The most effective way to help our young children learn to read successfully is to identify the ways young children learn naturally and to use those same exact ways to teach reading.
The fact is, we think and learn using both sides of our brain. However, each of us has a dominant hemisphere that dictates our learning strengths, impacts our view of the world, and determines how we function in it. It is important for us to understand our children's strengths to successfully teach them to read.
When I first engaged in teaching, I did everything very traditionally. What I did was widely accepted as "how you teach", so it never entered my mind that what I was doing was riddled with fatal flaws.
While there are many children who can succeed in traditional classrooms, there are a vast number of children who learn best through visual and kinesthetic connections made between what is familiar to them, and the new, unknown material.
Logic dominant children need to add the meaning and emotion and comprehension to their great logic skills so that they can improve as problem solvers. Gestalt dominant children need to match all the linear stuff with the colorful right-brain stuff they are so good at.
