The SEEDS Framework is grounded in the science of reading. The framework provides educators with a comprehensive, evidence-based roadmap to support children’s early literacy development, ensuring that instructional decisions are informed by research on how children most effectively learn to read and write.
The “science of reading” consists of two main, interconnected strands:
- Language Comprehension: This strand refers to a child’s ability to understand spoken language, build vocabulary, acquire background knowledge, develop verbal reasoning, and understand literary knowledge. It’s about “understanding what you read.”
- Word Recognition: This strand focuses on how children learn the sounds in spoken words (phonological awareness), recognize letters in written words (decoding), and understand how those sounds and letters fit together (sight recognition). This is about “being able to read the words.”
Both Language Comprehension and Word Recognition are absolutely critical and mutually supportive; strong word recognition skills enable efficient decoding, which in turn frees up cognitive resources for language comprehension.