Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums Elementary School Grade 1 - typical reading skills

Most kids tend to read more in a monotone because they are working so much on decoding the words rather than thinking about what they are reading.

This is excatly what my DS said when I asked him what was going on. He read with beautiful expression, so was obviously scanning ahead. I think he kept losing his place and his eyes were jumping all over the page. Again, he did this less when reading books at the outer limits of his skill. I wonder, OP, does this problem vary with the difficulty level of the book, and how? DS's odd pattern (doing it more with easy books!) reassured me that it was a weird gifted thing.


That's very interesting. I have never known a child who did this. Most kids I know read basically in a monotone till they progress to fluency and then expression jumps. I feel like I can always tell an older child who is struggling with reading by the robotic read-aloud voice.

I'm not sure if this is what your child is doing or not, but for what it is worth. I used to be a professional actor. If you are doing a cold read (have never read the material before), you must scan ahead with your eyes while you are speaking text that comes before that. (You have to know the end of the sentence before you know how to phrase the beginning.) As an adult, I am a pretty good cold reader. However, it is very challenging to keep your place, and I often can finish without knowing the details of what I was reading--and that's as a well-read adult. You're juggling a lot of tasks and true comprehension is actually the least important.

Agree with the above. And as an over-the-top expressive bedtime reader myself, I find I often have to scan several lines ahead in order to figure out who the speaker is for dialog, so I know which voice to use.

My son is 5 and he definitely rereads until he gets it right. If he read with the wrong characters voice he reads it again the right way or if he started with a normal tone and realized it was actually a question he starts over. If he sees that it says the person yelled or screamed or cried something, it gets a very loud reread. He also starts any sentence again that didn't make sense (usually do to a reading error) or if he lost the meaning while working on a new word. He seems happy when he reads, not frustrated, so we figure all is good as far as wanting to read it just right goes.

dd reads expressively as well too. Very funny at times, def shouts when things are in capitals

So, DS just made a liar out of me - he stayed home from school yesterday with a stomach ache and when I came home he had read 20 pages of his Spirit Animals book _on his own_!

I think this is the first time he's done this, so maybe his reading is starting to take off.

Thanks for all the responses above - I can definitely see how reading aloud with expression would lead to looking ahead and then losing your place. So maybe that's all it is.

We're still going to do the visual assessment though - there are other quirky things he does that could be either DCD or visual (bumping into things, not finding items when looking right at them, etcetera).

That's interesting longcut - your DD sounds similar to my DS.

I can often convince him to read to me only if we agree to alternate pages (sometimes paragraphs - at his request).

He is supposed to read 20 minutes every day for homework and record on a log sheet, but this has been difficult to accomplish. (Although it's a bit better recently).