Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school What's considered reading?

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.