Four elements are essential for efficient, effective, and rewarding teaching of beginning reading. The first is the use of children's key vocabulary. Children are asked, in a prescribed fashion, what their very best word is of the moment. The teacher prints it in a prescribed fashion and uses it to help children acquire one-to-one correspondence or knowledge of the alphabet and left to right directionality for penmanship, and to prevent reversals. The second element is the use of an experience chart in which the teacher encourages the children to talk about whatever is important to them on a given day. These experiences are then translated by the teacher and posted on the wall. The third element is the use of constant daily writing, including the incidence of invented spelling, and the fourth element is the use of trade or library books to read aloud. Each of these elements provides a clear prescription of how to proceed, not a prescription of learning content itself. (HOD)