What Your First Grader Needs to Know: Fundamentals of a Good First-grade Education

Reading, Writing, and Your First Grader PARENTS: Before we present a selection of poems and stories for your child, we want to address you directly. This section, Reading, Writing, and Your First Grader, is intended to help you understand how children are--or should be--taught to read and write in a good first-grade classroom, and to suggest a few ways that you can help at home. The first section below, Teaching Children to Read: The Need for a Balanced Approach, summarizes a discussion presented in What Your Kindergartner Needs to Know. If you have already read this, then you may wish to skip ahead to page 5 and begin with the section Goals for Reading and Writing: From Kindergarten to First Grade. Teaching Children to Read: The Need for a Balanced Approach Everyone agrees that children should learn to read. But not everyone agrees how to achieve that goal. Many studies have demonstrated, however, that while fashions come and go in education, pulling schools toward one extreme or another, there is a reasonable middle ground that is best for children.