Reading is the single most important skill a child will ever learn. All educational success depends on it. How can students learn history, literature, math and science if they can't read?

But Department of Education statistics show that 70% of children fail to become proficient readers. How can this be? The reason is that there are fundamental flaws in the traditional methods used for teaching our children to read.

Until now, educators relied almost exclusively on phonics and whole language to teach reading skills. Phonics, the dominant method, teaches the sounds of letters and words, but English is a highly irregular language and the sounds that letters make change in ways that are often too unpredictable for a child to make sense of. Consider the following words:

face / facet / facetious		hear / heart / hearse
car / care / career		real / realm / reality
dead / dear /deactivate		rough / through / thorough

To handle these issues with sounding-out, phonics has created almost 600 complicated rules. Put simply, if phonics worked as advertised, the word would be spelled "foniks."

Whole language has had even poorer results. It provides very little structure for learning and as a result, children are often overwhelmed with unfamiliar words and sentence structures that cause unnecessary difficulties in learning. Without any formalized structure, children find themselves adrift in a sea of unrecognized words -- and reading failure often ensues.

The Reading Kingdom program, on the other hand, offers a new 6 skill model of reading instruction that incorporates elements of phonics and whole language while teaching additional skills required for reading and writing success without requiring kids to learn any complicated rules.