In its first season, Sold a Story argued, “Kids are not being taught how to read, because for decades teachers have been sold an idea about reading and how children learn to do it.”
In its second season, it looks at Direct Instruction. In the second episode, 99-year-old Elaine “Cookie” Bruner recounts how the children in the experiment preschool — which wasn’t just a nursery school — who chosen because they were the younger siblings of kids who were having trouble in school, needed language instruction:
We found out that they didn’t understand things like ‘o-r,’ ‘or.’
So — ‘give me the pencil or the book’ and they would pick up a pencil and a book. Ooh.
The narrator explains:
You might think children don’t need to be taught language. That they’ll pick it up from their environment. But … environments differ.
Yes, environments differ – but so do children.