A Behind-the-Scenes Look at How Treasure Hunt Reading Came To Be

Kaity Broadbent

Updated on:

July 22, 2024

Published on:

June 18, 2024

Learning

minute read

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Discover how Treasure Hunt Reading and Adventure Kait came to be.

Inside: Kaity's journey to developing Treasure Hunt Reading, a free literacy reading program that helps kids learn to read. Get Adventure Kait's Recommended Reading List when you subscribe to Prenda’s weekly newsletter.

I remember being about 15, standing in the middle of my large public high school’s quad at lunch, when a random thought jumped into my head. “Why haven’t we figured out the best way to teach kids how to read yet?” I thought about it for about 10 seconds, and then my attention was whisked away by the next hoop I was being asked to jump through, and I didn’t think about it again for a decade.

Flash forward to college—I decided I wanted to major in Speech-Language Pathology. My memory of this moment returned, and I thought, “Hey, maybe I could learn about literacy.”

I read a story in grad school that casually mentioned an old lady who had taught thousands of kids to read. At that moment, I had an overwhelming feeling that I needed to make my entire life about teaching kids to read.

Six years of college later… turns out they don’t teach you about literacy in Speech-Language Pathology school. Bummer.

I started working in elementary schools as a Speech Therapist and saw how many kids struggled with reading. It was shocking.

Little me learns to read

I wasn’t a strong reader when I was little. I remember my mom reading my reading assignments out loud to me the night before they were due. She was so tired she would fall asleep mid-sentence. I would let her sleep for a minute, and then I would nudge her back awake to finish so I wouldn’t fail the quiz the next day. While it seemed like it took me longer to comprehend things than other kids, I had a brother with bigger learning issues, so in comparison, I was “fine.”

And I was…fine. I just wasn’t strong. I didn’t have dyslexia or attention issues or anything obvious.

I just wasn’t a strong reader.

I remember being in a high school art history class where we took turns reading paragraphs in our textbook out loud. My focus was not on the art or the history. I was busy trying to figure out which paragraph I was going to have to read so I could have a few extra minutes to read ahead and figure out any tricky words so I wouldn’t look like an idiot.

Looking back, I now know I had just never been taught to read correctly. I was raised in California in the early 90s when they were doing some kind of literacy curriculum experiment. We were taught basic phonics and then given sight word lists and exposed to print-rich environments where our teachers “hoped” we would “figure it out.” Some kids did. Many did not.

It wasn’t their fault. If you’re interested in the history of literacy instruction in the United States, I can’t recommend Emily Haniford’s Sold a Story 6-episode podcast series enough. She documents how literacy instruction for the last mmm 50 or so years has been a complete sham. Listen to it. It will blow your mind.

Looks like I’ll homeschool

I left my Speech-Language Pathology career to have a family. Having seen our industrial-age factory-style education system from the inside, I had a hunch that I wouldn’t be sending my kiddos to “normal” school.

So we started homeschooling, and I finally started learning about literacy.

As I searched for homeschool literacy curriculum, I found A LOT of the same light phonics + sight words + hope strategy that I experienced. This approach is called “balanced literacy,” and it’s a compromise between “whole language” and “deep phonics,” the two contenders in the decades-long “reading wars” that were fought in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

With deep phonics, you teach kids letter sounds and the detailed nitty-gritty rules of our language. The main criticism here is that it is boring and slow and makes kids hate reading. There are a lot of flashcards. There is typically not a lot of joy or whimsy. Valid.

With whole language, you read kids lots of books and teach them to perceive words as whole units to be memorized rather than “sounded out.” Then you hope the brain “figures out” how to read while maintaining the child’s love of reading. The criticism of this approach is that many don’t figure it out. Valid.

Somewhere in the 90s, folks decided to split the difference and take a little of each to form “balanced literacy.” A seemingly rational thing to do. But it turns out this doesn’t work either.

Nowadays, we have decades of research that describe exactly what skills are needed to have strong reading comprehension. Reading scientists call this “the reading equation.”

The Reading Equation

Decoding Skills x Language Comprehension = Reading Comprehension

Decoding is your ability to use your knowledge of how sounds are mapped to written letters to “sound words out.” It’s phonics.

Language comprehension is how well you can understand spoken language—things like your vocabulary, your ability to understand complex sentence structures and interpret figurative language. It’s also related to your general background knowledge about the world.

Decoding multiplied by language comprehension will predict reading comprehension. It’s math.

So, can we take one approach and add a little of the other to “balance” things out?

Here’s what phonics with a little bit of language looks like (a 1 in this equation represents full adoption and skill development in that area).

Phonics x Language = Reading Comprehension

1 x .5 =0.5

Not good.

What about if we switch things up and focus on language with a little bit of phonics?

Phonics x Language = Reading Comprehension

.5 x 1 = 0.5

Huh, it’s almost like you need them both to create a strong reader.

Phonics x Language = Reading Comprehension

1 x 1 = 1

Go figure.

It’s a lot easier to read out loud to kids and to build their language comprehension than it is to teach them deep phonics when they are 6, so it makes sense that most literacy programs are light on the phonics.

The other thing I saw when researching homeschool literacy curricula was that the few programs that DID teach deep phonics were expensive and complicated. You had to figure out which set of flashcards, readers, workbooks, and teacher’s manuals you needed. Then you had to learn how to teach all of this stuff yourself (while making breakfast, wiping bums, and trying to keep kids from killing each other). Heaven forbid you happen to have two readers working at different levels.

I’d read rave reviews about these programs from people just getting started, but many more reviews mentioned giving up, kids hating it, or not being able to afford the next “level.”

Flashback to the '90s

I mentioned earlier my brother had some learning difficulties growing up. When my mom was navigating the public school system’s special education programs trying to get him the help he needed, she became… disenchanted, shall we say.

My brother had almost no intelligible speech until he was about 6. Maybe it was because we were always together, or perhaps we had some kind of mental link 😁 but I was the only one who could understand him. If he needed to tell Mom something, he would come to get me and drag me along with him. He’d do his best to say what he wanted, and then he’d look at me, and I would interpret.

These issues did not help any of his academic skills, let alone his reading.

In first grade, he knew nothing. My mom took him to a reading tutor for three months, and that helped him learn to sound out simple CVC words, but after three months, she couldn’t afford the tutor anymore. It would be up to the school to teach him. He stayed at this exact reading level for 2nd grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, and through 5th grade.

Zero. Progress.

Finally, she pulled him out to homeschool him (and this was way before homeschooling was trendy, y'all).

My mom is an English teacher and a very well-educated woman, and she still had no idea how to teach reading. She had grown up in the “Dick and Jane” era, where they didn’t even teach letter-sound correspondence at all.

Luckily, it was 1996, and “the internet” was on the rise. She discovered Ramona Spalding’s “The Writing Road to Reading” program, which was based on the work of Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham in the 1920s. She remembers literally knitting sweaters as she waited for things to download.

He made a lot of progress and, in 8th grade, returned to school. He had to bring a book to read for “Silent Sustained Reading” (SSR), or he would lose points. So, to save him some middle-school embarrassment, she found books that looked like 8th-grade books but were written at a much lower reading level. One day, he came home and said he had finished all the books and needed a new one so he wouldn’t get in trouble. She didn’t have another lower reading level book on hand, so she gave him “Hatchet” by Gary Paulson (a true middle-grade reading level book) to “pretend” to read during SSR.

He came home that day and said he had read four chapters.

Deep Phonics, for the win.

Here’s the thing. All of that struggle, frustration, embarrassment, and expense could have been avoided if our schools' primary means of instruction were deep phonics alongside rich language exposure.

But it wasn’t, and unfortunately, it still isn’t.

Several decades later

In 2018, I met the founder of Prenda, Kelly Smith. He had just started the first Prenda microschool earlier that year. As a homeschool mom, I was intrigued by the idea, so I sent him a Facebook message. I drove to his house to ask him questions and left, knowing that microschools were going to change the education landscape in a Very. Big. Way.

| Find out more about microschools by listening to our Microschooling 101 webinar.

But at that point, Prenda was for big kids who could already read, and I wanted to put my littles in these amazing microschools. I knew there was nothing on the market literacy-wise that we could put in a microschool that would be simple, affordable, and would allow 10 kids to learn to read in a mastery-based, self-paced way under the supervision of someone who didn’t have to have an educational background (a pretty tall order, now that I think about it). It just did not exist.

So we built it.

The early iterations were so bad. I taped my phone to a pipe I found in our garage and suspended the pipe across some baskets on my kitchen table to get a “top down” shot of my hands moving letters around.

It was originally designed to go in a little wooden box—so we called it “Treasure Box Reading.” The stories were stapled into little books and had to be sorted into the right order and inserted into the lesson cards.

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After hearing stories of kids tipping the box over and spilling out hundreds of cards, we thought a workbook would be a little more practical (though less whimsical, for sure). The “treasure map” was invented as a progress tracker, and the program name changed to “Treasure Hunt Reading.”

I had just had my 4th baby while making this second version. She was an amazing sleeper, and that allowed me to stay up until 3 am every night filming the videos in my office in between nursing sessions. Fun fact: my original name was “Safari Kait” since the workbook had a kind of jungle vibe. I put the videos on a flash drive, and Kelly’s 15-year-old son edited them for us.

My son and I holding the first copy of Treasure Hunt Reading.

We had solved a lot of issues with reading instruction already.

We had simplified all the “decoding skills” kids need to know into a single item. No complicated web of different workbooks and readers to navigate.

We had taken the burden of instruction off the adult, which meant you didn’t need any specialized training or experience to support someone in their reading journey.

It was mastery-based, and kids in an age-mixed group could move through it at their own pace. Win.

We aligned the instruction with research-based methods and tried to make it fun.

But there was still the issue of cost.

Prenda was just getting off the ground as a company, and we had invested a lot of time and effort into creating Treasure Hunt. I knew I had to ask Kelly a difficult question.

I asked him if we could give it away.

He did not hesitate for a second. He just said, “Absolutely,” and that was that.

People from all over the world started using it. Downloading the workbook, watching the videos, and reading.

A year later, we updated the workbook to be a little more foresty, reshot the videos, and I became “Adventure Kait.”

(Shout out to Amy Hauck Wilson, who filmed and edited the videos, and to Rebekah Jennings, who tirelessly edited every detail of the workbook.)

With Treasure Hunt, kids all over the world in any kind of learning environment can develop the decoding skills they need to become strong readers. Add to this a childhood full of play, stories, conversations, and real-world experiences, and you’ll have the language comprehension to match.

I think back to my frustrations with reading, to the profound struggle my brother experienced, and to all the stress and expense my mom went through trying to support him. I also think of the millions of kids who are struggling with literacy in our schools and their teachers and parents who love them but don’t have the resources they need to make a difference.