Welcome to my website! This page provides a brief overview of my background and professional experience. It also gives you a look at the natural, personalized approach to reading I’ve developed and some insight into the thinking behind it. Finally, it explains my purpose in creating this website.
Theoretical Base and Classroom Experience
When my daughters were preschoolers, I read Montessori’s books and became so inspired by her work that I wanted my girls to experience her methods. So, not having the training myself, I hired a Dutch Montessori directress and established a Montessori preschool. (See newspaper clippings about our school.)
The classroom management strategies I learned from that experience helped me later to create the active reading/writing work periods described on this website.
A few years after my Montessori experience, I discovered Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s concept of Key Vocabulary, which I now call Special Words. Those are the words a child uses to tell us about something of special interest to them. They’re a powerful tool for a beginning reader and are at the heart of this natural approach to reading you’ll find here.
Shortly after I began experimenting with Special Words, I interviewed for a position in a public, K-2, bilingual classroom in southern California. Many of the children there were not progressing well, so I was hired with the understanding that I could experiment with the Special Words strategy I was only beginning to develop. It was a one-school district where board members had children in the school and were willing to support me in any way I needed.
Close to half my students were the children of migrant farmworkers. The rest were native English speakers. Of that second group, some had the advantage of a print-rich home environment, while others had little experience with print.
Obviously, I needed a completely individualized reading program. So, I combined what I’d learned from Montessori and Ashton-Warner and developed this personalized approach. Working that out during the first year or so was a somewhat hectic experience. But it was well worth the effort.
Special Words and The Steps
I call this approach Special Words and The Steps. It begins by showing a child how their “talk” looks when written down. They’re fascinated by seeing their words in print and want to do it, too.
So, having captured their attention, the teacher, parent, aide, or volunteer carefully models what they’re doing as they write. They show the child how to listen for the sounds in their words and choose certain letters to spell them. Watching us, the child absorbs and learns to use phonemic awareness (listening for sounds), phonics, and letter formation.
Finally, since reading and writing are two sides of the same coin, their new writing skills easily transfer to reading. To support and ensure skill development, I devised a series of follow-up activities for Special Words, known as The Steps.
So, the child learns to read and write simultaneously. And they do it with the same pleasure and ease they learned to speak.
This approach can be done in any language that uses the same alphabet as English. Non-English speakers can remain in the classroom, with a bilingual aide or volunteer taking their dictation. Then, when the child feels ready, they spontaneously switch to English.
Keeping all children together in the same classroom avoids attaching any stigma to being a non-English speaker. It also avoids any delay in beginning to learn to read and working alongside English speakers in an active setting allows newcomers to pick up English naturally.
Leaving the Classroom
This approach was highly successful. Children who had previously been struggling flourished. As word got out, visitors began coming to observe. With the interest those visits generated, I began showing other teachers how to organize and use Special Words and The Steps.
Eventually, the county reading specialist brought in the nationally known reading expert, Dr. Jeannette Veatch. She urged me to enter the Ph.D. program at Claremont Graduate University, to allow me to teach aspiring teachers how to take this approach.
So, after five years of classroom teaching, I followed her advice. See Professional Education and Teaching Adults.
How this Approach Differs from Traditional Methods
This personalized approach recognizes the fact that from infancy to around six years old, a child’s brain operates differently than it does later — as follows:
A Young Child’s Natural Learning Strategy
Very young children are like sponges.
They’re also natural mimics.
They spontaneously absorb and copy
What they see and hear us do —
If they find it interesting enough.
That’s how we help them learn to talk, and they can easily do the same with print. Using their natural strategy, the child develops the same skills targeted by traditional methods. But they absorb and baster them through immersion — just as they so easily do with speech.
As we take a child’s dictation, their printed Special Words and sentences are immediately meaningful; they make sense, spark the child’s interest, and allow them to absorb and copy reading/writing skills. That makes learning to read enjoyable and easy. So, the child likes to read and does it — a lot. With repeated, enjoyable practice, the child becomes an avid, skillful reader.
Most adults intuitively use the child’s natural learning strategy to help them learn to speak. They model by talking directly to them in complete sentences, reciting nursery rhymes, and singing. They also emphasize words of particular interest to that child: milk, kitty, Mama, Daddy, etc.
But when it comes to print, many have a blind spot. They seem to disregard how they help infants learn to talk and feel they need to “teach” a child to read. So, instead of taking advantage of the child’s natural learning strategy, they analyze the act of reading take one of two traditional approaches. They either have the child memorize phonics and sight words, then have them practice with books virtually devoid of meaning to the child. Or they teach reading with specially designed books that repeat words and sentences that, while better than those used in the first method, still have less meaning than a child’s own Special Words and sentences.
Both methods make learning to read more difficult than necessary. Most children from a print-rich home or preschool environment can overcome that. However, children lacking a print-rich foundation will struggle.
Those children lose confidence, fidget, complain, cry, or stubbornly resist. They may ultimately be diagnosed with a reading disability, and sometimes that’s true. However, many times that’s not the problem. Using this approach for many years, I’ve found only two children who couldn’t easily learn to read and write. They also couldn’t talk, even in their home language.
My Purpose Now
I have never forgotten the children I worked with so long ago and how delighted they were to see what they could accomplish. And I frequently hear from parents now with children struggling to read. So, I’m offering this approach to help preschool, K-2, and remedial students avoid or recover from unnecessary struggle and failure.
Sharing this approach is a volunteer project in my retirement, and this website is a work in progress. Try as I may, I can’t find a technician (at least one I can afford) to make its messaging buttons work properly! So, if you have questions, you can contact me through my Facebook Group, Helping All Kids Write to Read.
Posts and Comments/questions to that group come directly to me and remain private unless you indicate you want them to be published. Or you can go to my Facebook profile and message me from there. (There’s more than one Janet Kierstead on Facebook. In my profile picture, you’ll see a piano in a room with glass walls.)
Just explain the situation, and I’ll be happy to answer your questions!