Amid all the recent calls for “back to basics” in education, we might well believe that there is indeed a core set of basic educational goals and values that children in each age should adhere to. However, this is in fact not the case: What schools teach and what a society believes that children should learn varies from one generation to the next and reflects issues of importance in the culture at large. This is true across the curriculum, but perhaps no where more obvious than in ideas about how reading should be taught, no doubt because reading forms the core of any educational process. This paper examines what just some of the strategies involved in teaching reading within a balanced literacy strategy as well as in some related strategies.
