Yetta and Kenneth Goodman have learned that even the littlest children bring an abundance of experience to school with them. Before they begin to read, children talk, they listen and comprehend, and they learn from their families and communities. What children know can be quite subtle. One first-grade boy spelled “make” as “mach.” He told Ken he wrote it that way because, he said, “I know there’s an ‘h.’ It’s a small sound at the end you can hardly hear.”The boy had learned to write an aspiration (like the “h” in “help”) with an “h.” He had yet to discover ...
