Five years ago, as a way to ensure that students not only learn to decode but also understand what they decode, the Core Knowledge Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes the Core Knowledge curriculum, created a language arts program for kindergarten through second grade. The program includes two 60-minute strands: (1) a "Skills Strand," in which students learn decoding, encoding (writing), spelling, and grammar; and (2) a "Listening and Learning Strand," in which they engage with a wide variety of fiction and nonfiction texts so as to build oral language, knowledge, and vocabulary--the real keys to comprehension. While the conventional wisdom has long held that students first learn to read and then, around the end of third grade, switch to reading to learn, Core Knowledge shows that students in kindergarten through second grade are fully capable of--and benefit from--acquiring both decoding skills and content knowledge at the same time. The program's Skills Strand, although high quality, is not what makes this program unique. Other early-grades reading programs also do a good job of helping children make the all-important speech-to-print connection through research-based phonics instruction. This article explores what makes this program stand out--the content knowledge delivered through the Listening and Learning Strand. (Contains 9 footnotes and 19 endnotes.)