It all began with an idea: What if there is a completely different solution to the reading crisis?
About 5,000 years ago, humans invented schools with a singular purpose: to teach students to read and write—a goal that is as true today as it was back then. However, for historical and philosophical reasons, English became increasingly challenging for students, leading to false theories about how kids learn to read and many failed instructional practices.
Today, two-thirds of American students don’t read proficiently.
Capit Learning is a mission-driven company that aims to inform educators about the true nature of the English writing system, simplify reading instruction, and ensure all kids learn to read at grade level.
66% of 4th-grade students are below proficient in reading. Source: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/reading/2022/
The CAPIT Solution and Methodology
Improving and Simplifying Reading Instruction
The CAPIT Method—created by CAPIT’s founders, Eyal and Tzippy Rav-Noy—is a profound departure from traditional instructional approaches and is based on the latest reading science, cognitive science, and years of classroom experience and testing.
The Rav-Noys learned that the standard reading curriculum has become increasingly complicated over the years, making it hard for teachers to teach and challenging for students to learn. They further noticed that most curriculums conflate reading instruction with facts about reading—as if every fact about reading should be included in reading instruction.
So, they set out to revolutionize and simplify reading instruction.
To design and empirically validate their methodology, the founders became de facto KG teachers, testing each design in the classroom with real students. Being parents of two kids with severe reading struggles has provided them with empathy and perspective. Today, teachers and students across the country benefit from the CAPIT Method.
Below, we summarize the fundamental differences between the CAPIT Method and other traditional approaches to reading instruction. We invite you to learn more about the research that guided the development of the CAPIT Reading Curriculum.
Teaching students to decode and spell without confusion, rules, or memorization.
CAPIT is an Improved Curriculum that Makes Sense!
CAPIT utilizes cutting-edge research in reading science and cognitive sciences to deliver a groundbreaking, streamlined approach to early literacy instruction. By discarding obsolete and ineffective methods, CAPIT concentrates on proven techniques that significantly enhance young learners' foundational skills.
Traditionally, English is seen as a chaotic tangle of irregularities. But CAPIT’s Sound-to-Print orientation brings order to chaos, making English logical and decodable. CAPIT's sound and spelling algorithm systematically shows students how to decode every word in the English language. The CAPIT method is so effective it can transform PK-2 reading instruction in just 30 minutes a day.
Reading Instruction Can Be Simplified and Improved
The Traditional Methods
What is the correct way to teach kids to read English? Most people claim that there is no simple answer or single approach. Instead, the English language—with all its irregularities—requires multiple strategies, such as rules, exceptions to the rules, sight words, syllabication, and word families. We count at least 12! No wonder many believe that teaching reading is rocket science—multiple strategies are hard to teach and challenging for students to learn.
The Multiple Strategies Approach of Traditional Reading Programs
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”
The CAPIT Method
We believe that students’ low reading achievement is not a symptom of under-instruction but rather a result of over-instruction—the classroom version is “too many cooks spoil the stew.”
OUR MISSION is to ensure all kids learn to read by revolutionizing and simplifying reading instruction. Instead of employing multiple strategies to teach reading and spelling, our learning algorithm reduces the learning process to a single step. We call it A Singular Approach to Reading Instruction.
We invite you to learn more about the CAPIT Method, our Singular Approach to Reading Instruction, and the CAPIT Reading Curriculum.
The CAPIT Reading Curriculum and Cognitive Load Theory
A principle guided our development: Less is More, also known as Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller, 2003).
The CAPIT Method utilizes Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) and teaches students to read in incremental steps without unnecessary distractions, such as games, virtual worlds, avatars, and extrinsic rewards. The CAPIT Reading Curriculum is 100% Learning 100% of the Time.
The Sound-to-Print Revolution
Traditional Methods
Most believe that English is a hot mess. For example:
Letters make too many sounds, and sometimes they stay silent;
Reading rules come with too many exceptions—rendering the rules useless;
Too many words are not decodable and must be memorized by sight.
These irregularities fuel the ongoing Reading Wars between Whole Language and Phonics. Whole Language advocates point out that English is too irregular for a phonics approach.
The CAPIT Method
But what if English makes sense, and we can teach students to decode and spell without confusion, rules, or memorization?
By adopting a Sound-to-Print orientation, CAPIT makes sense out of the chaos of English, making it logical and decodable.
Decoding Sight Words
Traditional Methods
It is common practice to teach young students—as early as preschool—to memorize sight words such as I, a, an, are, at, go, her, his, in, if, no, of, that, this, you, was, we, were, what. It is widely assumed that students can’t decode sight words because of their irregular spelling. Instead, we should teach students to memorize them as a whole.
Sight words have roots in the Look and Say and the Whole Language curriculums. Even traditional phonics curriculums teach students to memorize between 300 and 1000 words by “sight.”
The CAPIT Method
We believe memorizing sight words overloads the memory, encourages guessing, and discourages decoding. If the use of sight words derails even one or two students, their use is indefensible—why not use a method that works for every student every time?
Rote memorization doesn’t work because our cognitive architecture prevents us from memorizing countless random symbols. Try memorizing numbers out of a phone book, and you will quickly encounter memory overload. The overload occurs because phone numbers are meaningless number strings, and researchers have shown that it is extremely difficult to memorize a series of non-alphabetic symbols (see Ehri & Wilce, 1987; Jorm, 1981).
Thankfully, words are not like random phone numbers made up of meaningless strings of letters. Words are comprised of letters representing the sounds of words we use daily, enabling us to remember the spelling of thousands of words without much difficulty (for a deeper insight into the mechanism that makes this possible, see David Share and the Self Teaching Hypothesis).
The CAPIT Method enables students to decode every word in the English language—from rat to aristocrat. With CAPIT, there are no sight words, and no words are memorized and read by sight as a whole. Instead, we show students how to decode each word using our sound and spelling algorithm. Eventually, they learn to recall these connections efficiently and fluently without conscious effort.
In our professional development, we show teachers how to decode sight words and teach them to their students—explicitly and systematically.
The CAPIT Reading Sound Wall
Create a Sound-to-Print Environment™ in the classroom with the CAPIT Sound and Spelling Cards.
Traditionally, KG and first-grade classrooms are adorned with 26 Alphabet Cards, each card containing a letter in its lowercase and uppercase form (e.g., a, A). These cards reinforce the traditional Print-to-Sound orientation common to all conventional phonics programs of the last 150 years.
The CAPIT Method embraces a Sound-to-Print orientation, and teachers can introduce and reinforce this orientation throughout the day using our Sound and Spelling Cards.
CAPIT has over 40 Sound and Spelling cards (6.5’’ x 10.5’’), each representing a specific phoneme. The cards also display all the various ways we can spell each sound, i.e., all its spelling patterns.
Teachers use our Sound and Spelling Cards to teach and review all 40+ Sounds of the English language and all 180+ Spelling Patterns. As students’ vocabulary grows, students rely on these cards to look up Sounds and the more complex Spelling Patterns.
For example, when a student asks: “Which spelling do I use to spell the sound /k/ in the word school?” the teacher can walk the student over to the Sound and Spelling Card that represents the sound /k/, and point to the “ch” spelling. The teacher can then write the word “school” on a sticky note, underline the “ch” spelling, and stick the note under the /k/ card. The same applies to so-called sight words. These words can and should be decoded and displayed under the appropriate card. For example, the word “the” should be placed under the /th/ card, and the word “are” should be placed under the /ar/ sound.
The CAPIT Sound and Spelling Cards are part of the CAPIT Multisensory Kit™.
FOR TEACHERS IMPLEMENTING THE CAPIT READING CURRICULUM
Our Sound and Spelling Cards bring our Digital Sound Chart to life and onto your classroom walls and immerse students in the Sounds and Spelling Patterns of the English language. Seeing them on the wall and using them to learn to read and spell new words motivates students to progress in the CAPIT Reading Curriculum to collect additional sounds and spellings.
These cards benefit students progressing in CAPIT Reading Levels 2 and 3 as they learn to read and spell digraphs, diphthongs, and high-frequency words.
Learn how to use our Sound and Spelling Cards to teach students to decode any Sight Word.
Reinventing the Alphabet Song
The ABC Song—sung to a tune popularized by Mozart—is arguably the most recognizable in all English-speaking countries. However, this song only teaches the names of the letters. Although letter names are important, and teachers must teach them, letter names do not help students read or spell. For that, students must learn which phoneme corresponds with which letter. (CLICK HERE to learn more about our Phoneme First Approach.)
Not everything kids must know should be included in reading instruction. Knowledge of letter names carries information about reading instruction, but is not part of reading instruction.
We reimagined the ABC Song and created a song that teaches students the shape of each letter and its corresponding phoneme—preparing students to read and spell.
Why is our ABC Song so effective? CLICK HERE to find out.
Tactile Visual Mnemonics
Research and experience indicate that Visual Mnemonics are an efficient and fun method of helping students remember the relationship between the sound of a letter and its visual representation. The CAPIT Reading Curriculum provides unique Tactile Visual Mnemonics for every letter in the English language.
With our unique visual mnemonics, kindergarten students master their letter sounds in less than two months and immediately begin learning to decode (read) and encode (spell). Even preschool students finish the year knowing all the letters and the phonemes they represent.
We documented our visual mnemonics' effect on preschool-aged students in a Texas school. The results astounded them, and us.
A Curriculum is More Effective than a Learning Game!
Digital devices and learning games will not solve our reading crisis.
The CAPIT Method rests upon three premises:
Teachers are better than digital applications;
Students spend too much time playing on digital devices;
Both children and adults enjoy learning more than they enjoy playing games (—yes, you read that right!)
These premisses shaped our curriculum:
CAPIT Reading is a teacher-led curriculum that keeps teachers front and center of the instruction.
CAPIT Reading is a curriculum. In every lesson, students read, write, spell, and type. CAPIT does not contain virtual worlds, animated talking characters, avatars, and extrinsic motivators such as currencies and badges.
CAPIT Reading offers a learning experience that students prefer over other digital games (when given a choice by teachers). With CAPIT Reading, students regularly think: “This is challenging, but I know I can do it!” When done right—learning beats playing every time!
CAPIT Reading is a Curriculum because Learning to Read is Not a Game.
CAPIT IS 100% LEARNING 100% OF THE TIME!
Because only a teacher-led curriculum with built-in assessments can ensure that students explicitly and systematically learn and automate all phonemic awareness and phonics skills.
The Teacher is the Most Important Asset in the Classroom
CAPIT Reading keeps teachers front and center of the instruction.
Technology cannot replace teachers, and only expert instructors can and should teach children to read.
CAPIT Reading is a teacher-led phonemic awareness and phonics curriculum that keeps teachers front and center of the instruction. Trained teachers are always better than software and animated cartoon characters.
Technology Can Enhance Learning and Teaching
A digital platform offers many advantages, among them are:
INDIVIDUALIZATION AND DIFFERENTIATION
Students internalize and automate information at different rates. A digital curriculum allows all students to progress at their individual learning trajectories.IMMEDIATE FEEDBACK
A digital curriculum offers students immediate corrective feedback so students can update their knowledge in real-time.ACTIONABLE DATA
A digital curriculum provides real-time data and analytics to all stakeholders, ensuring students get the help they need early. School and district admins can monitor each student’s journey along the phonics continuum.DISTANCE LEARNING
A digital curriculum is accessible from anywhere and accommodates both in-class and distance learning. Whether students are sick, are unexpectedly out of town, or the school is shut down due to a snow day, teaching and learning are never interrupted.STUDENT ENGAGEMENT
A responsive and interactive digital curriculum enhances student engagement and enthusiasm for learning.
Our patent (U.S. Patent No. 9,996,255) discloses technology that interactively teaches children the letters of the alphabet, how to pronounce them and how to write them. An app installed on a touch screen device (e.g., a tablet or laptop) uses mnemonic-symbols to depict the alphabet-letters' shapes and generates related sounds, and teaches children the strokes used to write the letters (see FIG. 4F as an example).
Our mnemonic-symbols are research-based (NRP, 2000, 2-125), and include familiar objects, such as animals, people, fruits, and other objects with which children are familiar. Our app employs these mnemonics, along with visual and auditory feedback and finger sketching in teaching children how to write and pronounce letters. The app provides fun and positive feedback to encourage children in their progress.
