"Plants grow from
A seed and root's.
We grow from
Food
And water and
Love. Anama's
Grow
From food and
Water. Love
Grow's
From Fathe.
Drowing's grow
From a pencil or
Cran or makr.
A brane grow's
From lrning. A
Stoey grow's
From
An idea."

Kacey, first-grader,
reprinted in The Knight Foundation Quarterly Report, Spring 1999

Kacey is six. She can talk. She knows thousands of words. Each word is a string of speech sounds (also called phonemes). In English there are 40 of them.

Kacey is learning to read. She is learning to read by putting speech on paper, by writing. Letters stand for speech sounds. Kacey identifies each speech sound in the word the computer has asked her to write. Her mouth moves as she spells and sounds out the word along with the computer. Her fingers move as she finds the keys that represent each sound. She touches the keyboard, and letters appear on the screen.

Kacey reads words as she writes them. She may make a thousand errors, as children do when they learn how to talk, but her Read, Write & Type!™ storyteller friends can help her, a thousand times, to learn from her mistakes.

Using writing as a route to reading guarantees that Kacey will have help and non-judgmental feedback all the way through the learning process. No other computer reading program can offer this rich interactive feedback. The computer can't know when Kacey misreads something, but the uniquely interactive keyboard in RWT!™ can tell when Kacey "mis-writes" something. When she does, it gently guides her, every time, to the correct spelling and pronunciation.

This breakthrough innovation links three vital elements in Kacey's brain as she learns to:

• HEAR and identify the forty speech sounds in the English language
• SEE and recognize the letters that make up the alphabet code and represent the speech sounds
• TOUCH the letters on her keyboard, putting that code on paper.

Kacey is using her mouth, ears, eyes, and fingers. Because she is engaging multiple senses, her young brain is stimulated to create powerful pathways for efficient and effective learning. Once these neural pathways are established, her brain and the computer can set up an interactive relationship. Her fingers "talk" to the computer, and the computer "talks" to her, leading her to the right responses when she makes an error. She will write a multitude of words and stories that are meaningful to her, reading as she writes. The Read, Write & Type!™ Learning System has taken Kacey from speech to literacy!