I learned to read in a Montessori classroom where my mother was student teaching in 1974. Teaching children to read immediately became part of her life’s work and eventually mine.
Maria Montessori pioneered multi-sensory, systematic, cumulative, explicitly taught, child-centered reading instruction in Rome in the early 1900s with children under 6 years old.
She was not alone in her observations about how children and adults best learn to read and spell. Webster, McGuffey and Orton & Gillingham created readers, spellers and approaches to instruction for struggling readers before and after Montessori’s time.
They discovered what the the brain needed. Students had to train their brain to identify the sounds in the language and connect those to letters for both reading and spelling. They discovered that students did best with explicit, systematic lessons for building skills from the simplest to the most complex. They discovered that morphological study and syllable division were an aid to making meaning and decoding. Today research is validating many of their shared principles and elements and calling it Structured Literacy. Is it surprising that what has always worked, still does? Not really because the brain learns to read one way and always has.
Consider this: What if teaching children to read is straightforward, practical and only requires a stick in the dirt and a wise instructor? Do we have the resolve to embrace that simplicity, train our teachers well and let them guide the children to success?
