she'd say, as she launched, pell-mell and fearlessly, into reading a story she loved. I remember two words in particular, in different books, which she hesitated on: cosy and investigation . I told her what they were. A few pages later, when the same words reappeared, she read them without any hesitation whatsoever. And of course she saw them again and again during repeated, joyful, shared readings of those same books. When children learn to read before school without any lessons, they do so because they've been looking at the same print over and over again as they've listened to the same language, in the same stories, which have been read so many times that their parents are driven to distraction. Not only does the print become familiar, language becomes familiar. Learning to read is much more about learning language that it is about making sounds from the letters on a page. It stands to reason that it's going to be easier to read driven to distraction if we've heard driven to distraction over and over again, than if we've never heard that phrase. In certain situations, the moment we read driven to we're going to expect a word like distraction to follow, and the print will confirm it. Anyway, that's the end of my Tale of Three Children and Chlo. What implications does my tale have for teachers of reading? Most methods, at most schools, tend sooner or later to get most children reading. Research tells us it's the