General Info

Welcome to Riggs Institute Riggs Institute is a self-supporting, non-profit literacy agency and publisher. We offer language arts curriculum for teachers and parents and formal training seminars as well. Our method of instruction, The Writing & Spelling Road to Reading & Thinking, begins by teaching manuscript letter formation through dictated instructions ( no copying or tracing ), together with a sufficient set of sound/letter relationships ( the alphabetic principle ). This accommodates the Webster-Oxford spelling system which "standardized" English spelling in the early 1860's,, and remains virtually unchanged after 140+ years. These phoneme/grapheme relationships are taught together as "explicit" phonics, "in isolation" ( without key words, pictures or letter names ) as recommended in the 1985 federal synthesis of reading research done by the nation's leading reading professors, "Becoming a Nation of Readers" ( BNR ). This instruction takes only four of the first nine weeks in Grade 1--all without consumable worksheets.