At East 10th Street UMC Preschool, four-year-olds are reading words. Not just recognizing letters — actually reading. And it happened in a single school year, with just ten minutes of targeted instruction a day. The preschool's director didn't set out to overhaul her literacy approach. She started from a familiar place: there isn't room for one more thing. "I often think I can't take on a new initiative because we're already doing so much," she said. "What I appreciate about

Reading growth isn’t one thing. It’s a chain, and every link matters. When a kindergartner truly masters letter names and sounds, first grade doesn’t spend the year re-teaching what should already be there — it builds. When first grade builds, second grade reaches for fluency. And when second grade reaches fluency, third grade becomes the year a child reads to learn, instead of struggling to learn to read. Break a link in kindergarten, and you spend years trying to weld it ba

By: Librarian Molly Technology certainly has its benefits and we here at TILT use it as a tool to help make literacy accessible to all children. We cannot and would not want to put the genie back in the bottle as far as technology goes, yet we still place great value on time honored literacy tools–namely reading aloud to children. We are reading about several current studies that point to the fact that an increasing number of children are not being read aloud to. The School

Josefa Beyer, TILT Reading Specialist B told me that at his previous schools, teachers rushed him. When it came to reading, they just would not slow down for him. Wise words. How many classroom teachers are given the time or training to find out why one child does not read as expected. And how many have the resources to teach a struggling student individually, day after day? I met B when he was 14 and in seventh grade. He could not blend even very short words. He guessed and