Ed is a sock. Ed has button eyes and a red mouth and lives in a drawer in the kindergarten room. Ed cannot read, and the children are teaching him, twenty minutes every morning, in groups of four.

How the groups work

One teacher, four children, one book, twenty minutes. The group reads the same book for a week, then moves on. Leo keeps the groups small on purpose: in a group of four, every child reads out loud every day, and nobody can hide behind the child next to them.

Where Ed comes in

Ed gets things wrong. He reads *dog* as *god* and *was* as *saw*, and a five-year-old who has just learned the difference will correct a sock puppet with a confidence they would never use on a grown-up. Teaching Ed is how the children find out that they know something.

What we do not do

• No flash cards
• No homework
• No reading levels on the wall
• No reading in front of the whole room

The last one matters most. Reading out loud to twelve children is a performance. Reading to Ed and three friends is a conversation.

What it looks like by spring

By March most of the kindergarten children can read a simple book to Ed without help. By June, all of them can, and the question is which book they want. We send home a note each week saying which books were read and which words were new, so you can keep going at story time if you like, and leave it alone if you would rather.

Every child leaves reading. Most of them leave reading to Ed.

For the parents

If you want to help, read to your child every night and let them see you read. That is the whole method. Ed does the rest.