Zoe was learning to read at a Canberra school that used a strategy that has since been removed from the Australian curriculum, yet remains in use in many classrooms around the country.

The three-cueing system encourages children to think of a word when they get stuck and ask themselves: "Does it make sense here? Does it sound right? Does it look right?"

This technique is coupled with "predictable" home readers — books that follow a pattern with pictures to match.

"The books that she was reading at the time, they were pretty much just 'look at the picture and guess what the words are'," Ms Bogart says.

...

There, they were taught letters and sounds in a particular order so they could blend them and decode unfamiliar words.

The theory is that, after a child has decoded a word a number of times, they will just know it and progress to more difficult words and sentences.

So, teaching them to actually read the word works better than teaching them to guess it? Why would they think 5 year olds have enough experience with every word ever to instinctively know if it’s right? Smh

This is the best summary I could come up with:

She took matters into her own hands, finding a tutor and scraping together enough money to move Zoe and her older sister Lacey to a Catholic school.

Her son Jagger learnt this way from the start, and the kindergarten student is already at a year 2 reading level, according to his mother, who has been on her own learning journey to teach her children at home.

Speech pathologist Scarlett Gaffey sees many of them in her Canberra clinic who are “failing to learn to read not because they can’t but because they’re not taught well enough”.

Professor Snow says the stakes are high: children who are early strugglers experience a “multiplier effect” as they go through school, potentially facing a “lifetime on the margins of society”.

South Australia was the first jurisdiction to make statewide changes in public schools in 2018, establishing a dedicated unit to train teachers and a team of literacy coaches.

In some schools across Australia, principals and teachers are making changes in a bottom-up approach, which Professor Snow says requires “effectively a 180-degree U-turn”.

The original article contains 1,845 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 90%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!