Learning to Read in Kindergarten: Has Curriculum Development Bypassed the Controversies?

Abstract

The prevailing assumption has been that a formal reading curriculum is inappropriate for kindergartners. However, district staff members and teachers in the Northern Lights School Division of Alberta were convinced that a nurturing approach to teaching reading would not endanger the and might in fact prevent some of them from encountering academic difficulties in the primary grades and beyond. WE'LL BEGIN with a simple proposition: let's teach our kindergarten students to read. We already know how to do it, so why don't we? Within schools and school districts, decisions about curriculum and instruction in literacy have to be made on the basis of present knowledge and judgment. Such decisions can't wait until all controversies have been resolved and all the evidence is in with regard to available options. In the case of kindergarten, decisions about curriculum are complicated by debates about whether there should be a formal curriculum in reading or whether the components of the kindergarten program should be designed to develop the dimensions of emergent literacy only. But research on how to teach beginning readers grows apace, and we believe that we should take advantage of it. In the Northern Lights School Division in Alberta, Canada -- a district of 20 schools and about 6,500 students -- we decided to design a formal reading curriculum for kindergarten, prepare the teachers to implement it, and conduct an action research study of student learning. Our decision stemmed from the judgment that research on beginning reading had reached the point where an effective, engaging, and multidimensional curriculum could be designed and implemented without placing our students at risk in the process. And if such a curriculum proved successful, it seemed likely that the much-publicized gap would be reduced. Over the past five years in Northern Lights, we (we includes the superintendent, Ed Wittchen; the trustees; and representative teachers and administrators) had concentrated on the development of nets for low-achieving students at the second-grade level and in grades 4 through 12.1 We based the two curriculum designs on strands of research on beginning literacy for young and for older struggling readers and writers.2 Currently, in both safety net curricula, about three-fourths of the students are progressing well and narrowing the distance between themselves and the district's average students. The others are holding their own. The need for the safety net programs and our observation of the frustration and hopelessness experienced by students who needed help caused us to consider the K-3 literacy curricula and to explore whether we could strengthen them and so reduce the need for the later safety nets. We take seriously the statement by Connie Juel, who, in reacting to the National Research Council report Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, wrote that children who struggle in vain with reading in the first grade soon decide that they neither like nor want to read.3 Our teachers who work in the safety net programs confirm that their job is half instruction and half therapy. For some decades, because of the concerns about not generating demands beyond the capabilities of the students or introducing students to reading in unpleasant ways, there has been a dearth of studies on formal reading programs for kindergarten. A few studies did suggest that formal reading programs in kindergarten could have positive effects that lasted throughout schooling. For kindergarten interventions as such, though, we had to go back to Delores Durkin's work of 30 years ago. In building a kindergarten curriculum, we were not able to draw on a body of recent research on, say, alternative kindergarten reading programs or dimensions of learning to read at age 5. We drew on the literature relevant to learning to read in grades 1 through 3 and above. …