When Kellyn Sirach sits down with a fifth or sixth grader who is struggling with reading, she starts by showing the student a picture of the left hemisphere of the brain. Reading, she tells them, is not a natural process. It has to be learned.
“We talk about the process that happens in the brain, just to read one word,” said Sirach, who works as a reading specialist in the Champaign public schools and is part of a group of teachers hoping to change the way reading is taught in Illinois. “It’s wild because oftentimes, students and adults actually think that reading just happens, it just occurs. And that’s not true.”
