History of the Superkids Reading Program

Forty years ago, I was a young teacher, frustrated by the classroom materials I was given to use, searching for a solution to help my students learn to read. After studying the literature of leading developmental psychologists, reading experts, and education theorists, I created a phonics-based reading program that integrated reading, spelling, listening, and speaking. That program, called Superkids, was published in 1978 by Addison-Wesley Publishing Company as the kindergarten and first-grade levels of a basal reading program. It met early success with students who loved its lively, likeable characters and teachers who loved its results.

In 1981, Addison-Wesley ceased to market the Superkids program, deciding instead to focus on its original mission of publishing math and science textbooks. But, by then the program had already been implemented in hundreds of classrooms across the nation, where it had won the hearts of the students and teachers who were using it. Although the program was never again actively marketed, a large number of schools remained dedicated to it and Addison-Wesley continued to supply the materials to them. For almost two decades, the Superkids program quietly continued to teach children to read and write, held safe in the hands of teachers who believed in it because it worked.

Some years later, Addison-Wesley offered to sell the program to me. Deeply touched by the fact that the Superkids program was still so valued by its users, I purchased it to keep it alive for the dedicated teachers who depended on it.

Because of those dedicated teachers, the Superkids program survives intact today, seemingly plucked by Providence out of the maelstrom of the past 25 years of reading fad and fashion. Ironically, as a consequence of being pulled from the market in the 1980s and 1990s, the program was never edited or revised to fit the trends of the times and its disciplined, phonics-based pedagogy, seamlessly integrated with language arts, remains undiluted.

During the past decade, I have become aware of the brain-imaging research of Dr. Sally Shaywitz of Yale University in her studies of how children learn to read. Dr. Shaywitz’s work validates the multimodal phonetic instructional method on which I had built the Superkids program years before.

The findings of the National Reading Panel, published in 2000, underscored the importance of explicit, systematic phonics instruction and the integration of reading with the language arts — the very pillars of the program I had created so long ago.

Providence seems to be at work again, but this time the nation was seeking what I had sought for my own students — a program that really worked and that teachers and children loved. Better yet, it is now a program that has stood the test of time in thousands of classrooms and is validated by state-of-the-art brain research.

In 2003, I formed a nonprofit foundation to update and distribute the Superkids Reading Program and to support research into the most effective way to teach children how to read. The new editions of Superkids for kindergarten through second grade are available now.

It is dedicated to that loyal band of teachers who held it safe for so long, with special appreciation for the illustrator, Loretta Lustig, who, when asked to produce a cast of engaging, timeless characters, created the Superkids — an enduring gift to children and teachers that, like the program itself, has proven timeless, indeed.

Pleasant T. Rowland
Author, The Superkids Reading Program