![]() ![]() She memorized high-frequency “sight words” using a stack of laminated flash cards: “and,” “the,” “who,” et cetera. My daughter was taught to use “picture power”-guessing words based on the accompanying illustrations. They figure out unfamiliar words based on a “cueing” strategy: the reader asks herself if the word looks right, sounds right, and makes sense in context. Early readers are encouraged to choose books from an in-classroom library and read silently on their own. I looked online for help, and learned that our Brooklyn public school’s main reading-and-writing curriculum, Units of Study, is rooted in a method known as balanced literacy. There were ambulance sirens wailing outside, forever. (My kid wasn’t the only one bluffing.) She perhaps wasn’t ready to read. I ascribed our ongoing failure to any number of factors-I wasn’t a teacher, for starters. She would pick out a book, flip around, guess, bluff, and try to match words to pictures, while I plodded along behind her, grunting phonemes, until her patience frayed. Our subsequent reading workshops followed the same script. She seemed to find it frankly outrageous. She didn’t appear to be familiar with this approach. I coaxed her to look at how the letters worked together, to sound them out, starting by taking apart the first few phonemes: bh-uh-tih, butt. ![]() Her decoding skills, at that stage, were limited to the starting letter of each word, and all else was hurried guesswork-pointing at “butterfly,” she might ask, “Bird?” and start to turn the page. She had selected a beginner-level book about the alliterative habitués of a back-yard garden: birds and butterflies, cats and caterpillars. In the first spring of the pandemic, as families across the country were acclimating to remote learning and countless other upheavals, I sat down on the living-room sofa with my daughter, who was in kindergarten, to go over a daily item on her academic schedule called Reading Workshop. ![]()
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