Writing before reading

Happy Friday, everyone.

Alice, my four-year-old daughter, has recently started to read. As recently as four months ago, she couldn’t independently read a board book. Now, she is reading independently and with stunning fluency, probably at somewhere around the 1st or 2nd grade level. She’s led reading at circle time at her Guidepost school.

How did this happen?

The answer is the Montessori approach to reading. The whole (elaborate, multi-year) approach. But the sudden jump in capacity is specially explained by one aspect of it: “writing before reading”.

The idea of writing before reading sounds paradoxical. What could a not-yet-literate child possibly write? But there is no paradox, and the approach cuts to the very heart of Montessori’s genius.

Literacy does not come all at once, it comes in bits and degrees. It involves a combination of phonemic awareness—that is, awareness that words are composed of smaller sounds—fine motor control, automated recognition of letters, and, for English, a long process of automating multi-letter phonograms, many of which are counterintuitive and exceptional relative to the most common alphabet sounds.

In addition, reading requires being able to blend letter sounds together into one word. Reading C-A-T as cat requires, first, translating the letters to their sounds—k-æ-t—and second, saying it quickly enough to integrate those sounds into one sound.

It’s this blending step that “writing before reading” brilliantly addresses. It sounds easy, but for new readers, it is very often the hardest step. Children typically struggle with it. Standard (not Montessori) approaches to phonics target this step with separate exercises focused on speed of enunciation.

This step is in fact critical for reading. But Montessori recognized that it is not critical for writing. Children who know letter sounds, but have not yet mastered phonemic blending, can produce writing even if they struggle to interpret it. The fact that the child herself is the source of the word that she wants to express, means that she doesn’t have to decode what that word is. She already knows what the word is. She can transliterate the sounds as they already stand in her mind, even if she would struggle to decode the sounds if they weren’t in her mind.

Children can practice with written words before they can read them—by writing them. Once a child has enough basic letters, digraphs, and so on, they can start to express themselves with the movable alphabet, or handwriting, or even typing. (I very strongly recommend giving budding writers typing opportunities at home, which is the topic of a separate post.) And they naturally love doing so. Expressing oneself in writing is joyous and sacred.

A small child writing in this way cannot, of course, spell very well. But it doesn’t matter. Precision with spelling in a language like English comes separately, after reading and with different sorts of practice and study.

Alice has only been reading for a few months, but she’s been writing for almost a year. It’s not that she never read anything, but she was much more interested in writing than reading, both in her Montessori classrooms and at home. She could continue to study phonograms, continue to automate the basic components of alphabetism, at the same time as she started to construct and automate words.

When phonemic blending finally clicked for Alice, it ignited a reservoir of rocket fuel that had been built up for a year (and much longer than that, if you include the sound games and vocabulary she’s been getting intentionally since she was a one-year-old). At that point she, well, launched.

I’ve always been convinced of the writing-before-reading approach on the merits of the arguments and evidence. Teaching three-year-old slum children how to read is the thing that made Montessori famous, and it started with her (almost accidentally) enabling them to write. The possibility and motivational appeal of writing before reading is a huge unlock, leveraging the child’s natural desire for self-expression for practice.

Montessori is the best approach to phonics. It is unique in fully connecting every step of the process to the child’s agency. Writing before reading illustrates this dramatically.

Seeing it play out with Alice, it is even better than I thought it would be.

I can’t end this note without thanking her many teachers at Guidepost over the years who have inspired her and helped her along in this process, most recently (but not exhaustively) Ana Maria Najera at Round Rock, Vaishnavi Vittal and Kanchan Yengal at Brushy Creek, and Ashley Gardner at Mill Valley.

Matt Bateman
Board of Directors, Higher Ground