The Fluent Readers Who Cannot Read

Ira David Socol
10 min readJun 1, 2022

It isn’t that “explicit training in phonemic awareness” can’t be helpful to some beginning readers, it’s that phonics and phonemes aren’t about the purpose (or the facts) of reading.

All of us who know kids know that the McDonald’s sign is one of the first things kids learn to read.
If a one-year-old knows what this sign means, are they reading?

“[T-ball is] not about [baseball] skill development. Kids don’t have full coordination or visual acuity yet, and they can only absorb 10-to-15-second bites of instruction, Ginsburg says. When a sport is working, kids are…

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Ira David Socol

Author, Dreamer, Educator: A life in service - NYPD, EMS, disabilities/UDL specialist, tech and innovation leader for education. Co-author of Timeless Learning