Sold a Story

Thank you for this very insightful podcast! I received a tip from a Dutch scholar who specialises in effective schooling for children. This is a must listen for every teacher throughout the globe! I wish that American kids get to decode words like they do here in The Netherlands. But we deal with problems of our own. Even though we decode there’s a rapid decline in reading levels here too. So it’s insightful in where to start when learning to read, but I do wonder about next steps in leveling up all the way into secondary school. And, I also wonder if what counts for learning the letters (decoding and sounding out letters) also works the same way for deciphering numbers and learning maths. I wish you get to investigate that too!

What an incredible story! The reporting here is absolutely excellent. As a parent of young children about to go to school I am eternally grateful to know I need to avoid this trap of Reading Recovery and Reading Workshop. My partner is also at a school where they have bought Calkins’ books. It is a big mess. Poor kids not learning how to read.

As a stay at home mom, raising my kids is my biggest priority and of all my goals for them, cultivating a love of reading is the most important. We have two dual citizen bilingual daughters: the eldest went to kindergarten in the USA and the youngest started school in the Netherlands. With my first one, learning to read was painful. It involved a lot of my time and a hefty amount of bribery. Thankfully we managed. But she really took off once we came back to the Netherlands and put her in tutoring to get her up to speed reading in Dutch. The youngest painlessly learned to read Dutch first and then taught herself to read in English. I did nothing more than provide a ton of English books and continue our nightly ritual of reading aloud in both languages. Her spelling is also better in both languages than the eldest, to this day. I always wondered if it had something to do with the structure of the languages or the extra difficulty of processing two languages. It’s probably that too, but omg a lightbulb went off when I listened to this. All those books with “sight words” I read with my eldest? What rubbish! Or at least peripheral to actually learning to sound words out! I listened to this whole podcast in two days. Amazing reporting. About to share with all the teachers I know!