5 ideas
A child's first reading words should come from their own strongest feelings, above all fear and desire: words like 'ghost', 'kiss', 'knife', 'Mummy', 'jail'. These emotionally charged words are 'one-look words' that the child learns instantly, because the meaning already exists inside them and only the written form is new.
Each morning the child asks for a word, the teacher writes it on a large card, and the child traces it, reads it, and keeps it. The next day all the cards are tipped out and the child must pick out and name each one. Any word the child cannot recall is thrown away, because forgetting shows the word held no inner meaning, so the method sorts living vocabulary from dead vocabulary.
A child's mind is like a volcano with two vents, one creative and one destructive. Energy that finds no outlet through making, speaking and writing will erupt as aggression and destruction. Widening the creative vent through organic work therefore reduces violence directly, rather than suppressing it through discipline.
Standard primers built on a foreign world, such as middle-class European 'Janet and John' books, ask Māori children to read about lives with no link to their own. Reading material must first come from the child's own culture and speech, so that literacy becomes a bridge into the wider culture rather than a wall against it.
Children progress from their key words to writing their own sentences and stories, and these become the class's reading books. Because the child authored the text, reading their own and their classmates' writing is inherently meaningful. Writing is expression flowing out, and reading follows as that expression is shared.