INS TR U C T I O N
Essentials of
Kumon Reading
by Mary P. Mokris, Ph.D.
“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever
has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of
the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It
gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet]
A
unsolved ones.”~Abraham Lincoln
braham Lincoln is one of the most
well-known of self-made men. He
never attended school formally,
and despite his humble beginnings,
he
educated
himself—through
reading and as an apprentice—into a
successful career in law, and later, to
the presidency of the United States.
Toru Kumon, in his autobiography
Give it a Try, seemed to have agreed with Lincoln’s sentiment.
He said, “I believe that the ability to think is developed
by reading books. Therefore, based on my own childhood
experiences, I emphasize the importance of reading in early
childhood education.” He added:
I learned the importance of self-learning, skill development,
and pursuit of potential in Tosa Junior High School. . . . I
also learned that the three activities I mentioned just above
should be started as early as possible in life.
Toru Kumon had extremely high goals for children, especially
when it came to reading. Following the basic philosophy of the
Kumon Method, he set about ensuring that everyone involved
in Kumon Reading understood that “the most important thing
is to discover how to accurately determine the ‘just-right’ level
for individual students.” And, when it came to assessing
potential, he did not put a cap on the heights to which even very
young children could reach in reading. He said that, because
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of reading increasingly challenging works, yet beginning
with those which are appropriately-leveled, even very young
children have the potential to read the works of Hemingway
and W. S. Maugham—without any difficulty through the
Kumon Method.
Often, Instructors say that children of very young ages cannot
fully understand the works in the upper levels of the Reading
Program. However, this is something that Toru Kumon himself
took exception to. He said:
You may doubt whether preschoolers of little experience
in actual life can understand, for example, literary works
dealing with love. However, they seem to understand in
their own way.
When we think about it, it’s difficult even for many adults
to fully understand love sentiments. Though people tend
to think of preschoolers reading literary works as biting off
more than they can chew, their ability is so limitless as to
frighten us.
Think about it this way: all people have differing degrees of
understanding and differing levels of intellectual capacity—not
to mention different kinds of life experiences. If you were a
college professor teaching Shakespeare to 18-year-old students,
you would recognize immediately that some can understand
the works and others have great difficulties—even when
IN STRUC TI ON
they are students who have similar (English-speaking) family
backgrounds and similar SAT scores (which have placed them
into a similar literature course). In our Centers, we have a
wide range of students of varying abilities, and we may very
well get one student who is in the 4th grade who is capable of
completing Level L worksheets, and another in high school
who has difficulty completing 2A. Keep in mind that until you
determine the ability of a student, it is difficult to determine
how far that student can go. This is why we talk about potential,
and it is especially important to keep this in mind with reading.
The writer William James put this concept very concretely.
He said, “Most people live, whether physically, intellectually
or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being.
They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and
of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out
of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using
and moving only his little finger.” Even though it is difficult
for us to understand what a younger student may understand
from—let us say—the story of Oedipus, that does not mean we
should restrict them from reading such stories. Like any of us,
students can come back again and again to any work of literature,
and each time, they will understand the author’s intention a little
better. This is especially true of the great works of Shakespeare,
Sophocles, and T. S. Eliot. If a younger student reads them, he or
she is likely to see them again later in life, whether in high school,
college, or at a play in London. Keep in mind that scholars study
these works for a lifetime and still do not profess to understand
them as deeply as they may be understood—and scholars, too,
get something new out of a work every time it is read.
We know, of course, that the purpose of the Reading Program is
to build reading comprehension in students, to the point where
they can pick up any book, at random, and be able to read and
comprehend it. In order to do so, the Kumon Program is built
on the idea that children will progress to and complete the
Summary Block—Levels G, H, and I—the most important part of
the Reading Program. The levels before the Summary Block exist
specifically to build the skills in students so that they can succeed
at summarization. In order to comprehend complicated texts,
it is necessary for every reader to have the ability to analyze,
or take apart, the text of the author, and to synthesize, or put
together meaning, from the text. This process is the basis for
summarization. And again, summarization is at the center of
the Kumon Program. In order to move beyond comprehension
to higher order thinking (analyzing, synthesizing, critiquing),
students must first be able to summarize. Remember: the ability
to summarize indicates comprehension of a specific text. In
order to achieve comprehension, students must draw from their
own background knowledge; they must understand why they
are reading a specific text; they must be able to understand the
content based on the structure of the text; they must be able to
consciously identify clues in the text (both from vocabulary and
regarding the author’s intention), and they must be guided to see
important aspects of the texts. Often for all students, this means
encouraging them to read the text more than once—the first time
for a general overview, and the second time to determine the
most important aspects which they will use in summarization.
Although the term “summarization” is often used in terms
of teaching writing, Kumon encourages students to use this
technique to build their reading skills. This aspect is considered
essential to building an understanding of what is read, while
moving students toward the kind of higher-order thinking skills
Toru Kumon envisioned building in even very young children.
With these elements in mind, let’s take a look at each block, one
by one, and just consider the essentials. First, we will look at
what Mr. Kazuo Murata—one of the originators of the Kumon
Method of Reading—said about each of the blocks, and then
we’ll look at how these ideas are applied on a day-to-day basis
in the worksheets.
Word Building Block: Levels 7A-2A
The purpose of the Word Building Block is:
1. Develop student’s basic ability to read words and very
simple sentences.
2. Develop student’s ability to write letters and words.
3. Raise the level and depth of students’ vocabulary.
Mr. Murata specifically said, “Having taken the steps necessary
to make students’ early study proceed as smoothly as possible,
and having focused solidly on word-building, we could think
of these levels as the first step on the way to developing
student’s abilities to summarize and to read with a high level of
comprehension.”
In order to achieve these goals, we must do something that is
really easier said than done. In fact, those three points above
are easy to elucidate, but are sometimes difficult to reach.
Reading in itself is a complex process, requiring a number of
factors to come together for success. In order to move out of
the Word Building Block, students must exhibit the following
characteristics. They must have the ability:
•
To sound out words.
o Students who can do this will have mastered
letter-sound correspondence.
o Students who can do this recognize immediately
even challenging letter combinations and can
decode them instantaneously. That is, they
are familiar with most of the sound-spelling
combinations and can pronounce properly the 44
phonemes found in English.
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INS TR U C T I O N
o Students should have the ability to apply wordattack skills to unknown vocabulary words.
There are always new words to learn, so it is not
necessary for students to be able to decode all
words instantaneously, but they should have the
ability to attack words using the knowledge they
have built in these early levels.
•
To decode sentences.
o This practice requires not only an ability to almostinstantaneously decode words, but also requires
students to have some level of consciousness
that words are used as particular parts of speech
in sentences—that there are words for naming,
doing, and describing.
o Short sentences in the lower levels are written in
the most usual sentence structures (for instance,
subject-verb-object).
•
To write words.
o Some students will have excellent fine motor skills
as they progress through the lower levels. Others
will need extra writing practice. It is important
to assess student’s reading ability separate from
their writing ability. Some students can write
letters very well but have trouble decoding. In
the lower levels, it is more important if a student
can decode words easily than it is for the student
to write neatly or without difficulty. Sometimes if
a student is advanced at reading, it is fine for the
parent to complete the packet for the student if he
or she gets tired from writing. Students should
not be held back simply because of difficulties
with writing.
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In the Word Building Block, if a student cannot read the
worksheets by him or herself, aim to provide appropriate
instruction in descending order of model-reading, repeat
reading, reading together, and reading alone by the student.
Students cannot be expected to read completely without help
until they have mastered the necessary skills and are ready
to move to the Sentence Building Block. Ask your assistants
and parents to tell students the word if they have difficulty
decoding it, and to tell students the meaning of a word if they
do not understand what it means. Utilize your assistants to
provide you with summaries of how the students are doing in
class, and ask them to highlight any points of difficulty (lack
of attention, not repeating or reciting, missing specific letter
sounds in 5A, whether or not students begin to blend letters
together in 5A 111, any letter combinations the students find
challenging in 4A, problems with reading sentences in 3A, etc.).
As the Instructor, it’s impossible for you to observe everything
happening at every moment in the Center, so it’s important
to ensure that your assistants are acting as your eyes and ears
when it comes to the level of competency of your students in the
lower levels in reading. Use the Achievement Tests as a point
of assessment rather than the only information on the student’s
level of mastery. The worksheets require students to have built
a large number of skills in a very short span of material, so it’s
important to assess progress continuously.
Sentence Building Block: Levels AI-CII
In the Sentence Building Block, students become familiar with
the basic sentence patterns necessary for summarization. Mr.
Murata said:
Kumon Method Summarization involves reorganizing
groups of sentences in an original passage into single
sentences. Each of the new sentences concerns one topic
and represents a paragraph in the mind of the reader. One
may put this another way and say that the process involves
finding the various key ‘subjects’ of the original passage and
IN STRUC TI ON
formulating and attaching the appropriate ‘predicates.’ It
is for this reasons that thorough study of sentence patterns
prior to beginning the GHI Summary Block is essential,
and that we designated the A, B, and C Level materials the
‘Sentence Building Block.’
In brief, its purpose is:
1. To develop students’ ability to read sentences through
emphasis on the patterns of sentences.
•
In other words, you will not be able to
understand a paragraph if you don’t
understand the sentences which make up that
paragraph.
o Sentences are presented from those
containing only two sentence parts
(subject and predicate), to more
complex sentences with complements
and modifiers.
2. To develop student’s ability to pick out the ‘five W’s
and one H’ of sentences.
•
•
In order to make up a summary, students
must be able to comprehend these elements
of sentences through their grammatical
structures.
By the end of Level C, students must have
come into contact with sentences which
prepare them for the later summarization
exercises. They must be able to restate the
thought of the authors of passages in their
own single sentences which involve the five
W’s and one H.
3. To further develop student’s consciousness concerning
the properties of words.
•
In the Sentence Building Block, students
continue to understand relationships between
words and how words can be combined to
form other words—in addition to building
student’s skills in comprehending meaning
through understanding the usage of an
unknown word in a particular sentence. In
other words, students continue to build their
vocabulary by adding words whose meaning
can be understood in the context of the
sentence in which it appears.
Regarding vocabulary building in particular, Kumon ensures
that words are introduced in as systematic a method as possible.
Sentences and excerpts are assessed based on the appropriateness
of the vocabulary word for the level by using specific readability
formulas, which allow the words to be ordered in the best
sequence for students to learn them. When students learn
vocabulary in the middle of sentences and passages, they build
their love of reading as they discover new things—and each time
they read, they are faced with new opportunities to solidify their
vocabulary of the words in context.
Kumon does not require students to study vocabulary in an
unsequenced form or out of context—in other words, in single
occurrences. Teachers sometimes refer to this technique as
the “worst” way to learn vocabulary­—this is the way schools
sometimes offer vocabulary for spelling or vocabulary tests.
Research suggests that most words are learned in context.
Kumon relies upon building students’ confidence in their
reading ability by building their reading comprehension
and at the same time developing vocabulary in a way that
is comfortable and understandable for the students—in
context. The students must be conscious of the words they
don’t recognize immediately and figure out their meanings,
especially if the definitions are not provided. What seems more
fun? To look up the word “arduous” in the dictionary (it means
difficult to accomplish—requiring great effort), or to discover
its meaning from reading this?
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INS TR U C T I O N
Climbing the mountain was an arduous task. We had to
stop to rest many times, and though the trip was difficult
and tiring, we wanted to make it to the peak.
The worksheets in the Sentence Building Block help students
grasp grammatical concepts while building their vocabulary—
one sentence at a time. This prepares them to be successful in
the Paragraph Building Block.
Paragraph Building Block: Levels DI-FII
Needless to say, in order to understand paragraphs, it is
necessary to understand the sentences in them and how the
ideas in the sentences connect to each other. A paragraph is
a series of sentences all focused on a unified topic—and each
paragraph has a sentence (or sometimes two) which identifies
the topic of the paragraph. Because students have already
mastered simple sentence constructions in the Sentence
Building Block, this block concentrates on more advanced
sentences structures. Specifically, according to Mr. Murata,
the Paragraph Building Block aims toward these goals:
1. To enable students to understand how sentence parts
and sentences connect to one another, specifically by
studying compound and complex sentences.
2. To enable students to have the ability to explain the
meaning of sentences.
3. To enable students to advance from determining
the meaning of sentences to determining the role of
particular sentences within passages.
Sentences in DI-FII are no longer short and simple—they are
filled with clauses and phrases of all kinds, and thoughts are
coordinated or subordinated. Let’s look at an example from
DI 195b:
Li Lun looked lovingly around the one room of the little
house in the Village of Three Firs where he lived with his
parents, his three younger brothers and baby sister, two
cats and three ducks. Already his mother was packing
food and clothing. As she worked she talked to Li Lun to
ease his mind.
This paragraph is filled with phrases and clauses, not to mention
subordinated thoughts. Being able to subordinate thoughts in a
sentence shows depth of understanding—it shows that someone
knows what is more important, and what is less important.
Even just examining the last sentence alone is interesting: the
most important part of this complex sentence is the independent
clause: she talked. The subordinate part of that sentence is
“As she worked”—this is less important than the action of her
talking to Li Lun and taking the time “to ease his mind”—the
reason for his mother’s talking. Students who understand
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simple sentences can get to the main idea: she talked. Those
who are beginning to understand subordination, coordination,
and how sentences link together, and how paragraphs work,
can pay attention to the rest. Without the basics built in AI-CII,
this understanding is not possible.
Throughout the worksheets of the Paragraph Building Block,
students take apart and put together sentences which are more
and more complex.
The Summary Block: Levels GHI
The summarization method used in the Kumon worksheets
was created because it was the one method which incorporated
intellectual excitement and a method of seeing concrete
improvement in comprehension. Most Instructors might
wonder what is so exciting about summarization—and also
might wonder how exactly summaries can work to show a
student’s thinking process. These two elements were what
attracted the originators of the Kumon Reading Program to
concentrate on summarization as the core of the program.
Mr. Murata said that the summarization method:
involved the reconstruction of all sentences of a passage,
including the stylistic points. If I were to produce a
metaphor for this method, I would refer to the kind of
intermediate calculations necessary for solving equations
and reducing fractions in mathematics. These intermediate
calculations indicate the thought process a student goes
through when solving the equations. The student, through
the shape of intermediate calculations, in effect, feels her or
his way along to the answer as best she or he can. Where
the intermediate calculations are incomplete or take broad
leaps, the student is unable to arrive at the answer she or he
is striving to find. Summary passages are just like that in
that they reflect in their exact form the reader’s attempts to
feel her or his way along to a point of understanding.
That’s a bit surprising, isn’t it? This means that summarization
is a window into the mind of the student, and can show how
deeply the student understands the passage. Students have to
take the original passage and analyze the letters, punctuation,
and sentences into something of their own, and then reproduce
it. On the worksheets, students do this in the form of filling
in summary passages, where they recreate the original in
miniature. Again, Mr. Murata found this intriguing:
Even if children summarize the same passage, the resulting
summary passages will differ subtly from child to child. It
is just as with musicians who, from the very same musical
score, spin out a variety of tones and timbres. It is in
this dimension of composition that children show clear
IN STRUC TI ON
individuality and from which students’ fascination with
summarization grows.
Creating summaries allows students to build skills in:
1. Reading comprehension: by having students summarize entire passages, including stylistic points, the
activity proved to be a more highly effective way of
raising student’s comprehension than any other.
a. Students read precisely and accurately (sometimes more than one reading is necessary).
b. Students read more quickly.
2. Vocabulary: Vocabulary is enriched and solidified
through the summarization process. Students must
not only recognize but use words from the initial passage. In other words, it is active, not passive, vocabulary use. The many (and varied) vocabulary exercises
in these levels provide students with strong practice
and preparation for standardized tests.
3. Understanding any genre of work: Kumon does
not differentiate between fiction and non-fiction, or
among the variety of genres of literary works when
it comes to the creation of summaries. As a method
which focuses specifically on deep understanding of
the original text, children are trained to delve deeply
into the passage—no matter what the topic—and to
arrive at an understanding of the syntactical units in
the passage.
The magic of summarization lies in being that window into
the mind of the student: and what the Kumon Program aims
to develop is a mind capable of applying specific skills in
understanding a passage, and enabling children to practice these
skills in a formal way until they have the ability to replicate the
same kind of comprehension with any text they read. It is only
when students achieve this level of ability that they can move
on to even higher-order thinking. It is that kind of higher-order
thinking which is found in the Critique Block.
The Critique Block: Levels J-L
Often, we talk about “reading comprehension” as the goal of
the reading program. This is true, of course, but what Toru
Kumon was aiming for is what students begin when they go
beyond summarization and into critique. This movement is one
which takes them from being literate—able to read whatever
is on the page—or, to put it at an extremely basic level, being
able to decode the words on the page and understand what
those words mean when put together into sentences and
paragraphs—to comprehending.
Comprehending means
being able to turn the work around in your head and come up
with its meaning—to show that you can do this, summarization
is the method which everyone uses—from teachers using tests
to a parent asking a child what the book is about. Moving one
step beyond this is where “critique” comes in: it is reading
the words on the lines, reading the meaning in the lines,
and reading, then, between the lines and even past the lines
themselves to come up with an interpretation which is one’s
own. In other words, it’s looking at the author’s work and
having an opinion about it. It is where discovery, invention,
and artistry come together. Authors do not just want their
books to be “comprehended”—they want them to be lived,
in a certain sense. The Critique Block encourages students to
delve into the author’s intentions, and even asks students to
draw inferences based on the author’s language.
Often, we talk about “reading
comprehension” as the goal
of the reading program. This is
true, of course, but what Toru
Kumon was aiming for is what
students begin when they go
beyond summarization and into
critique.
Critical reading trains students to read works of fiction and
nonfiction closely, and therefore helps them to distinguish what
the author is really trying to say. When Shakespeare began to
write his plays, he included all kinds of hints at what he wanted
the reader to gain from reading or seeing his plays—moral
messages, connections between images, hints about humanity’s
vices and virtues—but often his audiences missed his points.
Instead of seeing what he wanted them to see, they saw what
they THOUGHT he was trying to say–but those are two different
things. To Shakespeare, it was like seeing the difference between
a cat and a pig in a picture that’s not quite clear. Unless you see
the curly tail, you aren’t sure which one you’re dealing with.
So, Shakespeare began writing in everything he wanted people
to get from his plays so that he left nothing to chance. Good
writers have a basic idea they want to get across, and when
reading critically, the reader understands that basic idea, as
well as all of the nuances and hints which the author uses to
convey it, through metaphors, similes, figurative language, and
imagery. Based on the author’s language, means of expression,
historical period, and exposure to past forms of literature and
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INS TR U C T I O N
the prevalent imagery of the time, meaning can be derived from
the work.
Critical reading:
1. Means that the reader applies different kinds of
processes, compares different kinds of models, thinks
about different kinds of theories, and asks specific
kinds of questions to come up with enhanced—
deeper—comprehension of the text.
2. Cannot be done with skimming or a superficial
understanding of the text.
a. It requires close, attentive reading.
b. It goes beyond superficial characteristics and
information.
3. Builds a sophisticated understanding of passage
structure, characterization, plot, literary devices and
elements of figurative language.
Toru Kumon felt that the earlier children have an opportunity
to read great books, the better. Here, he is specifically speaking
about changing the lives of children in this manner through
reading:
The earlier children begin their studies, the greater the
learning effect upon them. As a result, they can enter their
preferred high schools and universities without special
difficulty, and in turn can become absorbed in what they’re
more interested in than studying for entrance exams.
Parents therefore shouldn’t think lightly of early childhood
education.
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Recently, it’s often said that a ‘more relaxed style’ of
education should be provided for children at schools. I
think that accurately measuring the ‘just right’ levels
for individual students and helping them improve their
academic abilities step by step will lead to a ‘relaxed style’
of education. Having individual children study at the ‘just
right’ level to improve their academic abilities will greatly
expand children’s capability.
The most important thing for us to do now is study
children’s capabilities and discover how to accurately
determine the ‘just right’ level for individual students.
Finding the “just-right” level for individual students in
reading requires significant effort on our part—knowing the
worksheets, examining the lesson plan on an ongoing basis,
observing attentively, and reassessing the student’s current level
of ability. To ensure student success in the Reading Program, all
of these elements are necessary and must be continuously at the
forefront of our thinking. It is not easy; however, it is necessary
for student success.
Andre Gide, the famous French writer, said, “There are
admirable potentialities in every human being. Believe in your
strength and your truth. Learn to repeat endlessly to yourself,
“It all depends on me.”