Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Learning to read

Of course, we don't always get to participate in conventional wisdom as it pertains to our little non-conformers. DS7 couldn't be read to until around 4, but he was reading all sorts of stuff himself well before 3. Always had his own priorities, and they seem to work.

If your child isn't really into picture books right now I'd just focus on what she likes. Not everyone likes fiction, some people always prefer nonfiction. If she mainly likes the nonfiction books with photos of things then I'd get a big supply of those and just aim to make reading together part of your day and try to bring in a variety of these books that she likes so it stays interesting to you both and so you have new things to talk about. I try to make the focus of reading together on learning about the world rather than learning to read.

With Starfall, it might be good to pay attention to what the games are teaching your daughter and try to point out related material in the environment at stores and at home. We've only had a Starfall reading app for about a week and maybe it differs from the computer version but for example if your child likes a song that says "double e says ee" then you could point out words in stores with double Es and sing the song to help reinforce things that Starfall is teaching.

The main thing I focus on is not letting my child be obsessed with anything at the expense of other areas of development. When you are an adult and have an all consuming interest that can be a good thing but not at age 3. My child is at the level of recognizing a lot of words and trying to sound out new words but not yet really reading and I'm not sure Starfall will help bring her to the next level but she does really enjoy it. I think my child would easily play games like Starfall all day and would learn a lot this way but that at this age it's especially important to make sure that most of the day is about developing a range of motor skills, social skills and cognitive function (especially executive function, attention, working memory) and that games like Starfall are providing limited benefits. Not that you said or implied you were letting your child play Starfall all day, this is just a big issue within our house right now with at least a few tantrums over active screen time limits pretty much every day so this is where I am on the issue right now, having given it a lot of thought lately. I second guess myself all the time and wonder what would happen if we didn't have screen time limits. I wish there was more research on this topic (negative effects of active screen time) so I wouldn't feel like I was guessing all the time.

Great words of wisdom from MotherofToddler.

On the topic of linking screen interests to the real world, I tend to sandwich screen time between analog activities reacting to the same topic. So, with our current "Dinosaur Train" obsession, we read dinosaur books before and after watching the show, or act out the show with figurines, to pre- and post-saturate DS in dinosaur activities.

I'm probably tilted more toward the laissez-faire end of the screen time spectrum. I let a previous "Winnie the Pooh" obsession play out naturally a few months ago and, even at its peak, we'd watch maybe 90 minutes of Pooh per day. (I didn't allow any other screen time.) The peak lasted a few days and fizzled to zero within a week when DS was left to indulge ad libitum. Most days, we have about a hour of screen time from all sources.

Now, if he wanted to read Pooh, draw the characters, build their homes, or act out the books, I'd let that go on all day. YMMV.

Back to the topic of reading: I've found a fun way to incorporate some physical play into learning to read (or anything) is jumping games. Draw words or letters on the driveway in chalk and run or jump from letter to letter to form words. You can race, compete for letter spaces, etc. It's how I taught DS to jump, incidentally.

We never read to our kids and we let them have as much TV and computer time as they wanted (probably several dozen hours of screen time per week). They taught themselves to read at age 2 or 3, so that's one way to do it.

Don't forget to always have the closed captioning (subtitles) on the TV.

Interesting question. I never really thought about this in depth but if I used a site similar to Starfall in concept to learn a new language (not that I'd ever manage to do that), I'd still consider that as independent learning. It's really not that different from a child picking up a calculus book and teaching himself/herself except that it has a lot of visual-auditory materials. I tend to think that self-teaching does not require that you discover everything from scratch but you learn without the guidance from or support of a teacher.

It's hard to trust young children to know how to learn; after all, that level of metacognition isn't supposed to kick in until much later but if they can drive their own learning process, that is a wonderful thing. I try to support my DD by keeping our apartment organized so that she knows where all the library books are as well as hunting down cheap used copies of old and new classics for our home library. Whenever I try to help beyond that, DD rejects whatever I suggest so I've learned my lesson to keep out of her way.

So I asked dd yesterday night how she learnt her letter sounds. She immediately replied,"
I learnt them by myself mom. Remember the song you used to sing that was like abc song but was actually abacada." I do vaguely remember singing that to her when she was 18-24 months, a phase we both spent singing a ton of nursery rhymes. Didn't realize it had helped dd so much.

Interesting thread! My youngest taught herself the alphabet & sounds with the starfall app before 18 monhts (primarily car rides). At 2 she would point out letters while we were out, sometimes sounding out a little, we thought she'd keep going but her interests went elsewhere and we saw no reason to redirect our own personal cyclone back to learning to read at the ripe old age of 2. Two years later at 3.5yrs she's just now having an explosion of pre-reading skills, "[word] starts with..., like [otherword] starts with..." "[word] sounds like [otherword]" but she's more interested in getting us to tell her how to spell words than she is in trying to read books. I assume she'll read well before school though...

Ours is like that too, we find her passed out at night with a flashlight & a book when we go to bed! At 3.5 she recognizes a bunch of sight words and sounds out others, but she mostly likes to spell things back "Mommy, what does M-E-G-A-T-R-O-N spell?"
She's currently in a comic book phase and seems to really have an easier time reading them (she reads My Little Pony & The Amazing Spidergirl) than she does regular books.
Our biggest struggle has always been memorization, she started memorizing books likely before she could speak, because as soon as she could, she'd recite things we hadn't read in months! Because of this she won't even look at the words in her books, she'll just recite them - so we got her comics, which aren't as linear and make it so he has to actually LOOK at words to identify them.
She is currently in preK and at nap time each day she opts to read instead of sleeping (she's a terrible sleeper!) she writes "letters" to her friends by telling me what she wants to say, having me write it on a white board and then either typing it (a skill she's mastered) or handwriting it (a skill she's far from mastered). We aren't rushing her, and we take it to her level of interest, we almost read every night unless she's misbehaved and lost stories. I've found that the more casual I am about it, the better she does, she doesn't like pressure and she sometimes decides that she wants to "fit in" (my word, not hers) and purposely holds back because her friends can't do things, so we do our best not to make a big deal of specific things that set her apart because she's very sensitive to it!

Wow everyone - thanks so much for the great advice!
Just to clarify she gets an hour or 2 of starfall a day which is too much I feel but not enough as far as she is concerned.
I agree 100% about not letting computer interfere with other development - actually she is very sporty (1 st sign of giftedness was throwing and catching at 14 months!). Plus she goes to a play only kindy 2x weekly for the social side of things.

With the books we may be making progress. (In the past 24 hours for heaven sake.) She has sat through some margaret mahy. I even got her to listen to a few fairy tales which I think is purely because she can point at the words as we go along - yay. I just always dreamt of reading fairy tales to my kids - sigh. Perhaps the fiction switch just got flicked? She has just hit a stage where everything is exploding and I'm finding it hard to balance letting her find out for herself and extending her.... We had to build a dodecahedron today and play catch with it.

Given her interest in learning to read, the best thing for DS were sight words (there are some apps of she wants to do it herself). High frequency sight words quickly my son's reading ability. Literally, he went from kind of reading to actual reading within a month.