What Is Scarborough’s Rope and How Does It Explain Teaching Reading?
Experienced teachers know that true literacy is much more than just ringing the letters on the page. Experienced readers must be able to master what the words are and what they mean. To do this successfully, they bring together different skills such as vocabulary, language structure and verbal reasoning. Scarborough's rope model can help educators better understand what it really takes to attract qualified readers. What is Scarborough's rope? Source: Brainspring dr Hollis Scarborough invented the reading rope concept in the early 1990s. She used it to help parents understand the different skills their children needed to master in order to become competent readers. Originally, she twisted together a model made out of pipe cleaners to demonstrate her point. In 2001 the model was released in Handbook of Early Literacy Research (Neumann/Dickinson). Reading teachers immediately saw how useful it was, and it became a staple in the training of new teachers and parents al...