Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Quirks of an Early Reader?

My DS is in preschool. He is an excellent reader and has been reading since right around the time he turned two. He is one of those kids, like many here, who just seemed to spontaneously start reading on his own. We read to him regularly as a baby, but otherwise did nothing special to prompt early reading.

Now in this preschool, his teacher has been surprised at how quickly DS can read words (including big, complex words) but says DS is really resistant when it comes to sounding out words or doing any sort of phonics exercises. I guess when the teacher asks him how to spell a word, DS gets annoyed/bored/jokey immediately and simply doesn't want to. The issue isn't pressed, because... well, this is just preschool afterall! But the teacher was surprised by the apparent incongruity of a kid that reads so quickly/effortlessly but yet seems to run away when asked what sound the letter "b" makes. (FWIW, I know DS knows the letters and letter sounds because he was playing a game online a few weeks ago that had that as an element. But I don't think he can necessarily build a word with this knowledge. Then again, I've never asked him to...)

But I was wondering... for kids that start reading really early, is this normal? Maybe he has simply memorized a dictionaries worth of words so it appears that he is a fast reader, but he really doesn't know how to spell or decode words? Does that make sense?

I'd love to hear from other parents of early readers... Is this something I should actually be working on with him? We've always taken a pretty hands-off approach in terms of formal teaching in our house. Our kids are both preschool (and pre-preschool) age and our time with them is more focused on play and messy art projects and running at the park kind of things. I'm not even sure where to begin if I were supposed to teach him how to spell words at home. (?)

Sorry to ramble, hope this makes sense!

Sounds like he's a "whole language" reader. I think you're right, he probably doesn't use decoding skills in his reading.

Unfortunately, he's likely to be pretty resistant to learning that (to him, secondary) skill set by the time it is officially taught to most kindergarten and first grade students.


You're also right to be wondering about the necessity of teaching those skills now, IMO.

This is the entire reason why we intervened and (against professional advice of a family member) taught our preschooler to read. Well, I say "taught." Not really. We just got her a set of phonetically controlled readers and went through them with her for a couple of weeks.

The problem with whole language readers is that they can have difficulty with other peripheral literacy skills such as spelling, foreign language acquisition, etc. later on, and the problem with gifted children in particular is that once they know a way to do something, they are VERY resistant to instruction which 'remediates' something that they don't see as a problem. This is why we did NOT want our DD to begin reading fluently using this particular method. Not like other parents necessarily have a choice, I know.

I'd probably provide a few at-home resources to work on that other skill set (workbooks or starfall, etc. just what he likes and enjoys doing)-- and maybe see what he can do with words that you KNOW he's not seen/learned in context. If he can reason out words that he's very unlikely to have ever seen before, then it's likely that he's using some kind of decoding skill set.

I'd be cautious about assuming he's really a full-on whole language reader. He may just be resistant for other reasons (finds the question beneath him, thinks it's a trick question, hasn't consciously thought about it in ages, dislikes the teacher). I thought my self-taught DD was a whole-language reader, but when I really paid attention it became clear that she couldn't possibly be, although she did use quick whole-word recognition as part of her arsenal. Can he, for instance, sound out things like unknown dinosaur names?

FWIW, my DS4 can't spell nearly as well as he can read. I THINK this is common in early readers? He hasn't been much of a "write to learn to read" kid. DD did more of that.

Give him some easy nonsense words and see how he does in an unpressured setting, if possible. Does he not read signs all over the place, even abbreviations and things that aren't true words? (My DS is always doing this--I remember DD doing it as well. I laughed when he tried to sound out "CVS" just as she had done. "Cuvuhuzz??")

DS2 can now read maybe about 100 words ... he has a very limited vocab (speech delay) and only wants to read words that he in fact uses in real life and won't even try to read words he doesn't use. Anyways ... I noticed when he first started "reading" he would sound out the word and then read them. Now, two months later he no longer does it. He just reads the word without any sounding out. Unless he runs into a brand new word that catches his attention and then he sounds it out. But other than that I think he's at a point when he thinks sounding out is boring when he KNOWS the word.

He does sound like a whole-language reader. I think that the better the long-term memory of a young child, the more likely they are to rely on it in learning to read in this way. It can be frustrating to them to learn phonetics, as it's not as amenable to quick recall at first and it feels like slowing down to them.

I used some whimsical phonics flash cards with my older son way back when, to make sure he was getting the rules in place. We never really studied the rules intensively, but later on when I was teaching him to spell, we'd blast through up to hundreds of words on spelling lists at a time, slowing down to 40-50 in a quick session when we got to harder words. I'd take the time during those sessions to point out certain words and make sure he knew the rules at work, and the first time through the list would ask him to try to spell each word without seeing it first. This not only got him thinking about encoding and the rules, it let me quickly find out the few rules he was missing, and encouraged him to struggle to recall the spellings of words from his reading as well, another good skill for a speller to have.

actually, I should correct myself ... he will sound out unknown words, just won't read the word after that because he's not familiar with it but he will sound out all the letters when it's a new word to him that he doesn't recognize yet. DS2 is self-teaching himself so I never know where he's really at. But as long as he's having fun with it, it's fine with me! lol
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... sorry if this is a double post. I posted it couple minutes ago but it's not showing up for me

My ds also started reading at 2 as a whole language reader (I guess I'm assuming most self-taught kids probably are as the ability to process phonics (especially complex ones) is a higher developmental skill. Here is where we are at 6: ds remembers almost every word he reads, so his sight -word recognition is very advanced (blows me away) . Of course he understands simple phonics...but he has a harder time sounding out phonetically complex words. But he's still waaay beyond where the typical 6 year old is.

His decoding skills are great: he references words he knows when he gets to a tough one (yesterday "refracted" was "refractured") and he does an excellent job with contextual clues - that's something he started fling really early). Although he's learning to read "backwords", his reading is continuing to advance quickly.

I think what's going to help him the most is the phonetic-spelling they encourage for journal writing. My ds loved the Leap Frog videos when he was about 2-3. Code Word Caper tackles some advanced phonics.

We didn't push spelling skills until this year - selfishly thinking It would be at least ONE thing he could learn in school.

My DS6 is quite parallel to Evemomma's description. I don't think ours is quite like Whole Reading as much as complex pattern matching. His guesses at new longer words he encounters are hilarious and sometimes when he makes a faroff guess to a new word, it is much trickier to get him to the correct reading.

And now in 1st comes spelling lists, I tried an experiment with him last night to have him close his eyes briefly and try to see the word before he tried to spell it. Seemed to help, time will tell.

Love this idea! My ds cracked me up yesterday because he couldn't recall how to spell "and" - this from the child reading the 7th grade science book last night.

...can we spell "asynchronous?"