ABSTRACT
In a school nearby, teachers are using the reading basal series that their school adopted for all the elementary grades. It has a scope and sequence chart for each grade level. For the most part, teachers follow the manuals, here and there adding ideas of their own. Primary teachers at another school use a balanced literacy approach to teach reading. The first graders were beginning to put together a reading process system and clearly understood that meaning is at the heart of reading. After years of research working with proficient and struggling readers, Marie Clay developed Reading Recovery as an early intervention program. Basically, most literacy educators agree that there are two contrasting theories, the simple and the complex. The simple theory of reading, sometimes called the item or skills-based theory, relies on all the visible aspects.
