A Book List to Understand the Science of Reading

The Science of Reading is central to how children learn to read in school. These three books, recommended by a teaching expert, can help you understand how it works whether you are a teacher or a parent with elementary-aged students.

The Science of Reading is the body of research that breaks down the skills children need in order to become good readers and is widely applied to the reading curricula being taught in schools today. If you have children at home or if you are a teacher and could use a refresher, below are three books that might be helpful to read this summer

It could be especially helpful to parents of children who are struggling to read at grade level to better understand how the reading programs being used in schools help struggling readers learn the main components of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and reading comprehension.

The list and descriptions below are from Miriam Williams, the professional development manager at 3P Learning. It’s her job to train teachers how to use the Reading Eggs, which is a supplementary reading curriculum for elementary grade students.

Harnessing the Science of Reading, by Nathaniel Swain

Harnessing the Science of Reading is about setting up the classroom for success and establishing clear routines with daily and weekly planning. The idea is to avoid overwhelming cognitive load, finding ways to make practical changes in a teacher's daily and weekly routines.
Much of Swain’s philosophy is about patterns and creating predictability. His approach is the "I do, we do, you do" sequencing — a pattern many teachers already follow. 3P Learning products follow that sequencing, too.

Beyond the Science of Reading, by Natalie Wexler

Beyond the Science of Reading is an anchor for many teachers in helping them understand the Science of Reading in practice. Wexler goes beyond explaining the Science of Reading and describes what this knowledge looks like in practice with students.

Wexler puts a lot of focus on comprehension and describing context, which sometimes gets overlooked in the necessity to get right to the teaching. However, if a student has no context for the words they are trying to learn, they cannot create meaning to help them learn those words in the first place.

Atomic Habits, by James Clear

Everybody loves Atomic Habits. It isn't only for teachers. Clear's book works through how a person learns to focus on the things they care most about, and how to cut out the noise. Where Swain’s writing gives practical strategies to implement these ideas in a classroom, Atomic Habits is broader. It’s about personal habit forming, and if you master this as a broader skill it becomes so much easier to implement the practices Swain advocates for changing practice in the classroom.