In traditional methods, the student sees the letter as a name and relates the letter sound by retrieving a mental picture or a character that has been taught, in order to make the sound. Making Great Readers is an alternative program based on the fact that letter names and not what the young learner needs the most. Our program makes the sound-letter shape connection first and foremost and creates the philosophy of "See the Sound - Think the Letter."

Wallace Howard is a retired kindergarten teacher with 27 years of service in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. His passion is to teach reading to early learners by designing and implementing a kinesthetic reading process that gives students the skills to decode and comprehend. Wallace has presented for the North Carolina Reading Association, Georgia Reading Association, and Florida Readingt Association, served as a grade level chair, new teacher mentor and consultant for the North Carolina Newton-Conover School System.

Think for a moment about how parents teach their children to walk. They model walking, give them time to develop their muscles, take hold of their hand, and move them in a walking motion. They are given the information they need to begin walking before they are developmentally ready. And yes, they learn to walk.

As teachers of reading, either in the classroom or as a parent, we need to copy the process that has been successful at providing talking and walking skills and apply it to reading. We need to give children the information they need to become a reader, in large quantities, before they are developmentally ready. Children then need time to develop the process of reading.

Reading is an integrated process that involves many skills.

Pre-reading skills include:

Phonemic awareness

Knowledge of the alphabet

Sound-letter connections

Concepts of print

Vocabulary development

Comprehension

Making Great Readers targets the first four and advocates for comprehension.

Making Great Readers develops the process that allows students to use a kinesthetic signal to make sound-letter connections that is necessary for self-directed reading. The philosophy of Making Great Readers is "See the Sound - Think the Letter", providing the learner with a correlation of sounds with letter shape before learning letter names.