Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Pre-school Teaching a toddler how to read...

We start K this year...I have my fingers crossed. I was a very creative story/art/imagination kid...my little scientist has thrown me for a loop!

I have wondered if my son had a photographic memory, too. It is so crazy how he knows a word after reading it once. He also can quickly find a specific page in a book that references something we discussed, even if he hasn't looked at the book in weeks.

On the other hand I don't think I hothouse because  I teach my son a little each day.  I think "hothouse"  would be more like working him  just to show him off.  I have seen it used a little differently on this forum, used to mean "work with them on a useful  skill".   I am trying to stay one step ahead of him and  I'm giving him an education.

I have mixed feelings here. My first child learned to read very early with very little help. I read to her every single day in two sessions. At some point I began to slide my finger under words as I read. Then she began to ask me how to spell words and I would write them down for her. She was two and a half or so then and could read hundreds upon hundreds of words before three with no program, no flashcards,no computer games etc. so I didn't really need to teach her, plus she didn't like to be taught. She is very independent. My other daughter is a different story. She is a very bright kid too, but has a different mind for reading. She is might even be better than my oldest is with letter sounds, and can sound words out, but her reading level is nowhere near my first child's was at 4, but that isn't a fair comparison since my first was very verbally gifted. The first would see a word once and "own" it. I think about working with my younger daughter on her reading, but she doesn't really want me to do it, so I just let it be. Compared to kids at her preschool, she is quite far ahead of schedule, but we have a warped perspective based on our first. If she were interested in having me write things down for her, or reading for me, I'd love to work with her and wouldn't think it was anything that was in any way harmful as long as it is in short sessions and isn't negative for her.

It seems to me "hothousing" is teaching or pushing your kids to do something they may not be developmentally able to handle. Couldn't that also mean the parent who works with his 6 year old on pitching two
hours a day? I absolutely see myself as my children's most important teacher. I have showed my DD2 letters the way my son always loved (writing them on magnadoodle)...but she prefers making her own "words". To me hothousing would be continuing to force her to learn the way her brother did.

Incidental story...how we discovered my son knew his letters: I came home from work to find my dh distraught. He said my ds was obsessing all evening,that dh should draw him an "a#s". It took us a few days to realize he wanted us to draw an "S", much to our relief.

What's confusing me is not the amount of time.  It's really not that much time and honestly less time than an average preschool.  It's that I am teaching him things I want him to know (handwriting, deciphering instructions).   I'm surprised how far some of it has gotten doing just a little each day.  Lessons add up quickly.  If I had never read about Hothousing I would have only thought I was teaching my child. 

I'm sure I sound all defensive.   I am nervous about what they're going to say when he starts school.   I worry that many people don't think it's cool to specifically teach little children academics.  I talked to the principal last year about early entry.  She said there are a lot of gifted kids (including her granddaughters) who could use an early entry.   I also know a teacher who taught her daughter to read before school.  I keep going back and forth wether I should be worried about this (perception) or not.  

I'm also confused now if this thread is looking for tips on what/how to educate a young child.  If so I just went off the rails again with my ping-pong game of Hothousing thoughts. I think it's because I know in two more months I'm going to take my son to school and I know that means my parenting decisions can be judged.  Since I've read about Hothousing and helicopter parents I know what some of those judgements might be even if they don't say them to me.  I just need to remember to listen with my ears and not assume I know what they are thinking.  

La Texican...

My experience is people will judge parenting no matter what: too lax = indifferent, too strict = totalitarian, too cuddly = indulgent, too loving = enmeshed.

Kids are not the just the sum of their parenting...thankfully (for my kids anyway).

Do what seems right for your kids and let the judgements roll right off.

Exactly. Your parenting practices are never going to get everyone's approval. Everyone is coming from different places. You can only do what you feel right for your child. Also, when someone does something different with their child, or recommends a different path than you have chosen, I don't think it is necessarily judgement on you. If I came off that way I sincerely apologize. Nobody has all the answers. There is no right and wrong. If there was, we'd all be doing the same thing. We are all just trying our best.

La Tex-- It sounds like you are now homeschooling a very bright 4.5-year-old. No worries, mate.

Thirded.

Also, people will rush to judgement based on ridiculously small sample sizes. If the first thing they learn about you is that you disciplined your child, you're an ogre. If it's that you allowed them to roller skate in the hallways, you're a derelict.

This is why I pay very little attention to other people's opinions.

LOL I won't be throwing the stone. I agree 100%

My kids aren't PG (possibly HG - I am HG and they are very similar).

Anyway, DD(now 9) coerced me into helping her learn to read when she was a toddler. She too, had the alphabet mastered at 16 months and didn't talk until 24 months (raging perfectionism, lol). She was driven, driven, DRIVEN to learn what these "things" were in books - she'd crawl after me, furniture walk after me, book in one hand... lol I'd try and hide (seriously - she was so non-stop). She point to something in the book and stare into my eyes, until I gave her a label for it. She was eerily quiet, but SO intense - she'd look INTO you, not at you.

Anyway. I had heard of these toddler programs and they kind of baffled me. "Why would anyone need that?"

A friend of mine with a "typical" son close in age once said to me "hey can you teach my son to read?" (DD and her son were about 3 at the time). I didn't know how to tell her that it wasn't ME who taught my daughter to read without offending her son's cognitive ability (which is perfectly fine and "normal"). I managed to steer the conversation on to something else...

We "taught" my daughter how to read.

LOL. Well, okay-- sort of.

We taught her, over a period of about 10 minutes a day, for a few weeks, how to apply the knowledge she already possessed (phonemic awareness of entire alphabet) to decoding.

We used these books, which came in a lovely boxed set:

Now I'm Reading, Playful Pals level 1 set (These were more appealing than Bob books for her-- better illustrations and more.. er... well, frankly? snarky story lines.

After that first set, there was no need to do anything more. She then picked out two sets of Clifford phonetically-controlled readers at the local bookstore (sets 2 and 3, I think). No worksheets, no drill, no nothing. Within a month of starting all of this she was reading silently to herself from those Clifford books and hauling them EVERYWHERE with her. They were a set like these--

Clifford's Phonics Fun set of 12 books

Honestly, her attitude about all of this was... a great deal of satisfaction.

She was just burning with a desire to read. For herself. Truly. The next thing that she ate up was Little Bear and Cam Jansen, quickly followed by Magic Treehouse. The sheer rate of progress was the best argument against this having been some kind of hothousing on our part.

That's the key thing, I think. I mean, DD was pretty pouty the first couple of times we worked with her-- she's a perfectionist, see, and 'teaching' a perfectionist anything is fraught with tears and sullen outbursts of "I caaaaaaannnnn't..." LOL. Once you understand that, and recognize that teaching "NOooooooo, you pick yourself up and TRY AGAIN" is just as important as anything else a child like that will ever learn.... well, it gives you a different take on the notion of hothousing entirely. How pushy is too pushy? Should we have let her give up and learn her own way (whole language, probably)? I think not.

This was a child whose rate of literacy development was superhuman, truly. She needed help to get going, but her momentum was entirely her own. Within a year, she was reading at (at least) a 6th-8th grade level, and within ~30 months, she was reading Shakespeare. The fact that school still wanted her to be completing "phonemic awareness" activities at that point in time is a little surreal, it's true... but I don't think that my 6yo should have had her ideal development stunted in order to make her fit into ND and standard teaching any better.

I also wholly believe that the trajectory that DD entered upon learning to read is simply not possible for a 'bright' or probably even a MG child. Validation after the fact, though, is probably not very useful in terms of self-reflection about whether or not something is 'hothousing' or whether it's harmful. I don't think that any parent can really know one way or the other until after the fact, there. I tend to think that hothousing is probably not harmful if it is child-led and conducted in a loving and developmentally sensitive fashion that doesn't exclude normal developmental 'work' for children.

Make no mistake, I'm not a fan of "smarter baby" crap. Not at all. We didn't use it with DD. We delayed the introduction of electronics, television (okay, when she had pnueumonia as a toddler and was VERY ill, we did use a few Teletubbies VHS tapes to keep her QUIET)... We even delayed the introduction of any kind of formal instructional tools until DD was about four and a half years old, which is quite late, given that she's probably PG. We just talked to her, read to her, and let her explore.

On the other hand, really very basic (phonetically-controlled readers, magnetic letters/number sets) tools to teach phonics and number sense? You bet we did-- at that preschool mark, once we could see that she was constructing her OWN method of learning it on her own. Because that is a foundation for relating (even autodidactically) to pretty much everything else up through high school level material. Having an understanding of the basic 'language' of standard pedagogy just made sense to both of us as educators. We'd have provided those things to ANY child of ours, regardless of what we interpreted that child's level of cognitive ability to be.