It is a startling fact – a whopping 65% of fourth-graders are struggling to read proficiently  according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2022 and it’s 2 percentage points higher than in 2019. Why are our children struggling and why is their literacy rate decreasing instead of improving over the years?

The American Public Media podcast series, ‘Sold a Story’ by Emily Hanford, with Christopher Peak brought this crisis to light, raising a crucial question: What's going wrong in our education system? Something's broken.

Enter the "Picture and Guess" reading method, the backbone of most literacy curriculums. By harnessing visual cues and context clues, it encourages readers to predict and infer meaning. It sounds good on paper – systematic phonics lessons, decoding skills, and all. But guess what? This strategy leaves our children ill-prepared for literacy challenges ahead without teaching them how to read. It is a real concern that stretches beyond the classroom and into middle school, impacting their readiness for high school.

But here's the plot twist: there's a game-changing solution, and it comes in the form of decodable books. They provide a phonetic way of learning to read and spell, and are with words that have spelling patterns a child has been taught, i.e. so children can try to read the words instead of guessing. 

Armed with this knowledge, we begin to gather a team of experts and work to incorporate decodable books in the core of Yeti Confetti™’s English Literacy curriculum to revolutionize how we teach reading to our children! 

Join us next as we delve into inequality in reading, the experts we collaborate with and how we work to improve the literacy rate of our children.