DS3 showed no interests in reading whatsoever even though he loved to be read to.

I bought some sight word DVDs for him over the weekend, and he learnt 20+ sight words in less than a week.

He recognizes those sight words in normal contexts and now loves to “read.”

Not that it matters, but I am curious to see if it is considered reading or not.

TIA

Not that I really know but I called mine recognizing words when he did that, starting to read. Then I called him an "emerging reader" when he started sounding out words. I called him a reader when he could decode an early reader book, including re-reading sentences to himself if they didn't make sense to him. I will call him a fluent reader when he doesn't sound out words anymore. I was raised using phonics and that reading was a process so that's where I got those terms from. I think now they do constructivism & whole word reading so my understanding is obsolete.

I agree with La Texican (and mostly see constructivism as an edumacational philosophy that doesn't have a lot of good supporting data, FWIW).

For me, reading starts when kids can sound out basic words. Doing this is proof that they get the foundational idea of reading: letters stand for sounds, and in order to read, you combine a bunch of letter sounds that make a word.

I think alot of people have different ideas of the definition of when a child is reading.

I might have been stingy, but I didn't consider my DD to be reading when she was "reading" the books she had memorized, or any little sight-word primers and things, but when you handed her something she had never seen and could read most or all of the words, stop at words she didn't know and try and sound them out. Or when she started reading streets signs, ceral boxes and things. It's sort of the wild spill-out after the breaking of the code.

Memorizing the basic sight words, knowing all the letters and their sounds, learning the rules of phonics and exceptions and all the many letter blends, reading alot and being read to (a combination of breaking down new words and re-reading familiar text for fluency) is the best way to become a solid reader I think...it happens over time at different stages.

All IMHO, of course.

I was going to keep going, saying, then you get to the comprehension and retelling in their own words.  Then you get to where some people say, "a good reader can visualize the story they're reading".  Or when you can get lost in a book...
Then I realized I missed something with my reading skills from your first post.   Congratulations on your son starting to read!

I swear we had a thread about this a couple or more years ago. I remember people defining ideas like "emerging reader" and so on. It was good, but I can't look for it right now.

FWIW, I was defining an emerging reader, not a fluent reader.

Was this the thread? When do you consider your child a reader?

A few years ago I had the same question and found some answers looking at definitions of "reading" in academic articles (I wish I could remember the specifics).

I remember one article using something like...'reading a 4-5 simple word sentence (assumed non-sight words, no pictures)'. That seemed reasonable to me. At the time I didn't really know what my DS2 was capable of so I typed short, random sentences on my computer (e.g., "The bridge fell on my foot") to get a sense of where he was at.

"didn't consider my DD to be reading when she was "reading" the books she had memorized, or any little sight-word primers and things, but when you handed her something she had never seen and could read most or all of the words, stop at words she didn't know and try and sound them out. Or when she started reading streets signs, ceral boxes and things. It's sort of the wild spill-out after the breaking of the code."

Yeah, that's how I define it, too.

Yes, that was the one. Thanks for finding it!

Val

Children may read books that are familiar to them early on because of the familiar context, which helps them figure out some of the words even if they don't have the book committed completely to memory. Despite all the talk about children having photographic or near-photographic memories, they are actually very rare. I suspect that it would be a rare pre-reading/early-reading child indeed who could recite from memory the complete text of all the child's favorite books without error, or even the hidden text of every page upon seeing the picture of the page. There's bound to be some reading going on.

When a child teaches themselves to read, really teaches themselves (no being lead at all by flash cards, Star Fall or a program of some kind) by being read to, watching your lips and listening to the sounds and asking lots of questions one phase at a time (starting with "what's that?" when pointing to letters everywhere and things, asking how things are spelled endlessly) watching some of these kids shows on PBS, they do break the code and I guess there is something more than just memorizing going on. I just always had people challenging me on it (mostly family) so I tended to play it down somewhat.

My DD’s experience learning to read was very much in huge leaps and bounds that I could not define. It does happen to some kids. Actually the older librarian where we used to go (his second career after retiring as a chemist) remembers learning how to read when he was about 3 1/2. He doesn’t know how it happened but he does remember the day when he could pick something up and start reading it on his own. He mostly just remembers spending time with his grandfather reading to him, asking questions here and there. Sometimes you read about slaves or other people that were kept in ignorance by a higher authority learning to read over time by seeing the cook reading recipes and other things, somehow linking the text to the speech. Some people are truly superb code-breakers.

We thought DD’d be an avid reader but she’s really not. It’s like she was more interested in the fun of breaking the code or so unhappy that there was this huge informational secret out there that she didn't know about and she couldn't take it anymore!

She’s still strictly in it for the information, or realizing that you should have a book with you if you think you’re going to need to wait, like going to the doctor’s office. She does love stories but she's not one of those voracious readers like a more classic gifted reader you'd think of.

The experience with me having a child who could read so early is part pride but part a big responsibility because I felt like I needed to shield her from more things at a young age and if she did have a chance to read a headline about kids killed in a car crash or something, her reaction really did indicate that she really understood what she was reading (unlike what the schools insisted she could not). There’s also the problem of the high risk of being bored to distraction upon entering school! And being sidelined for years in the classroom, stopping reading altogether to fit in...

Therefore, when I read or hear about people taking the lead in teaching a young child to read by introducing them to the process before they start asking about or taking an interest, I’m always very perplexed as to why they would want to do it.

No offense anyone!! LOL I think that, since I was considered a “late” reader, just on the verge of it becoming a big issue before I finally broke through, I don’t think there is any reason to rush into it.

IMHO as always.

I tried to make my kid think only old folks died too. He knew Pompa got very old and very sick and died. Then they had a "save the children commercial" on tv and he's immediately like, well then what's this?!

That's funny. Most parents on this forum probably have kids who don't let anything go undetected. It's the nature of the little beasts.

Dd had an avid interest in the written word from an extremely early age. By 12 mo. she would totter around with this huge DK word book --- one of her first words was "readabook" and it meant that she was going to plop in your lap with this book and you would read it to her.

We did help her learn to read, and here's why. She was a very tiny thing (<3rd percentile on weight) and in an effort to get her to stay in the high chair a little longer to eat, we looked for ways to amuse her. At some point (18 mos.?) she showed an interest in the writing on the cereal box and we followed her lead. It took off from there. By shortly after her 2nd birthday, she was a fluent reader as defined other posters here (reading beginning readers she had never seen before as well as signs everywhere ("No Parking, Daddy")). We did censor massively when she was little (but I did finally give in to the queries and explained the feminine hygiene product dispensers - "What does Tampon mean?" - in public ladies' rooms when she and her twin were about 4yo).

Now 12 yo, she has never slowed down on reading, and calls herself a "book addict." She routinely finishes off two substantial novels in a day and on occasion a third.

amylou my older sister was like your DD and my mother taught her to read before she entered school. My mother and sister both enjoyed it very much and my mother was so proud (my father too!)She has always been a voracious reader she sort of breathes in the books.

Since I was next my mother took the initiative to teach me too and I had no interest. There is a stereotypical image of early reader=gifted so sometimes when a child is the minority in a family of gifted readers the child gets the impression that slow to read=stupid, especially if the adults become frustrated. So I guess this is my "reading baggage" LOL

I don't want to give the impression that we didn't help DD learn. She was asking "what's that?" with individual letters under age two and if she asked us how to spell things we always answered her. But she showed the interest first and we just followed her.

She has some markers for dyslexia now (we are getting testing done) what might be called "stealth dyslexia" and I think that is one of the reasons she doesn't really love to read and tires of it more easily now. That's a downside of the spontaneous reading and reading ahead of peers some of things things have been covered up.

This story reminds me so much of my son as an infant. I remember one of my colleagues telling me a story about picking her son up at the daycare they were both at. DS was the last one left, and he was being a little fussy and difficult, and the daycare teacher couldn't find a way to soothe him. My friend looked at him and said, "Read him a book." The daycare teacher gave her a look like she was out of her mind, and she said, "No, I know this kid - try it. Read him a book." So the teacher got him a book and started to read, and it was instant silence. He listened happily to book after book until I got there. The teacher still comments on that day, and it's been three years since that incident.

I wasn't second guessing you, just responding to the question someone posted about why one might *teach* a child so young to read. We actually have a comparison child as well, dd's twin brother. At one point when they were 2yo, dh and I were so sucked into dd's reading vortex that we worried that we were neglecting a similar inclination on ds's part -- that maybe he just was not as effective at asserting as she. So we *did* try briefly with him, but it was abundantly clear that he didn't give a s*** about letters, so we stopped. He did learn to read at about 3.5 yo, but probably would have waited for kindy if it hadn't been for watching the example of his book-loving twin. We did think she was "the gifted one" (or a reading savant?), but time has proven us wrong. He has some executive function issues that she doesn't, combined with a strong stubborn streak, but is an extremely strong performer academically.

Yup! Dd recently declared she'll never need drugs to soothe herself because books do the job. I hope that stays true...

I never thought DS was reading if he was just reciting from memory.

I am a non-native English speaker, and my first language is mostly pictographic in nature. So I am surprised to see that most here consider reading starts when one can sound out words.

That's the often unrecognized bias of the alphabetic/syllabic language readers. The whole "breaking the code" as the ultimate key to reading thing...

So what do you think about the whole word reading debate?

I've always had people who were older than I tell me that I was lucky to have learned to read with phonics.  Now I see mothers online saying that whole word readers comprehend a text without ever having to go back and re-read a sentence or paragraph that they sped through like phonetic readers sometimes do.  Hmm.., I do that somedays but not on others.  

My choice wasn't really that well thought out.  It was decided by what was happening when the reading started.  At the time my son was recognizing a few sight words (erm., ahem- well, like spongebob on the tv guide channel, and his dad's name) J.C. Penny's had boxes of Hooked on Phonics on sale for $11/each.  We made the little word families sat, mat, cat.  He learned "fat" thanks to this and told me in a store, "That man is fat".  Thanks Hooked on Phonics.

HelloBaby I am also curious what you think of the whole word debate. I tried to check on google scholar what non alphabetic languages do for reading.. did not find anything of as yet. DD reads by whole word and is repulsed by phonics. She has well over 100 "sight" words and she picks them up or is showing them to us daily. She is obsessed with Dick and Jane and loves that there is a little girl Sally that is around her age in the books. I do think she may have used a bit of phonics when she was deciphering the difference between there and here. She knows all the sounds the letters makes but does not hear the word when she puts them together. I am one of the whole language readers and was never taught phonics and though I wish I knew it for sounding out words in those few times of reading publicly, I am not sure that I am missing much. I do think DD will get enough of it when she starts school and so I am considering her reading even though she is not doing it the phonics way.

Having had this discussion in various forms over the years, I have come to agree that all readers use phonics to some extent. Otherwise we could never even attempt a proper name we'd never seen, or scientific names. Some people may be faster at sounding out, but as fluent English readers, we all do it, by necessity. I think the whole-word vs. phonics thing is very relevant when learning, though. My DD didn't seem to do much via phonics at all and suddenly started reading quite fluently at almost 5--she went from her first book read to me ever, The Cat in the Hat (rapid, barely missed a word) to easy chapter books in a few months. If she didn't know a word, she would often skip it or guess. DS has been much more phonics-based and went through the phase of sloooowlyy...sssound-ing...o...ut eachhhh w...or...duh, which DD never did. But he learned earlier--it clicked for him faster (he is probably able to decode on a 2nd grade level now, at 4). Maybe DD was storing up sight words all that time.

Attempt is the word here.

Phonics are of use as long as your spoken/heard vocabulary bank exceeds your read vocabulary bank. I think that after a while most people in modern societies end up learning most vocabulary through the written medium, making phonics... less useful as they gain experience?.

I have been told repeatedly that I am a highly atypical sample of one, but I do believe that most people might sound out new words for use in spoken conversation (I don't) but retain the shape of the word along with the pronunciation, and that experienced readers do shape recognition rather than sounding out. All those viral emails/posts going round with the letters shuffled around or replaced with numbers, right?

My mother tongue uses a rather idiosyncratic alphabetic writing system -- not as bad as English (http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j17/caos.php#caos for anybody who believes there is any solid logic to English phonics), but much less straightforward than, say, modern Spanish or the Japanese syllabic system. I was never taught English phonics, and muddling through on my own I managed to acquire a large amount of vocabulary I can use in writing but cannot pronounce properly -- and you wouldn't believe how rarely some of those words come up in daily conversation, even after living in the US for over 10 years.

From the link above, my opinion on the (complete lack of) logic of English spelling:

I remember when DS started to recognize some words I got really interested in the what-is-reading discussion. I found in Exceptionally Gifted Children, a Miraca Gross book, a discussion of this. She says,

"...let me explain what I mean by 'reading'. A young child who is shown the picture of a cat with 'cat' written underneath, and responds by saying the word, is not necessarily reading. She may be responding to the pictorial clue, rather than decoding the word. It is only when the child is able to recognize and pronounce the word 'cat' in another conext, with no pictorial clue to assist her, that we can be sure that she is responding to, and analysing, the collection of printed symbols which make up the word 'cat' rather than the picture of an animal with which she is well familiar. Therefore, for the purposes of this study, reading is defined as the ability to decode and comprehend more than five words from a a printed sournce without the use of pictures as textual clues."

Gross goes on to say that her definition is "more cautious" than that used by many in studies of early readers.

Her definition is more inclusive than I would have guessed myself, I would have thought a typical definition would be reading and understanding a short emergent reader type book with perhaps a short sentence per page.

Her description is the only definition I've seen given in print by anyone studying gifted kids, curious if others have come across other well known gifted experts' definitions.

Polly

Question:

DD(26 months) keeps pointing to words when I am reading asking "what is that word? That one?". I tell her and later when reading another book she will get excited and say "mom that is ____!!!".
So my concern... Is this teaching her how to read? Will this screw her up for phonics? She does know every letter sound, but has yet to attempt to sound out a word.
Thoughts??

It is IMO always OK to teach as much as they want to learn. She'll probably learn phonics later when she takes up spelling. Only from what I've read (I don't know) I think teachers nowadays prefer to teach reading by the whole word method but to teach spelling by the "sound it out" rather than memorize that way they can see which phenomes the kids are hearing.

I wouldn't call Gross' definition reading. My DD had over 20 sight words when she was under two (some of which I taught her because she was into it for a while). But she couldn't read. A small collection of sight words (5??? 5 is nothing!) is not reading, in my book.

I wanted to address GHS's question. To me, your daughter is asking and you're answering her which you should definitely do (I always did this with my DD but I didn't put her through a program). And of course that's teaching but more like facilitating since your DD is in the lead.

My DD learned to read in huge leaps and bounds and my mother was always concerned about phonics (for a couple of years she'd always said "but she'll have gaps...you have to watch for gaps...) so she got me the type of workbooks you can grab at B&N or where ever. (You can look at all the brands and types and see what you like. Every time she'd come to visit my mother picked out ones that were organized by the sound blends etc. She taught my older sister to read back in the day and my whole family are those breathe-it-in type readers and all have super vocabularies so I guess I trust them.

For the most part my DD seemed to magically know all this stuff and when I'd periodically "check her for gaps" with the books she didn't realy seem to have any. It certainly wouldn't hurt to think about this in the future for your child, and if she gets a teacher that starts telling you she couldn't know this and couldn't know that, you will have alot of confidence to advocate.

A side note...there are lots of online and DVD things but my mother isn't from that generation so that's not what she picked out. Anyway I didn't like my DD with too much electronic time back then because it seemed to make her a bit hyper.

This is all my opinion and advice looking back, and if you have concerns this is a nice low-pressure way to make sure there aren't any gaps.

p.s. for where DD (8) is now, I still can't detect any significant phonics gaps and at school she still doesn't appear to be challenged.

Anyway, at home I try to make sure she is periodically reading books(in between the popular stuff the other kids are reading, within reason) that follow the "five-finger rule" so she is practicing stopping at words she's never seen before and trying to sound them out, understand their meaning and context. I insist on some classics in there, with the original writing so she has a higher chance of seeing words she's not encountered yet. Also if there is any dialect in a book I'll select it for that, since it's stretching horizons.

It's hard when they read young to find challenging books that are emotionally/socially appropriate, but it gets alot easier as they get older. Classics are great.

We also haven't stopped reading out loud to her, she still loves this, and listen to audio books on road trips.

I don't see any gaps in my DD's reading ability, either (she's also 8), and she was definitely quite whole-word in her approach. She is a phenomenal speller, too. Whatever her approach is, it hasn't led to any problems whatsoever. I have zero concerns about gaps. In any case, she suffered through plenty of phonics at school.

If you see that your child truly cannot sound out words, that's a concern. I think that's relatively rare, though.

opps! wrong post! sorry!

My dd learned to read without instruction. She started memorizing books at 11 months old...storybooks not the one word per page type books. She would "read" the words on the page even if we skipped around to different pages out of order. She began reading CVC type words around 2yo while playing games with magnetic letters. She seemed to lose interest in going any further after awhile but still loved being read to and memorizing the books. At 3.5 she brought me the Little House in the Big Woods we'd been reading together and said she's do the reading and she read fluently with no difficulty on any of the words, proper inflecting, and using voices for the quotes.

I think she was a whole words reader but she also could sound out. She's a natural speller and if she happens to get a word incorrect, just needs to see it once to always spell it right. I used a spelling program for her with words listed according to phonics rules but she never spelled anything wrong so we stopped doing spelling.

I considered it reading when she was reading new words ie. when she brought me that Little House book and read it. The memorization and sounding out CVC type words were pre-reading skills (emergent reader) but not what I consider "reading."

I agree with that, although it doesn't necessarily have to be a fourth grade level book, lol.

My DD started out as a wholly phonics driven reader (she didn't ask what does that word say. She asked what do these letters say together, etc.) But, it was not until she figured out how to accumulate a sight word memory that she really started reading books.

Now she seems to take a more holistic approach to reading. I can tell she will sometimes look at the first couple of sounds and makes educated guesses using context. She also does the same thing as annette's DS. And, I know she is glancing ahead at the text before reading it out loud. If a word in a sentence is unfamiliar she pauses at the beginning of that sentence rather than the word, figures it out, then reads the sentence from the beginning. And, when she really has to, she will sound out a whole word, although I think she has begun to think that reading should be automatic. So, while she started out on the phonics end of the spectrum she seems to have found her way towards the sight end.

I guess I think there are a lot of skills needed to read (as donnapt describes,) and you really should be able to use them all, and when really young kids teach themselves how to read, no matter where they start, they will figures that out. It is also my opinion that when they are reading so young (self-taught,) you should not interfere and just let them do what they want to do, however they want to do it.

Yes, I am sure my dd learned to read with sight words from memorizing but she also associated letters with sounds because she knew all her letters by 18 months old as their sound from Leap Frog letter factory. I think she started reading before she actually called letters their names rather than by their sounds. LOL

True, it doesn't have to be a 4th grade level book for it to be reading. It could just as easily be Dr. Suess or Little Bear or something even simpler but we just seemed to skip that stage around here. dd had all the picture books we owned memorized so even if she were reading them, I didn't give her credit for that. LOL

I agree.

These kids are "weird."

Less than 1 month ago, DS can't read a single word. Now he knows 60+ words and spelling them. His favorite activity now is spelling with magnetic letters.

The definition of reading is: "to gain meaning from text" which means that recognising a MacDonald's sign and understanding that that is a place you can go to to eat hamburgers would be reading even if the child had no knowledge of letters whatsoever.

It also means that a child could decode the entire Declaration of Independence and sound fluent while "reading" it but get no meaning from it whatsoever and therefor NOT be reading.

My daughter knew a good many sight words well before her second birthday, could read sentences with sight words by 2.5 years old and was decoding cvc words before 3. However she only began reading beginner readers at around 3 years of age and now at 4.5 she is able to read almost any picture book and knows almost every phonics rule. (she doesn't like book without pictures yet though she will listen to me read them and she does not have the stamina for chapter books yet) I don't know what I would say if someone asked me when she started reading - I'd probably ask them what they meant first.