Why It Works

The Superkids characters engage and motivate children.

The Superkids program has something unique in all of educational publishing: a cast of delightful characters, called the Superkids, whose activities and adventures keep children engaged and motivated as they go about the serious work of learning to read and write. Each Superkid has a distinctive personality, special talents and interests, and problems and predicaments that young readers can relate to. With their songs and stories, the Superkids carry children from lesson to lesson and from level to level, capturing and sustaining their interest over a two-year period as they move through a program that is as rigorous and disciplined as it is fun.

Explicit phonics instruction gives children a reliable way to unlock the written word.

The systematic, explicit phonics instruction at the heart of the program is thoughtfully and thoroughly designed so that children learn to decode words with continuous practice until they reach automaticity and fluency. At the same time children are taught to decode, they are also taught to encode, or write, letters for the sounds they have learned. Thus, the relationship between written and spoken language is made explicit as children see that they can write what they speak and read what they write.

Phonetically controlled vocabulary enables children to really read, not guess.

Throughout the program, every word children meet contains only sound and symbols that have been explicitly taught. Children approach unknown words with confidence knowing they have the tools to unlock them. Reading phonetically controlled vocabulary encourages children to build the habit of decoding, rather than making guesses, until they can read automatically. The success children experience builds their confidence and motivates them to continue to apply the decoding principle to ever more complex and challenging material.

The program seamlessly integrates all of the language arts.

In the Superkids program, reading skills are developed in concert with other language skills so that children understand the integration of written and spoken language. As a result, they advance from level to level with an increasing store of balanced skills that can be applied to accessing, processing, and reproducing our language. Skills from multiple strands are taught simultaneously and in support of one another. In addition, when a new sound, word, or skill is introduced in the Superkids program, children always "hear it, see it, say it, and write it." In this way, all the skills children need to read and write are taught in multiple modes—visual, auditory, and kinesthetic.