R is for Reading

Storylines

There’s a battle going on about how to teach kids to read. It’s been fought over decades. In Canada, it mostly shakes down as follows: on one side, phonics, which focuses on letters—how they sound, how they blend together, and sounding words out. On the other side, three-cueing—which uses context clues like what the story’s about, what letter a word starts with, and looking at the pictures in order to guess a word in its entirety. Mom and teacher Brittney Thompson found herself in the middle of the reading wars during the COVID lockdowns. That’s when she discovered just how much her daughter was struggling to read with the three-cueing method. The same method Brittney was using in her own classroom… On this week's Storylines, producer Mykella Van Cooten digs into the reading wars, asking when it comes to teaching kids to read, who's got it right?