Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school letters vs. reading

My daughter received leapfrog's Fridge Phonics when she was 21 months old. At first we put all 26 (capital) letters up, but it seemed overwhelming for her to have so many. Then we put away all but A,B,C, and D, and let her know that she could earn new letters by demonstrating that she knew the ones she already had. (I'd quiz her on 3 or 4 of the ones she was having the most difficulty with, and if she got them all right she got another letter.)

I'm not sure of the timeline, but by her 2nd birthday she had earned all of her letters, and we bought her the Fisher Price Fun-2-Learn Color Flash laptop. She has learned all of her lower case letters from playing with that. It also has a focus on phonics, not just identification. I think that's a product she can definitely grow into, too. When she is able to use the mouse better, there's a game like pong, some mazes, and some counting activities.

I started her on starfall last night, and she asked for it again this morning. She almost cried when I had to turn it off to bring her to daycare on my way to work. I promised her we would play more when I got home. I learned about that site on this forum, so I'm thankful for the suggestion.

There are some i-pad apps that she's enjoyed as well. There was one she liked that would display several letters on the screen simultaneously, and ask the child to find a certain one. I think that was a good review for her.

We skipped the letter factory, but we have the Talking Words Factory, which is a leapfrog video for teaching phonics and building words out of letters... she'd rather watch Toy Story or Tangled though. For those types of entertainment-only videos, I started putting the subtitles on for her, and now she asks for that. Some children's videos don't have subtitles though.

This sounds an awful lot like my son. Could recognize and write his name very early, knew all the letters, and then wanted very little to do with letters or reading on his own until Kindergarten (he still wanted us to read to him all the time).

Now, he is a pretty mathy kid, but he is also very strong verbally. However, his interests have historically been much more focused toward math and science). We just kept reading to him (his preschool was not academic, much more social focus) a lot. I had some flashcard type things he wasn't interested in, so we never did them.

Lo and behold, within about a month of starting kindergarten he started reading (he could read a few basic things before that, cat, dog, etc. but not much, or not much that he let on), and he went from not reading to reading Magic Tree House type books in about two weeks, and just kept accelerating from there. The entire reading thing just popped - either he decided he was interested, or more likely, hit the right developmental spot for him, who knows?

He is very clearly a whole word reader - he still has a hard time with sounding out, and spelling is definitely not his strong suit (I was the exact same way, I don't remember learning to read, I just started to do it) - and it cracks us up when he can't connect a word he knows verbally with a word he is reading - can lead to some very funny questions ("Mom, can we take a trip to Yozmight some time?", "Where??", "You know, Yozmight, where Half Dome is", "Oh, you mean Yosemite. . .").

I have a DD6 who is an equally strong reader, but she sounds out everything, the complete opposite. Her spelling is amazing - it has been so interesting to watch the difference between their reading development, it is completely different, yet they are both equally strong readers. She started reading substantially earlier, but didn't have the same "pop," her progress has been much more steady.

Hard to know, but maybe your DS just has other things he would rather occupy his time with right now (and he sounds like a fun guy).

Cat

Hi Cat
OMG, we have those same conversations!!! Early on with magic treehouse, he was referring to a scorer, or scorerer which is how I kept hearing it. I even asked him to spell it from memory and he did pretty well,and I was able to figure out he meant sorcerer. He gets so annoyed, sometimes that he treats us like we are either hard of hearing or from another country, getting either louder or slower . . . I SAID . . . LOL on the other hand it's teaching great definitional skills as I often have to ask him to use it in a sentence!

DeHe

OMG this is me! I think DS1 might be a bit like that too. To this day I can read a book, and then realsie though I have read and enjoyed it, I don't know how to pronounce a main characters name!

I was astonished to learn, as an adult that there were "sight words". I thought all words were sight words! And then as we painstakingly taught my eldest to read I learned all these phonetic rules that I had never had any idea of - which really explained a lot!