Zoe was learning to read at a Canberra school that used a strategy that has since been removed from the Australian curriculum, yet remains in use in many classrooms around the country.

The three-cueing system encourages children to think of a word when they get stuck and ask themselves: "Does it make sense here? Does it sound right? Does it look right?"

This technique is coupled with "predictable" home readers — books that follow a pattern with pictures to match.

"The books that she was reading at the time, they were pretty much just 'look at the picture and guess what the words are'," Ms Bogart says.

...

There, they were taught letters and sounds in a particular order so they could blend them and decode unfamiliar words.

The theory is that, after a child has decoded a word a number of times, they will just know it and progress to more difficult words and sentences.

So, teaching them to actually read the word works better than teaching them to guess it? Why would they think 5 year olds have enough experience with every word ever to instinctively know if it’s right? Smh