhood and elementary school classrooms. The history and details of this misguided shift in reading instruction in the United States are shared in a recently released podcast, and countless articles published in The Atlantic magazine, American Public Media, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. The topic of reading instruction even made headlines at the annual SXSW conference, a meeting place for educational innovators.
Like so many aspects of education that have been under scrutiny since the pandemic, reading and how to best teach it has been under close inspection by politicians, parents, and educators. This close examination began in 2018, and only increased since parents had a front row seat to their children’s classroom lessons during virtual school in 2020. Since then, 18 states and counting have passed legislation requiring public schools to implement a curriculum that follows what is known as the “science of reading.” The science of reading is based on long-standing and emerging research from the fields of education and neuroscience about how one learns to read. The approach focuses on phonics instruction – the subject of those memorable childhood commercials.
The focus on reading instruction has found its way into our TVS admissions process last year. Families considering TVS have had more questions than ever about our approach to reading, especially in Spark Studio. We are proud to share with them that our curriculum and pedagogical approach is in line with phonics and the science of reading. It is designed not only to teach learners how to read, but is also designed to foster a love of reading.
Our Spark learners use phonics-based Montessori reading materials that include sandpaper letters, moveable alphabets, and the Waseca Reading Curriculum. These are enhanced with pre-reading activities and books from the All About Reading (AAR) curriculum, and later, an adaptive online platform called Lexia. These resources are highly engaging, research-based, and from what we can see, joy-inducing.
A new learner will first work on making the connection between sounds they hear and the letters that represent those sounds. They then learn to distinguish between beginning, middle, ending and ending sounds of words that they hear. They also explore concepts such as rhyming, segmenting words into individual parts, and blending sounds together.
Once all these skills are mastered, learners are ready to begin the Waseca Reading program, a multi-sensory set of materials that is based on the Orton Gillingham Method of reading instruction. Orton Gillingham is a highly structured, research-based phonics approach that is based on how children naturally develop language. It is a well known staple in many Montessori & Reggio classrooms, as it is self-directed and allows learners to correct their own mistakes. It involves careful encoding of words (sounding out and spelling words from picture cards), then decoding those same words by reading them without pictures. Through the drawers, children learn individual phonemes in a careful order. They then practice those same phonemes using the AAR readers, which follow a similar sequence.
Once learners have mastered the Waseca reading drawers, we introduce Lexia, a phonics-based program that has recently been adopted by local public school districts in an effort to shift reading instruction to align with the science of reading.
Beyond learning how to read, the goal of our reading program across all of our studios is for learners to identify as readers. First, we focus on creating the space for our learners to read for fun, build fluency, and gain confidence. Second, we focus on developing a love of reading, with dedicated time for reading called ‘DEAR’ (Drop Everything and Read), and whole studio read-alouds. In our elementary and middle school studios learners select their own books to read and write about. The books they choose must meet a specific set of standards, including meeting their reading challenge zone, and be peer-approved.
The autonomy we allow and the amount of time dedicated to reading as a group contrasts with traditional schools, in which the reading curriculum is pre-determined and dedicated to the kind of reading comprehension that results in passing standardized tests. New research even suggests that this type of success measurement is flawed; testing reading comprehension measures knowledge – not comprehension.
While we don’t use standardized tests in the same way that most traditional schools do, our learners do take a national test once a year as just one data point to measure their learning. Over the past 5 years, our learners typically score an average of 1.5 grade levels above their peers in all subjects, including reading.
Through the science of reading, and dedicated time throughout the day to read both independently and as a community, learners at TVS have many opportunities to see themselves as readers and find joy in reading. For some, it might not be apparent right away, but it is our hope that learners experience the kind of reading in school that might turn into a passion for reading at some point, whether that’s now, or when they leave us to continue on to the next phase of their educational journey.
My identity as a reader has certainly changed since I learned how to read in the 1980s, and my Saturday mornings have changed quite a bit since then, too. Instead of perched on my couch with cartoons, you can find me curled up in my bed with a book. My hope, and our hope at The Village School is that someday, our learners will find joy in something similar.
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