Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Still not reading.....?

Doubtfulguest, you make a good point about the early readers. If you've been eating up Diana Wynne Jones and Frances Hodgson Burnett as read alouds or audiobooks, Barbie easy readers are kinda depressing.

Your daughter is not late learning to read. ....One thing that I try to remind myself is that my twins will not be ahead in learning everything, but probably will master the subject more quickly once they start learning.

One of my twins taught himself to read at age 3; but the other didn't learn to read until he was 5.5 yrs old. He is quite a perfectionist, and wouldn't let us teach him at all, but started "reading" the Bob books to himself around that age. He wanted to learn by himself, just as his brother did, LOL, and couldn't be told otherwise.

When he was learning to read, he would just push himself through sounding out the words, alone, after he went to bed. When K started, he could sound out simple words, but that was it. Our K program really focuses on teaching reading, and once he started school, his reading skills progressed extremely quickly.

He can now read better than he thinks he can, though, as he will only read lower level easy reader books unless he is extremely interested in the topic. He thinks Frog and Toad has "too many words" but is reading Star Wars level 4 readers which are much more difficult.

He has chosen quite an assortment of different leveled books to read this summer for his summer reading, which is fine with me. As the summer has gone on, he has started to read "harder" books. And his twin, who can read at least middle school level, also enjoys the picture books written for their age groups. One minute he will be reading Dr. Seuss, but his next choice might be a science encyclopedia written for eighth graders.

Try to find a book series which really interests her. It took us reading "Captain Underpants" to get my early reader interested in reading fiction books, which was important because that is what the schools use to test comprehension. My boys both love Dr. Seuss. His books are easy to read, but seem to be more "clever" than most of the easy readers.

I'll chime in with another "she's not a late reader" post! Neither of my kids were "early" readers (in the sense that they were reading in preschool or before). And I didn't learn until I was 6yo. Not all gifted kids are early readers.

When DD was 5.5 she was still sounding a lot of words out and going very slowly. Now, a couple of months past turning 6, she can read a "Henry and Mudge" or "Mr. Putter" book with no problem (and has told me that they're getting too easy. Oh how I'll miss them!) It has really snowballed, but it was a slow start.

When DS was in kindergarten, he would insist (at home) that he couldn't read, or that certain books were too hard. I mentioned this to his teacher one day, and she told me, no, in fact he was reading at level E (or something like that). So for his-favorite teacher-in-the-world he would read, but not at home (either because of perfectionism, or because he knew I'd read to him and his sister no matter what). Is there another adult (or older child) she looks up to who can ask her to read?

Along the perfectionism lines, some libraries have a program where they bring in dogs for kids to read to. If she is feeling inhibited by perfectionism, that might be something to try.

It could be that you don't see many posts about normal or late readers because, well, there's nothing to post about. Early reading is often a sign of giftedness, so you see a lot of posts along the lines of "my child started reading magazines at 30mo, could he be gifted?" or "I knew my kid was gifted when he started reading what was on my laptop while in his highchair."

(FWIW, both my kids were in a Montessori preschool, which was heavy on the reading academics. If any of it stuck, they certainly kept it a secret until many months after leaving the school.)

Anecdotally, at least from several comments I've seen on this forum, the early readers are the ones who later turn out to be particularly strong in mathematics, rather than verbal skills. When tested at age 7, my early reading (at age 2) son was found to be PG in mathematics, but only MG in reading.

Gabalyn... you could have written this about my DS7! They sound remarkably similar.

Over 4 months, he went from essentially not reading to reading at the 5th grade level. In some ways, this doesn't surprise me. He's always been the kind of kid that wants to work out a whole bunch in his head first, and then later, when he "gets it," demonstrate competence as if he's been doing it for years. Learning to read has only been the most recent thing he's set his mind to.

FWIW, both my kids were very interested in reading/phonics/writing at age 4, and by 4 and a half or 5, knew all the letters and most of the sounds, and could recognize and write about half a dozen words, like their names, "mum", "dad", and "zoo"
But basically they started school at age 5 not really looking any different to anyone else. It wasn't until about 5 and a half they started pulling ahead, and were a year ahead by age 6.
By age 8 they're about 4 years ahead, and university level by 11. They're not especially mathematical.
So, not early readers, pretty much exactly on time readers, but then take off after that. Five and a half doesn't ring any alarm bells but it's great you're aware enough to jump on any problems if there are in fact any.

I wrote so many posts about this up till about 7 months ago. My DD was exactly the same, she's now reading Thea Stilton and eyeing up my Harry Potter. Basically she had it in her head that you read at 5. She couldn't really read at all when she started school, then it just clicked. She still had to go through all the levels (she wouldn't have been able to read Harry Potter in June) but each level was about 2 days.

One thing that really helped was making her do the practise books school sent home and also a lightly worded activity book that we just flat out refused to help her with. The first 4 weeks were meh, then wow.

I think there is something visual about early reading, or the decoding aspect of it is very non-verbal in the same way that math might be. DS learned to read practically before he could talk, and learned effortlessly. He didn't seem to even care about reading. He was tested at age 6 on the WISC and his PRI was in the 140's (verbal ability a lot lower). Now at age 8 he is still a strong reader but doesn't stand out the way he does in math. He is accelerated 3 years in math.

Anyway, to the OP...I think that most gifted kids who are exposed to phonics and blending sounds will pick up on basic reading at age 5, although I'm sure there are differences in development. I would definitely keep an eye on it if you don't see a lot of progress in the next year, in case there is a reading disability.

I would agree that there is a strong visual component to early reading. I've found that quite a lot of NVLD students were first identified as reading disabled, but then "catch up" and even surpass in reading, but hit a wall in mathematics as they leave elementary (when math changes over from a vocabulary exercise (learning math facts--at least the way we teach it in North America) to an abstract reasoning task). The early years of reading instruction are focused on "learning to read", which is partly a symbolic exercise, much like higher math. Once fluency is attained, instruction switches over to "reading to learn", where reading is about language and communication, and now favors verbal learners.

I would agree that most GT kids with decent exposure to phonemic awareness activities will pick up reading on schedule or early. If there is a reading disability, it is likely to show up as subtler deficits in reading fluency and comprehension (secondary to fluency). Though, of course, classic dyslexia can still occur even in quite gifted children.

Thanks for that contribution aeh - that's really fascinating!

Although the original poster is long gone, I'll throw in my two cents worth for current readers, as I can actually talk to both sides of this debate.

DS was a late reader, who wouldn't voluntarily pick up any kind of book, long after most of his friends were tackling Harry Potter. He refused to read, even though we were almost certain he could if he tried. Reading finally started in grade 1, when his teacher sent home a book to read every night (in a second language - he's in an immersion program). He zipped through his nightly book and their reading levels quite quickly and with little trouble, but still refused to read anything else voluntarily. Not until grade 2 did he actually read his very first-ever book in English (Wimpy Kid), followed by his second (Harry Potter, of course). His book report was on his favourite sections of his Encyclopedia of Science. I wouldn't say he really started to read by choice and for pleasure until grade 3 - when he became just as likely to be reading Stephen Hawking as Rick Riordan.

All this was very weird to me, an early read-a-holic (my own Mom says I came out of the womb with a book in my hand). But since it seemed more like a could-but-won't, we didn't push. By then, we had also gotten used to a clear pattern of total refusal followed by developmental leaps - won't, won't, won't, mastery. And he certainly loved books - from about 18 months, he was insatiable, and had me read to him for 3 - 5 hours a day. At the time, we suspected that he might simply refuse to read until he was capable of handling the kinds of long, complex chapter books he liked to listen to - easily 5 years or more beyond his age.

So when his younger sister also refused to read, I just kept waiting for that magic day when suddenly she too would be happily devouring encyclopedias. And so, I waited way too long. But her daily readers from school were a nightmare, and she fought them harder and harder, and though she seemed to progress there were all sorts of weirdnesses about it (which I have detailed at length in other posts) that we should have been paying a lot more attention to. Eventually, between grade 2 and 3, we discovered DD is dyslexic, and since, have realized DH and his family is just rampant with previously-unrecognized dyslexia.

Now, when DS was young, I knew nothing about giftedness, and nothing about dyslexia or reading. If I knew then what I know now, I would have been freaking about about DS's reading. 99.9th VCI but won't read in grade 2? And lots of weird red flags, too. For instance, he would always make me read all the people's names, even when they were simple. He would always tell me he couldn't read even when I knew he could, and explain, "Mommy, I'm not reading, I've just memorized the words," and I'd just laugh, and say "silly, that's what reading is!" In retrospect, I realize that he was telling me in no uncertain terms that he couldn't decode, he could only do sight words, but at the time it meant nothing to me. So was he just a late bloomer, gaining the developmental capacity to decode rather late? I suspect the more-explicit phonics and reading instruction he received by being in an immersion class was important for him; while he learned fast, I don't think he was "self-taught". Was he just too perfectionist to do less than 100% correct? Don't really know, but that may have been in there too. However, no amount of paranoid scrutiny since his sister's diagnosis has given me the slightest reason to think he too is dyslexic (while other, still-undiagnosed LDs are certainly affecting his ability to get ideas written down, his fluency, spelling and grammar are all excellent).

So, knowing what I know now - on one late reading-kid I would have been needlessly panicked, and he just needed time to grow into it. On the other, I waited too long, and left her in deep misery and anxiety, falling (unrecognized) much too far behind, creating a huge hurdle to get over when we finally started to remediate. These kids aren't always the easiest to figure out. My best advice? Follow your gut. If something feels wrong, it probably is. The biggest red flag, I think, is if something just feels *too hard*. Not that they can't do it, but it seems painful and miserable to do, even if they can. So while both kids avoided reading like the plague, there were some very different behaviours involved. With DS, it seemed like he could read, easily, but didn't want to. With DD, in contrast, it seemed like while she could read, it was horrifically hard, and the easy stuff never got easier. Again, with later-gained knowledge, I now realize that she just wasn't gaining any kind of automaticity. Over the course of grade 2, she took on harder and harder reading tasks, with enough success to satisfy her teachers, but the simple ones were never getting faster or more automatic.