Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from

Curiosity.com. I'm Codygoth. And I'm Ashley Hamer. Today you learn about what

research says is the best way to teach kids to read with best-selling author Emily

Auster and why trusting science may make you more likely to share false science.

Then play along at home as we test your podcast knowledge with this month's edition of the Curiosity Challenge trivia game.

Let's satisfy and challenge some curiosity.

Yesterday, Emily Auster told us how parents can make the best decisions for their kids.

Today we're going to zoom in on the best way kids can learn to read.

Emily Auster is an economics professor at Brown University and the author of several books

on parenting, including her latest, The Family Firm, a data-driven guide to better decision-making

in the early years.

Emily told us that her biggest surprise when writing this book came down to the data on reading.

The sort of traditional like old school way to teach kids to read is with phonics, you know,

teach them to read a language like English is kind of with basically sounding out, right?

You learn the letter sounds and you learn how they put together and then you learn to

read from there. There was a movement at some point which still has it sort of tendrils in some of how we teach reading these days,

which is to move to like a whole language approach, to sort of deprioritize phonics in favor of something like

let's just read things to kids and they will get excited about it and then they'll kind of like

osmose the words and and I think part of the idea there is that as an adult you sort of

perceive yourself to be reading by recognizing words and so you have some sense if you

just like have a lot of exposure you will learn to recognize those words.

And this whole language idea really took off,

...