Welcome to my website! This page is a brief overview of my background and professional experience. It’s also meant to give you some insight into my thinking and a glimpse of the natural, personalized approach to reading I recommend. Finally, it also explains my purpose in developing this website.
Theoretical Base and Classroom Experience
When my daughters were preschoolers, I read all of Montessori’s books. I became so inspired by her work that I wanted my girls to experience her methods. So not having Montessori training myself, I hired a Dutch Montessori directress and established a Montessori preschool. (See newspaper clippings about our school.)
What I’d learned from that experience helped me create the active, individualized writing work periods described on this website.
A few years later, I discovered Sylvia Ashton-Warner’s concept of Key Vocabulary — now called Key Words — in which she used a child’s own words to develop reading and writing skills. By then, our family had moved to California, where I taught in a K-2, public-school classroom.
Close to half my students were the children of migrant farmworkers. Some of the others came with all the advantages of a print-rich home environment — and still others were native-English speakers, but had little experience with print.
So I needed a completely individualized reading program. To provide that, I combined what I’d learned from those two educators — Montessori and Ashton-Warner. Influenced by their theory and practice, I developed a personalized approach to reading based on a child’s heartfelt interests and the words they used to express them. I refer to the program as, Key Words and The Steps.
It shows a child how their own “talk” looks in print. They are fascinated by seeing that and want to do it, too. So as we model, they absorb and learn to use phonics and other skills required for writing.
Their writing skills readily transfer to reading. So with this personalized approach, children learn to read and write at thecsame time. And they dobit with the same pleasure and ease they learned to speak. Key Words spark their interest and establish that printed words have meaning. Using The Steps ensures the child’s skill development.
The approach was highly successful. Children who had previously been struggling flourished. As word got out about how they were operating, visitors began coming to observe. With the interest those visits generated, I started showing other teachers how to use Key Words and The Steps — plus how to organize and manage an active, writing work period.
The county reading specialist eventually brought in the nationally known reading expert, Dr. Jeannette Veatch, to observe my children during our writing period. Dr. Veatch urged me to leave the classroom and begin showing other teachers how to do it. So, after five years of classroom teaching, I followed her advice. See Professional Education and Experience Teaching Adults.
Key Words & The Steps Add Experience to Traditional Approaches
I’ve created this website to sound the alarm that traditional methods are not meeting the needs of our increasingly diverse student population. We’ve been swinging back and forth between “phonics first” and “whole/balanced” language for too many decades now.
The approach you’ll discover here incorporates components from both traditional methods and adds real-life experience with print. It does that by immersing the child in using print to convey their thoughts in writing. As a result, print immediately begins to have meaning for the child, so that it makes sense to them and sparks their interest.
This approach recognizes that young children are equipped with a natural learning strategy that allows them to accomplish an amazing amount in their early years. In short, that strategy goes as follows —
A Young Child’s Natural Learning Strategy
A young child will automatically
Absorb and copy what they see and hear us doing,
If they find it interesting enough.
Most adults intuitively recognize this natural strategy and use it to help an infant learn to speak — by emphasizing words of particular interest to them: milk, kitty, Mama, Daddy, etc.
Unfortunately however, something strange happens when it comes to print. Many adults feel they need to take a more mechanical approach to help a child learn to read and write.
Instead of immersing the child in print as they did with speech, they directly teach reading — often these days by having them first memorize phonics and sight words.
Children coming from a print-rich, pre-K environment can manage with more mechanical approaches, but many do not. Those who don’t may fidget, complain, cry, or just stubbornly resist. And then, many times adults look for some fault or disability within the child to explain why.
However, I’ve found that most of the time, the problem comes from not recognizing and supporting The Child’s Natural Learning Strategy.
Most adults know that children are natural mimics — and can easily copy us. Many also know thats how they learn to talk and why they so easily “pick up” a second language — just by being immersed in it. Yet they don’t realize that a child can and will easily do the same with print.
But I’ve experienced for years that we can model the use of print the same way we model speech. The only difference is that we have to be more intentional about guiding skill development with print than we are with speech.
So I’ve developed a way to do that — by first using the child’s own Key Words. Those are the words they say to talk about things they love, fear, or simply find fascinating. Key Words are powerful — because they spark the child’s interest.
Then to ensure skill development, I created follow-up activities for Key Words, called The Steps. Using them, child develops the skills needed to read and write. With that combination, the child learns phonics, high-frequency words, sentence structure, punctuation, and more.
With The Steps, we don’t leave skill development to chance. Plus all the while, the child is discovering that print is meaningful — it’s just another way to talk.
Given their work is always based on topics of particular interest to them, a child learns to both read and write with the same pleasure and ease they learned to speak.
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 about children struggling with reading,
So I’m offering these strategies for preschool, K-2, and remedial. My intent is to help children avoid or recover from the unnecessary struggle that causes such problems.
Finally, since it takes some rethinking to provide the classroom management and organization that allows this to happen, you’ll also see sections on this website devoted to that topic.
You can contact me through the Facebook Group devoted to this topic. Your questions and comments there come directly to me and remain private unless you indicate you want them to be published.
This is a volunteer project in my retirement from teaching children and teachers. So I’m happy to respond to any questions you may have.