Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums When do you consider your child a reader?

I have seen alot of posts that say, my child started reading at 2.5 or 3 or 5.

How do you know if your child is a reader? Is it when they can sound out words, or when they read a board book for the first time. Mabe it is when they start regulary reading signs. Or when they can read chapter books fluently. What is the typical age range for children to start reading.

So I guess my question is. What constitutes a reader?

I usually consider it reading when they can read a (simple) new book alone.

I don't think this is what most people out IRL mean though. I suspect this is why we parents of GT kids so often get ignored when we say our kids are reading. We mean books, and most people mean that they recognize letters.

*sigh*

I split reading into levels. For me, it begins when the child can sound out/read a word without help(no assistance from someone else and no contextual clues, such as pictures). This is easy to determine: I write random words on a piece of paper. Can the child tell me what they say? If yes, reading has begun (I think of these kids as emerging readers).

Next come simple books (Bob books, Dr. Seuss, etc), and the process progresses from there. My eldest was pretty driven about reading. He didn't start until he was 4, but had got to Goosebumps chapter books sometime in kindergarten; Amazon says they're for ages 9-12. At that point, I thought of him as being pretty good but not yet literate.

I see literate when someone can accomplish things by reading. For example, can s/he follow the directions in a science kit without my help? Figure out a bus schedule? Use the index in a big book, find the relevant entry, and understand what's written? I see these skills as signs of basic literacy.

I also see two main stages in reading: the first is sounding out words of increasing complexity (ex. from cat to cave to volcano to excitation). Being able to understand increasingly longer sentences is also part of this stage to a degree.

Once my kids get proficient at this skill, their progress in reading seems to be tied to vocabulary. Which is to say, once they can sound out words without much trouble, reading skills become dependent on knowing what the words mean. This, I think, is why a lot of GT kids can race ahead of their peers so fast without help or extra work --- they're little vocabulary sponges.

My DS6 could sound out words when he was 3, but didn't have much interest. He's now at a point where he's tipping between sounding-out and benefiting from his large vocabulary. It's kind of trippy to give him a new book and watch him sound out a small word one minute and then whip through a complex sentence the next.

There people on this list who have kids who were reading books when they were 2 or 3! They might have a totally different perspective on this subject.

Val

I say "my child self-taught reading at 2" and usually that's specific enough; if people want more detail, I explain what happened, which was:
- we noticed he could read the odd word when he was 18 months, which as it happened was before he could talk :-) (He recognised and pointed out DVD on an advertisement for a DVD that didn't have a picture of one, which we thought was odd; so we wrote DVD and his name and several other words of the same kind of general length and shape, spread them out and asked "which one says DVD? which one says Colin?" which he could show us very convincingly.)
Of course, I don't really know how much he could read at that point, it was hard to tell!
- he knew all the letters by sound and name by the time he could articulate the sounds
- by 2y1m a favourite game was to say "M mmmm Mummy" etc. with different words, and I remember the nursery staff being amazed by that, and myself being amazed that he could even do it with words that I was sure he hadn't met on Starfall
- during the next months he gradually got better at reading words, and would "read" familiar books with a lot of help from memory. We used to do "I'll read one sentence and you read the next". It was hard to tell how much was reading and how much memory.
- by 2y6m he was spelling obsessed
- at 2y10m we were at a school open day and he picked up a story book of the kind you give 5/6yos and read the whole thing, maybe 15 pages; that was when I really understood that he could read books, not just remember what he'd heard

If he hadn't reached this last point before his third birthday, I suppose it might have been more difficult to decide what to say, because really his early learning to read was clandestine!

I will try to remember what they taught me in teacher school...

1. The first stage is letter recognition, attaching the sound to the letter.
This stage usually will end with the child knowing some "Site words" those are words they are not actually read in a phonetic way, rather they just know it though memory. (EXAMPLES: and, the, with..... sometimes store names that are advertised a lot)

2. The next stage is the sound out stage, kids discover that when the letters are put together they make different sounds. This is the emergence of true reading.

3. The last stage is Fluency, this is when a person can read in a flowing manner. This is true reading.

With DS7 He started stage 1 when he was about 15 months. I discovered he was at stage 3 at age 2.5, it may have been earlier.

He could and did read books, like Dr. Suess at 2.5. And anything else he got that had text on it. The supermarket checkout was always a lot of fun as he read the tabloid headlines and asked me questions about what they meant.
"Who is Brad? why is divorcing Jen? what does divorce meant?" Always a fun show for on lookers who would tell me my child was so smart. Meanwhile I'm just trying to get my eggs home un-cracked.

By 3 he was reading 3rd grade early reader books. By 4 he started reading 4th grade, he could read Harry potter but it was too scary for him. He read a lot of captian underpants and ricky ricotta. In kidergarten he read all sorts of stuff, and by 1st he read harry potter, it wasn't that scary anymore.

Jenjoy, you make my kid sound so normal! - that's why I love this place! My kid was book obsessed from an early age, so at 18 months dd3 could recite most of her books- I remember hearing her recite Brown Bear, Brown bear over the baby monitor at that age... she went on to some of her other books and looking at the pictures she would say things like "Goldilocks, Goldilocks what do you see - I see three bears looking at me!" and she would laugh as though she knew this was funny. HA! When she was 2 years 3 months we were at someone else's home when she picked up a book she had never read before and started reading all of the little prepositions and articles - I would not have believed it if I had not seen it with my own eyes.. but I guess from having memorized so many of her own books, she had put 2 and 2 together and started to memorize words. She already knew all of her letters and most of the letter sounds at that point, so I decided to show her how you could just put the letter sounds together to sound out words. By two and a half she was reading fluently... totally crazy, I know... I think a lot of parents will say that their child can read when they can recite books - which I agree, makes our jobs communicating with teachers a bit more of a challenge.

My kids have all been early readers. I don't remember any of them sounding words out, except for once when my daughter was trying to imitate what she saw another child do.

I love the example of JenJoy's child reading the tabloids. It was at the supermarket that I first realized one of my kids was really reading, and not just remembering sight words. He'd been reading signs and individual words from 12 months, but at just over two, he was suddenly reading words I knew he hadn't encountered elsewhere. It was scary. By the time he was two and a half, he was consulting adult field guides to identify rocks and minerals, and seashells. We went on a weekend trip and he amused himself in his carseat by reading the liner notes to an Irish Tenors cd. At that point, he seemed able to read just about anything.

I wasn't surprised when my other kids were also early readers. I didn't try to teach them- they all seemed to pick it up on their own when they were ready. We have a print rich environment and read to the kids from the time they are babies.

DS6 started reading fluently just before his 5th birthday. He'd been asking me since he was 3 to teach him, but I (mistakenly as it were) believed that he should wait for Kindergarten. He just one day picked up one of the leveled easy readers and started reading it. Within a month he was reading Magic Treehouse.

At the time I thought it was completely spontaneous, but having spent some time reading about other people's experiences with early readers, I'm sure that he was showing signs much earlier. By 18mo he had every kids book we owned memorized and could memorize books from the library after 1 or 2 readings and then remember them if he saw them later. He was probably 2 when he started with some sight words, I just didn't think that counted for anything because they were just memorized, right? When he was 3 I thought that him asking me to teach him to read was cute, but he didn't really understand what he wanted. At 3.5 he started writing sentences and became really interested in the spellings of words and how the letters came together. But, he was asking me how to spell them, so it didn't mean anything.

I use the "just before his 5th birthday" marker as my answer for when he started reading. It's the one that I'm most comfortable with and since I can name books he was reading, it makes it easier to explain to other people.

ITA that is it hard to pinpoint when they were "readers." Both my kids were fluent without any teaching from me. In fact, I suspect they both read even earlier than I could identify because by the time I figured it out, they were into 2-3gr books by 4yr. It is also hard to ask parents of GT kids this question because using my first child as an example, we assume whatever they are doing is the norm! I was more attuned to my second child and was totally thankful that she also just "picked it up" since I had never had to teach phonics. I will say that the reading progression with her has been a bit slower than him (or maybe I am just more aware of the milestones since she is the 2nd and last child) but her writing is way ahead of him. Could also be attributed to gender differences. To clarify, by writing, I mean composing thoughts on paper, not handwriting.

Gratified-
There were all sorts of levels of surprise with the field guides. First, that he could read them, then that he could use them appropriately to identify specimens, and then third, that he actually remembered data from the book so that when DH brought home a "pretty seashell" from a business trip, DS saw it (it was not a type we already had) and immediately identified it without opening the guide. He may have been three at that point, but I am not sure.

My son is pretty well rounded, but I'd say that science is an enduring passion. How about your field guide kid?