Skilled Reading for Every Child

Decades of research have proven that teaching children to read is an art and a science, leading to the emergence of the Science of Reading movement. Thousands of international, interdisciplinary scientific and educational studies have pinpointed what—and, crucially, how—we must teach children who are learning to read. The resulting evidence forms the foundation of reading science:

• Humans are not hardwired to read the way we are to speak. Children must be explicitly taught to decipher the "code," beginning with foundational skills: Phonological Awareness, the ability to recognize the individual sounds of spoken language, and Phonics, the association of those sounds with the letters that represent them on the page.
• To build fluency, Phonics lessons should be followed by reading decodable texts that connect to the student’s recently acquired skills.
• These foundational skills do not compose the entirety of an evidence-based reading initiative, but they lay essential groundwork for building subsequent skills that interweave word recognition and language comprehension to realize skilled reading for all students.