Like others here have posted, IMO, the focus should be on literacy.
Its absence almost certainly WILL be used to deny advanced placements.
Fasten your seat belt, though!
Learning to read is (was for my DD and I, at least) the fundamental bootstrap loader for pretty well everything else learned subsequently. Once your child gets it their ability to move forward hits rocket like acceleration (remember the seat belt).
For my DD her memory and abilities to glean context from the accompanying pictures and other cues allowed her to fool us into thinking that she could read earlier than she actually could. She was that good. LOL.
She had could sight read a lot of individual words and knew her 'letter sounds' but she needed a push to sound out the letters to pronounce the actual words. It took a very intense (for the both of us) 2 hour session one Saturday morning when she was about 6 or so when I gave her an entirely novel book and was horrified to learn that she couldn't read it.
I spent the time during those 2 hours to get her to sound out the words based on latter sounds and also the basic 'combination letter sounds' like 'st', 'th', 'ou' etc as we encountered them in the book. I felt like Dr Mengele and pushed through the tears to the sunlight and rainbows on the other side. Whole universes of knowledge now lay at her feet!
Within weeks she was tearing through Harry Potter, the Magic Treehouse, Geronimo Stilton and books on Egyptology, Astronomy etc with joy. The rapidity with which she cannoned through books was stunning.
I had been taught the same way by a relative myself as a kid with similar results (my story was a bit more complicated in that I actually learned and then forgot how to read but relearned it this way).
I thought that I had cracked the code to being the Uber Teacher until later I discovered that my DD was DYS material and that the talent was hers not mine LOL.
Last edited by madeinuk; 07/15/14 04:08 PM. Reason: tidied up mobile device original
