Dr. Janet Kierstead is a graduate of Claremont Graduate University (CGU). She taught for 5 years in a K-2 classroom in southern California, where approximately half her students were the children of migrant farm workers.
There, she developed an individualized program, based on each child’s own interests and the words they spoke to describe them. The approach she used was patterned after the way a child learns to speak — and what adults do to help them.
The children were unusually successful, and not just with reading and writing. They also took their work very seriously.
As word got out about how the children were operating, visitors began to come to her classroom regularly to watch the children at work. With this, she began teaching her approach to teachers.
After leaving the classroom
Eventually Dr. Kierstead left the classroom. Already having M.A. in Early Childhood Education, she entered the Ph.D. program at CGU. For the following 20 years, she taught as Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Teacher Education, at CGU, while also acting as a consultant to the California State Department of Education and providing workshops for teachers in the United States and Canada.
During her time with the state, she helped design and lead a major curriculum reform effort throughout California. She wrote and conducted Curriculum Integration Workshops for Interdisciplinary Academy Teams. She designed the first curriculum module for the state’s Administrative Training Centers (ATC’s), as well as contributing to various state curriculum publications.
Privately, she served as Chair of the Language Experience Special Interest Group of the California Reading Association and published several articles on curriculum development and classroom management. As an independent consultant to individual school districts, her workshops focused on Key Words With Steps, Action-Based Student Projects, and the Management of an Individualized, Active Classroom.
The purpose of this website
Now retired and living in the Seattle area, Dr. Kierstead wants to share what she’s learned with anyone in a position to help all children succeed. She’s especially wanting to help children like the ones she taught so many years ago — the children of migrant farm workers who simply needed a little extra time and help to succeed. For she has never forgotten them and their delight in discovering how much they were capable of doing.
Beyond that group, she is concerned now that too many other children are also struggling and in danger of failing to learn to read. She sees this as the result of the use of current traditional, “top down” methods which are too difficult for children coming into school without the experience of a print-rich preschool environment. (This problem may also be exacerbated by the current use of various digital devices, where children cannot see what their parents are doing as they write.)
She knows first hand that struggle and failure is completely unnecessary for any child. So as volunteer effort, she’s explaining here how and why an approach that mirrors how a child learns to speak fills in whatever gaps any child might have — gaps that make it difficult to gain literacy skills.
She developed the approach in her own K-2 classroom and has taught it to many other teachers, over the years. It’s referred to here as A Natural Approach To Learning, and it is just one example of how to base the child’s work on their own interests and language.
She hopes to encourage and help others interested in supporting children in this way. To that end, she has also established the Facebook Group, Helping All Kids Write To Read. You are welcome to join, as a way to gain from and contribute to the ongoing support and information shared there.
next —> How A Natural approach to learning was developed
individualized language experience
