( this write-up is featured here from our main website for the visitor's info)

Teaching a preschool child to read is one of the happiest, most worthwhile,and most satisfying forms of early learning.  It is also the subject of widespread research - with bright young children, disadvantaged children, three-year-olds, youngsters who are mentally retarded or emotionally disturbed or brain-injured, children of average IQ, four-year-olds, two-year-olds,and bilingual preschoolers.

Reading is being taught to preschoolers - by parents at home, by psychologists in child development laboratories and by educators in day-care centers.  It is being taught phonetically, by sight-word techniques, by combination methods and by no method at all. It is being taught with sandpaper alphabets, with comic strips, by first grade primers, by children's television shows, by programmed readers, by CDs and by computer programs.  

Regardless of method or motivation, the most successful individual to teach a child are his own parents.  Those who have written about their experiences - in professional journals or in letters to schools usually comment on the great joy, eagerness and enthusiasm with which their children have learned.

Contemporary interest and research about teaching preschoolers to read began in the late 1950s.  It was touched off, generally, by the discovery about the functioning of the human brain itself and by concerns not only about providing learning stimulus for gifted children but also about equipping disadvantaged children to succeed in first grade.  Now, it is commonplace to find youngsters entering first grade already able to read well.

As long as 1954, for example, Dr. Arthur I. Gates, then professor at the Institute of Language Arts, Teachers College, Columbus University, said about early reading:

Certain factors suggest both the possibility and the advisability of helping a child learn to read long before the 6th year, even before the fourth year.   Children learn to understand spoken English and to use it long before  their 6th birthday.  Children get an increasing amount of experience with picture books, comics, radio, television, and other visual, auditory, mdia almost from infancy.  The result: children are well advanced in getting information and stories of all kind, long before they learn to read.

     The difficulties of teaching reading to a large class are so great that the average child learns rather slowly., By the end of the first grade, the child cannot read material anywhere as complex as he can secure through other means.  This puts reading in the first grade at  very great disadvantage. The reader is reminded that the difficulties and confusions attending the new and strange group life, the necessity of learning in a distracting group situation, the teacher's difficulty in giving each child much quiet individual guidance and the meagerness of the content of what a child can read in the first grade in comparison with what he can get from spoken words and pictures may comprise greater hardship than those attending easy-going guidance and self-employment at  a younger age.

 In a Montessori school in Ilinois, Bobby, 4, spreads out a small individual mat on the floor then takes a collection of simple picture cards from a nearby drawer.  One by one, he lines up the pictures in a row, down the side of his mat.  He studies the first one, a dog.  Slowly, Bobby sounds out the word under his breath.  Still repeating the initial d sound, he goes to an open rack full of colored letters cut out of sandpaper-covered cardboard.  He locates a d, takes it back to his mat, and places it beside the picture.  Next, he finds an o and then a g, sounding each letter as he walks back and forth.  Bobby successfully spells out cat, hat and man.  Then he tries bus.  But he can't remember what letter makes the b sound.  So, for the first time, he asks for adult help.  "What says 'b' ?" Bobby asks the teacher.  She goes with him to a bin of large-size sandpaper letters that are glued on cardboard rectangles.  Gently, she guides the fingers of Bobby's right hand so that his fingertips trace the sandpaper shape of b while she repeats the sound of the consonant.  After learning the b sound through his eyes, his ears, and his fingers, Bobby is easily able to find it himself.  Without anymore help or supervision, Bobby spells out the rest of the names on his picture cards.  Then he quietly returns all of the materials to their proper place.  No one has instructed Bobby to do the reading-spelling lesson.  No one has supervised or graded him or pressured him or even praised him for doing it.  He could have chosen any of dozens of other activities.  But he was sounding and making the words because he enjoys learning and the sense of accomplishment it gives him.

Dr. Montessori discovered that preschoolers could learn to read and write and enjoy the process enormously when she was developing her first slum-area school. Ever since, Montessori schools have taught preschoolers to read and to write.  Dr. Montessori's textbooks are full of descriptions of the eagerness and the enthusiasm with which her poverty-level students learned to read.  After studying their progress, degree of interest, and rate of learning, Dr. Montessori concluded that children learn to read most easily at ages four and five.

A child in a Montessori school learns to write before he learns to read.  And he learns with such ease and pleasure that most elementary schoolteachers find it difficult to believe.  He begins by learning how to control the muscles in his hand, by manipulating equipment designed for this purpose, by working with geometric form boards and inlaid puzzles, by tracing and filling in geometric shapes with a pencil, and then he practices tracing sandpaper letters with his fingers as he learns the sounds these letters make.  In this way, he learns all of the physical motions necessary to write before he ever risks making a mistake by actually trying to write with a pencil on paper.  When he is ready to try, he usually succeeds immediately and joyfully.

(An excerpt from "How To Raise A Brighter Child" by Joan Beck')