Principles

Motivation is a key factor in children's success in learning to read.

Children come to school excited to learn. Above all, they come expecting to learn to read and write. But five- and six-year-olds can be easily discouraged. To keep children engaged as they tackle the hard work of learning to read, the Superkids program features a cast of lively characters, whose adventures and activities delight children of all skill levels and backgrounds. The Superkids mirror the developmental stages and interests of students themselves, so students can easily relate to them.

Success itself is a key motivator as well. The program's lessons are ordered so that children work only with the letter-sounds and spellings they have been taught. This means that early on students experience the joy and success of really reading words—not just guessing at them. This accomplishment delivers on children's expectations: they are learning to read, just as they hoped to.

Reading is most effectively taught when integrated with the other language arts.

Children come to school with a sizable speaking vocabulary. Their academic task is to learn to read and write the words and ideas they can speak. Teaching students how to read and giving them a foundation in all the other language arts may seem daunting. Yet, research shows the best way to teach any one of the language arts is by integrating it with the others.

The lesson sequence of the Superkids program integrates reading and the other language arts seamlessly. Handwriting "imprints" letter shapes on the brain. Practice in hearing sounds (phonemic awareness) leads to quicker, more reliable letter-sound associations. Listening to, reading, and writing stories gives children the understanding that what they are learning will help them communicate their ideas, and communication is the end goal of all the language arts.

Explicit phonics instruction gives children a reliable way to unlock the written word.

English is a rich and complex language with hundreds of thousands of words. But at its base is the alphabetic principle, a relatively simple code in which 26 letters stand for all the sounds we speak. Mastering the sound-symbol code is the foremost step in learning to read—the only truly reliable process that opens written language to beginning readers. Current brain research has validated the efficacy and importance of the intense phonics-based instruction that is at the core of the Superkids program.

The systematic, explicit phonics instruction in the program is thoughtfully and thoroughly designed so that children learn to decode words with continuous practice until they reach automaticity and fluency. Only when they can decode automatically are their minds free to comprehend fully what they have read.

By applying the simple decoding equation, children can read hundreds of words by the end of the first Superkids level and, by the end of the program, can decode almost any word in the English language.

At the same time children are taught the decoding equation, they are also taught to encode, or write, letters for the sounds they have learned. Thus, the relationship between written and spoken language is made explicit as children see that they can write what they speak and read what they write.

Phonetically controlled vocabulary ensures success, enabling children to really read, not guess.

Learning to read is hard work. As letter-sound connections are taught, limiting the words children read to those that have sounds they have learned gives them surefire success. The phonetically controlled vocabulary in the program allows children to build the habit of decoding, rather than making guesses, until they can read automatically. The success children experience builds their confidence and motivates them to continue to apply the decoding principle to ever more complex and challenging material. The decoding habit will serve them throughout their lives. It is the same technique adult readers use when they meet unknown words.

As children are applying their decoding skills to phonetically controlled vocabulary, it is equally important to give them practice in encoding that same vocabulary to reinforce, again, the relationship between reading and writing.

An integrated, multimodal approach gives all children repeated opportunities to practice the key reading skills in the modality that suits their learning style.

Children, like all of us, learn through their senses, through visual, auditory, and kinesthetic modalities. Throughout the program, when children learn a new letter and sound, they see it (visual modality), hear it (auditory), say it, and write it (kinesthetic), thereby guaranteeing that all modalities are engaged. This multimodal technique supports the simultaneous development of reading and writing so that children have
a balanced store of skills as they progress to becoming independent readers
and writers.