Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School gifted kids who do not read early

DD5 is what one would call an early reader (she knew her letters by 18 months and began recognizing sight words at 2), but she was never a really strong reader until she started Kindergarten. She's the poster child for "whole language" learning -- phonics and cvc words would stump her, as would easy sight words like "at" or "the", but she would memorize other words at an amazing rate and would often guess within context. When she tested on the MAP in September she was 91st percentile for K, so obviously advanced, but her teacher and I both recognized that she had been "stuck" on being an emergent reader for a while at that point. The guessing was killing us because she would see a word like "turtle" and just say whatever came to mind that started with a T and fit the story, so she just wasn't reading independently at all.

Now,she's the type of kid who does learn things spontaneously, so I can't be sure if direct instruction is what did it, but I definitely do think that it's her K teacher that made all the difference in her reading fluency. Her skills have completely shot up in the last two months. We are in a play-based classroom, and her teacher focuses on phonemic awareness, not sight words or even phonics. She doesn't tell the kids how to spell words if they ask (she wants them to think about the sounds), and she focuses on the rhythm of the words and the number of syllables, etc. Somehow, it awoke something in DD, who finally understands that words aren't things you just look at and immediately recognize, and that they have actual components to them. And now she's blowing through reading levels.

I'm not explaining it really well, but in short, I've seen a huge difference. I tried BOB Books and iRead and other phonics things and none of that clicked, but whatever her teacher did, she's gotten it now. Or it's spontaneous. Because you never know with gifted kids.

As a side note, the whole "not telling them how to spell a word" thing is very frustrating for her, because she's a perfectionist. She gets so mad when she sounds out a word and then later realizes it's not spelled that way, but since that's the way her teacher does it, I'm consistent about it at home too and the meltdowns over imperfection have greatly decreased.