I wouldn't be too concerned by a child not sounding out words - my son detests doing this & had similar issues, even though he could identify the starting letter of a word easily enough. Beyond that - he has taught himself to read and is probably around Grade 3 level (he is 5). I never really heard or saw him sound out words - though he'll often test himself on things like like secretly - even as a baby, he would coo and babble incessently when alone in the room, but not when someone walked in. I'm sure he did learn phoncis - some at Montessori and from TV (Sesame Street etc). The environment we provided included the Leap Frog ball with letters, phonic sounds and music. It's the only Leap Frog device I got for him as I try to steer away from video games, computer and TV, especially as he has grown older. However, keeping a radio or TV on from birth helps children to learn a language so we did that and always had the subtitles on. He didn't pay much attention to the Leap Frog ball at 11 months, but really became fascinated probably around 15-16 months and pressed the buttons over and over. We still have sub-titles on the TV all the time, and around age 3, he started reading an early reader that was about a Grade 1 level and I couldn't believe what he knew already. The subject of the book was based on a show he watched a great deal on DVD, again with subtitles and "story book" sections that highlight words in the story on the screen. I spent sometime with him on the computer around Age 2 using "cat" and "bat" phonic type exercies on a really old fashioned computer game - it was obvious he didn't "totally get it". By age 4, he was completely fluent at reading without any further help from us. I was shocked. I appreciate all the comments from parents in this section, and others about allowing your child to fail / not giving them an answer - but telling them "just try, give it a shot". I did this last night when trying to get him to "compose" his own writing. I had to keep asking him "well, what would that word look like if you were reading" - because he struggles a little to correlate what I know he can read with actually spelling it and writing it down on paper. He seemed scared to get it wrong, and really happy after getting it right or "almost perfect". My son will still sometimes say "Oh, you just read it" - and I figure that is becasue he is scared and frustrated by the words he gets stuck on, and also because he learns by watching me read. However, it has always frustrated him if I point at words, or read at a slow pace that I would consider reasonable for most toddlers/young children. I've read to him since before he was a year old, and even then, he used to like us to turn the pages really fast, especially when doing single letter pages such "A, B, C". We never even got around to using his Phonics set - because it occurred to me last year, he could read every book in the set without any further "schooling". Also thanks MamaBear for some great pointers - I think I can use those to help my little one read the "harder books" which are intimidating him as he kept on saying "too many words" and he has eye sight issues and wears a patch to correct his alignment too. It might also help with the written composition. Spread the words out on the page.
