The traditional ways of teaching the script to children involves rote-memorizing the Varnmala and the Barahkhadi before children are given any chance to engage in meaningful reading. This makes the process of learning how to read a cumbersome and meaningless exercise for children. In this blog piece, Nilesh Nimkar from QUEST appeals for the need of an alternative approach and discusses the approach used by QUEST, inspired by Prof. Maxine Berntsen’s PSS approach, which combines decoding with meaning-making.