Reading Window School

The Reading Window School program imparts literacy basics in such a way that students have a good time while learning. The school is a small non-profit organization located in rural central Virginia.

The school’s founder and principal, Piper Martin, reports that her program is much more effective than the way reading is currently taught in United States public schools and more effective than the Head Start program. She says twenty years of Reading Window successes show that when a four- or five-year-old child--even a child from a very poor family, even a child whose parents/guardians are illiterate, even a dyslexic child--is enrolled in the six-week Reading Window program (20 minutes per day, five days per week), that child will come to enjoy reading and will never become a failure in school. Mrs. Martin predicts that Reading Window techniques would, once incorporated into public schools, nearly wipe out functional illiteracy in the U.S.

The program consists of a series of brief private tutoring sessions for each student with a tutor who's highly trained in split-second timing and the other Reading Window techniques. Private tutoring may sound like an expensive way to go, but Mrs. Martin says her calculations indicate that incorporating the Reading Window program into elementary schools would cost less than what the schools are doing now. She points to the fact that when the traditional school group-instruction model is used for introducing reading, some children become failures during the first year of school. In subsequent years, she says, schools place those children in special classes designed for slow learners--small classes that are costly because of high teacher-to-student ratios--and even so, such children seldom catch up to regular grade level, instead staying in "special" classes year after year and thus remaining financial burdens on their school systems.

Reading Window School is supported by the Charlottesville Area Community Fund, the BAMA Works Fund (associated with the Dave Matthews Band), the Optimist Club of the Blue Ridge, the Rappahannock Electricity Cooperative, and Louisa County.

Piper Martin lives at Twin Oaks Community, which provides some of the classroom space used by the school and provides volunteer labor for its program.

Reading Window methods are also highly effective for remedial work and for teaching adults.

External links

* [http://www.readingwindow.com Reading Window School] official webpage
* [http://www.cacfonline.org/ Charlottesville Area Community Fund]
* [http://www.optimist.org Optimist Clubs of Charlottesville]
* [http://www.cacfonline.org/default.asp?pageID=6E46A5C7-26C4-4BD6-9D22-B69201903A1F BAMA Works Fund] affiliated with the Dave Matthews Band
* [http://www.davematthewsband.com/ Dave Matthews Band] official website
* [http://www.myrec.coop/ Rappahannock Electricity Cooperative]
* [http://www.twinoaks.org/ Twin Oaks Community]