Do you know of a resource that explains how children learn how to read? I can�t remember how I learned how to read. I know I read before kindergarten, but I�m not sure how or at what age. I have a hard time remembering what I did this morning.

I can�t figure out what DS is doing now. I�m used to him memorizing books and �reading� them to us, or recognizing words associated with symbols (e.g., the red Target circles). However, recently he�s �read� words I�ve never introduced to him in any context (e.g., coffee). How do they (kids) do that? It�s not really reading is it?

I can't answer your question, but it makes me think of another piggyback question. I have heard that the phonics that they teach in many schools sometimes confuse the GT kids who were reading before kindergarten, because they learned how to read differently. I'm thinking that the kids who "teach themselves to read" do something more akin to memorizing words.

Anyone else heard that phonics messes with the early readers?

And Ann -I would say that if your child "reads" something new and out of context, then yes, that's a form of reading. It always surprised me when my child, who was with me pretty much 24/7, would read a word that I knew wasn't in any of the books we had read. Who knows how they do it, but they do it!

I actually used a book "How to Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons" with Pud starting when he was about 3 1/2. He was desperate to read - in tears at rest time because he couldnt read the words in his book. He was reading about halfway through the book but I made him finish the book for the foundation.

He has done Saxon Phonics in 1st grade this year and it did confuse him, in addition to being terribly boring. Things like not being able to read "cape" vs "cap". When I asked to exempt him from the work, I was told that he needs to master phonics to help him with his spelling. I totally do NOT understand how phonics helps anybody who is already reading. The Saxon Phonics people even say it is for remedial or non-reading use. His school also uses it in 2nd grade. I just never saw a value in worksheet after worksheet of making little marks over letters.

By the way, what has helped him with spelling more was what a friend told me (she's a teacher and a dyslexia therapist): every syllable has to have a vowel, that's why "y" is sometimes considered a vowel. That makes great sense to me. After I told him that, he no longer spelled "turtle" as "trtl". He doesn't always get the right vowel but he does get the vowels in there.

As for kids who read on their own, I have no idea how that happens, even though I did it when I was 3. Common wisdom in my family is that I was just copying what my K sister did. I don't remember not knowing how to read.

For us, dd learned to read the same way she learned to speak. She simply did. No phonics or instruction, I simply exposed her to lots of books and we read daily and then one day I discovered she knew how to read.

really interesting question! We exposed my DS5 to print as early as I can remember by just making it available - we never "taught" him we just answered his questions or played silly word/letter/sound games while driving in the car.... we knew he was visual from pretty early on and I labeled everything in the house...it looked pretty silly to visitors that we had labels on everything from the sink to the front door but he loved it and he could read environmental print by 2 years old, was reading words out loud to us that he saw everywhere when he was 3 and was reading from books by about 3.5. We question the same thing...he seemed to learn by osmosis as we like to joke - he was a sponge and just took everything in and next thing we knew he knew all his letters and sounds and figured out how to read all on his own. He can hear/see a word one time and he knows it. I was worried that he hadn't learned phonetically but he seems to be doing fine...he does the same thing...we will be reading along and I will see a word coming up that i am convinced he doesn't know and whamo he surprises me by reading it with no issue. I was also a very early reader and my dad said the same thing - it just was :-)

DS never sat with us when we read to him; he was always moving. He learned to read while moving. DS started by "reading" an exit sign at 23 months. Then he moved on to logos, then he pointed and said "What does that say?" at every sign on the commute to daycare. Then he started correcting me if I read him the wrong sign, "no, not the speed limit sign the one that starts with 'next exit.'" Then, "Why does that sign say 'no admittance. employees only?'" He must have picked up some reading skills figuring out how to operate a computer because he didn't ask me what any of the menus said after we had been through them once. And then he read the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe the summer before Kindergarten. I have no idea how he learned to read. Except as Belle says, he only needed to be told a word once and it was in. It is the same as I teach him to read Spanish.

It is weird how the can read things they haven't been exposed to. I was making DS read me an article for an Asian history class I am taking. I was behind in my reading and paid him to read to me while I was driving. He would come to a Japanese word (but in letters, not kana), pause for a second, change accent and say it perfectly. He doesn't know Japanese; he never saw these words before; the pronunciation rules are different. How in the world did he know how to do that?1? Frankly, it scares me!

My kids both learned the letter sounds first. But mostly they don't sound out words, the letters seem to be clues that help them infer the right word from context. I think this is true because they can read complicated words in context that they stumble over in isolation. DS can also read Spanish even though he doesn't speak more than a few words of it. His pronunciation is excellent--I think he picked it up at preschool from one of the teachers' aides.

I think phonics is of limited use in English because of all the exceptions. Adults don't read by phonics anyway. We read by word recognition.

You may have seen this before:


DD9 can read that passage fluently and easily. She is clearly not using phonics to do so.

DS5 started reading about a year ago. Prior to that he loved rhyming words. He would spend all day coming up with words that rhyme and then writing them down on paper. One evening during our story time he corrected me when I was reading. He was able to read the rest of the very short book to me. I then bought a few Step 1 readers and the first time through a book was rough but after I told him how to pronounce a word the first time he has never not known how to read it afterwards.

Right now he is comfortably reading the Magic Tree House series. On occasion he comes across a word he doesn't know--he either uses simple phonics to attempt to read it or he just asks me and I tell him. The next time the word comes up there are no issues.

My DD (almost 4) is just starting to recognize some print. Last night I took out the same book the older DS first read and she was able to read a few of the repetitive words. Otherwise she just made the story up by looking at the pictures and called it reading. I give her another 6 months before it just clicks.

I've read that very early readers are whole-word/sight word readers. My 2nd grader definitely had an intuition about phonics as he could read words he had never seen before. I think that once he sounded out a word once or maybe twice, he got it so he may have looked liked a whole-word reader but I don't think overall that he was. He wasn't a precociously early reader though - I think starting about 4yrs old.

My 2nd son, sounded out words like cat, hat and read his first Bob book at 2yrs3-6 months or so but he was definitely using phonics which I had not taught him.

So I think kids can intuitively get phonics w/out explicitly being taught even at young ages.

I've also read that pure sight readers hit a wall at some point (about 2nd grade or so) when the words get harder and more phonics is required. I think many kids don't hit this wall and intuitively grasp phonics early on.

DD3.5 now, has hit the wall. She sounded out a word (Dollar) when we were out when she was 2.5 and she can just sight read, but it isn't consistent. And she could sound out words, but she seems confused now and why I say hit the wall.

She expects to sight read and although she is fully capable of slowly sounding out a word, I ask her what the first letter is when she is having trouble and she says it and then expects the rest to pop into her head. She is having trouble of actually sounding out the words. She wants the fast answer. So she was actually reading better a few months ago.

Ren

I haven't found that to be the case with my dd (pure sight reader). She is 8 years old and she is at the very least at 8th grade level in reading. Most big/complex words are nothing more than compound words. If you know how to read two simple words, and they now appear together than you can read the new word as well.

I taught my first child to read phonetically because that is the way I was taught to read. She new all her letters and sounds for about 6 months before the magic switch went off in her brain and she truly understood the concept of reading words. Once she grasped the concept of reading she progressed quickly by memorizing words (whole reading) on her own. I believe it was beneficial for her to learn the process of phonetics, which was extremely helpful as she picked up her second language. She is prodominantly a whole reading reader and scored an abysmal 50% on the vowel phonetics section of her Stanford achievement test. Yet as a 3rd grader she is reading The Lord of the Rings for pleasure.

My second child learned to read a little later due to some vision and hearing problems. I also taught her phonetically but a friend of mine let her borrow some Dick and Jane books (whole reading). Once she started reading the Dick and Jane books her reading really took off.

The latest trend in literacy education is called Balanced Literacy. It is a combination of phonics and whole reading. As I discovered by accident, it is beneficial to introduce both types of reading to children.

Wren: Well, it's a process, and it isn't linear.

She may just be developing some other skill right now, and sometimes that shift means that some skills seem to languish for a while. She'll get back to it when she's ready, and she'll gain back what she seems to be lacking now and then some. Think spiral, not straight line. Ebbs and flows.

I'd let her decide if she wants to read. Don't push her. She may be working on something else, and that's okay.

Both my kids are pure sight readers also. They use context clues and vocabulary skills, in combination with length and the first syllable of unfamiliar words to figure them out. Since they have excellent visual memories, once they see a word, it is recognized easily from that point on, although recall of exact spelling is more difficult.

I'm fascinated by your personal experiences and the minds of your wee ones. This was an interesting thread for me to read this morning. I would still like someone from this group to write a book on our collective experiences. It would make a good gift for different types of people in my life. Sorry for the selfishness. ;-)

I think kids move very quickly to sight reading. I don't even know if the distinction is really valid. I did give DS one of those non-sense word tests and he didn't do as well as I thought he'd do. he reads words in context extremely well etc and decodes when he needs to.

I saw reference to a study at the SWR yahoogroup. The study was done in ENgland. Kids who read well and spell well use the same part of the brain for both but kids who read well and spell poorly use different parts of their brain. I'd love to get my hand on the original research!

Working my way backwards through this thread...



I once had someone argue that my DS6 wasn't really reading when he was 3yo because he didn't sound things out. "He just memorized the word and recognizes it when he sees it," she said.

Well, um, yeah! Isn't that the goal? I don't sound out every word I see! Most of them, I just know! Am I not reading?

I'm no reading expert, but I think there are a number of different ways to come to reading. Different kids require different strategies depending upon how they learn.

Even the pattern recognition stuff, I thik is reading. Unless they sometimes forget what they've memorized, I think memorization that can be applied in other contexts is reading. I mean, I don't somehow divine the inner truth of a word or something. I just have it committed to memory. I know it! That's reading.

Ann, I'd say that yes, what your son is doing is reading. If he knows the word--however he knows it--and he can recognize it and understand it when he sess it in other contexts, well, that sounds like reading to me!

I think sometimes we parents of HG+ kids try to persuade ourselves that what our kids are doing doesn't count. ANy other parent would count those things as reading! In fact, I think any other parent would count a lot of earlier stuff as reading! Honestly, I think this is GT denial running rampant!

Good points Kriston. You help bring me back to center when I wander off into the forest of GT denial. Last night DH told me that DS appeared to read something a couple of weeks ago, but he dismissed it as impossible. DH thinks DS is somewhat bright, but not particularly different from other children. The only way DH will buy into it is if he has test data on DS. However, I did note a little surprise on DH's face when DS read some text out of a book that neither one of us had read to him before.

Part of the confusion DS's teacher has is that DS appears bright but he behaves poorly. I may be reading DS's teacher wrong, but she implies that a smart kid wouldn't act the way DS does (i.e., he would behave better/older). Shrug.

I was deeply in GT denial about my whole family until the girls were tested. I think an evaluation from a professional can really help a GT denial person put things in perspective.
I highly support the eval.

I wouldn't put too much weight in the teacher's comment. I've found that most teachers think of gifted children as those who fall into the moderately gifted range. HG and plus are a whole different ball of wax. Most teachers don't have clue.
It's hard to describe what a yellow bellied sneetch looks like if you've never actually seen one. KWIM

Bah. Behavior and intelligence have virtually nothing to do with one another. And you can tell that teacher I said so!

LOL! Good explanation - I'll give you credit when I quote you!

LMAO! I wish you could come with me today Kriston.

Uhhhh....just don't say it exactly like that to the director or teacher........yet.

Oh, no you don't!

I am not good at those confrontations. Analysis and play-by-play, I'm there for you. But the people stuff--oh, no! I'm terrible at it!

I'm sure you'll do great. You have the benefit of our collective wisdom (such as it is! LOL!) combined with your own intelligence, experience and winning personality. You'll do great!

I wish I could come!! I eat that stuff up!!

Tee hee - I'm so grateful for you guys. Based on my conversation with DS's teacher yesterday, one of the questions I'm anticipating in our parent/teacher conference is whether I think DS should be bumped up to an older class. This is where I get that confused emoticon look on my face. How am I supposed to know if he needs to be bumped up? Because I'm not with DS at school, it's hard for me to weigh all the variables.

I strongly recommend that you decide what you want and pursue it though. The squeaky wheel and all that...

If you are indecisive, you will be sure to get no accomodations!

Here here! Just say something like: Well, what is he expected to learn this year and does he already know it? Has he already mastered what he needs to in order to be promoted.
Short, simple, reasonable. Then, they'll give you what you need in terms of how they view a gradeskip for him, what they think he already knows and maybe even expose their philosophy on gradeskipping in general.
Dottie gives great advice. Be non-committal. It is reasonable to say: Let me think that over and I will get back to you.

And remember, anything you suggest can be done, "on a trial basis" for a set time and then people can reassess. Sometimes this seems less scary to all involved.

True, there must be understanding of the meaning. Good point. I think I implied that, but didn't state it very explicitly.

But decoding + comprehension = reading in my book!

So here's a question: Do you think that gifted kids learn to read differently than ND kids or just sooner (on average)?

My gut says differently, but I can't point to anything specific to say why except my experiences.

I read when I was 3, and I can't remember not reading. It just always seemed to be part of me. DS7 seems much the same. He wanted to read before he could sit up by himself. We have a picture of him holding a book and examining it with intense interest when he was supported by a Boppy. He would bounce when he wanted us to turn the page because he wasn't coordinated to do it himself yet. He taught himself his letters when he was just a few months past 1yo. Reading seemed in his blood, and it was as if his body just had to catch up.

OTOH, DS4 isn't 100% sure of all his letters yet. He certainly isn't as interested, so maybe that's part of it, but it also just seems less natural, less a part of him.

He might be GT, too. He's very verbal and taught himself to write practically overnight, so my comparison may be flawed. But it does seem like there's a difference between my early reader and my not-early reader.

What do you think, Cathy?

I'm not Cathy, but I'll jump in! Like you, I always remember reading, but I don't think I was three, probably more like 4. Definately before K. K wasn't my year! DD8 taught herself around 4. She definately started with phonics and I would guess whole word reading came a little later.
DD5 seemed to sight read at three, but it never developed into anything. I showed her how to sound the word out, she demonstrated that she could a little, but never really was interested in doing it.
Flash forward to now, she has been whole word reading only. She asks what a word is then it's memorized. She was reading by memorization only. She definately knew what she was reading, just did not attempt to sound anything out. And she is not spelling like DD8 was at this age and I wonder if it's because she doesn't understand phonics. I mentioned before the girls go to Score and they suggested that DD5 use Headsprout and told me she would learn phonics. I did feel it was important for her to understand how it(phonics) works. After 4 or 5 times on the program, she just starts sounding out words, it just clicked. They want her to move out of it, but I want her to finish just to solidify it for her.
Consequently, I'm not sure in the GT crowd the early reading factor can necessarily translate into levels of intellligence.
I've just been told by the psyd. that specialized in GT kids that he know believes that C-dog is more intelligent than older sis. He's supposed to be the best guy around here, so I won't second guess it. However, if he is right and she was screwing around the first time, I may have him attempt to re-test with the WISC or SB. Currently the school is using C-dog's lower score as a reason they can't accomodate her to the extent they accomodate big sis.
So yes, I think I can say with some certainty that younger sib can definately be a hider. Although, perhaps they are just intelligent in different ways.

This "intuitive grasp of phonics" must have been what my son used. He is adept at using his intuition for other things so this makes sense.

At 2 1/2, when there was no denying that my son was reading on his own, without having been taught, I remember looking online for a reading test of some kind. I was very curious about how well he could read. I remember that I found an online test that showed pictures of things, for example a log, and the child was supposed to choose between three words for the word that matched the picture. He was able to do this and he was able to identify some words that were spelled out for him, so he had to have some kind of intuitive grasp of phonics. This was before he started watching Between the Lions.

I did read to him with my finger underneath the words, so I think that might have helped him learn to read, but I did the same thing with my daughter when she was 2 1/2 and she didn't start reading until she was four and she didn't have the vision problem that he had. His comprehension was also at a higher level than hers at that age because he has always wanted to know the exact meaning and different meanings of words that he didn't know. He says he has always been a word nerd and that is how he talked me into buying the book Word Nerd at our recent trip to Barnes & Noble when I thought we already found too many books. At least they gave us a homeschool discount.

I wish I could ask my mother questions about how I learned to read and when. I know that she didn't seem that surprised when my son started reading at 2 but she wouldn't tell me why. I think my younger sister read very early, after I started school and started bringing home books. I remember my mother telling me that my sister ( 2 1/2 years younger) cried and couldn't understand why she couldn't go to school when I started. They didn't have preschool available back then.

I know that once I was taught to read in first grade, I was usually the best reader in the class, even though I was one of the youngest in the class, because I could finish my work early and pick out something to read from SRA, which I loved because I thought some of the stories were interesting and I could chart my progress. I felt good about being at the highest reading level in the class, but more importantly I felt in control of how fast and how much I learned. Even though I was very shy and didn't have a lot of friends, I felt good about that. My teachers encouraged me to learn.

At our public school, if kids finished early, they got to color. They thought something was wrong with my son because he didn't like to color and instead wanted to learn. The focus seemed to be more on making all kids the same and less on learning. It seemed like school was very different from what I remembered many years ago. I just assumed that our schools would have made improvements in their teaching methods but I was wrong.

Good morning! I love waking up to a lively discussion

My kids learned to read differently, but I don't know if that's correlated with LOG or not.

DD has loved books since she was an infant. I have a photo of her sitting in her bouncy seat looking at The Sneetches while Daddy read it to her when she was 5 days old. When DD was 3 she begged me to teach her to read. I had no idea that 3 yr olds could read, but I agreed to humor her. I taught her using phonics and she picked it up without a problem. By 4 she was reading easy readers. By 6 she was reading chapter books. By that time she was pretty much whole word reading.

DS was never into books as much as DD. But at 2 he was fascinated with a children's video called Letter Factory. He quickly memorized the whole video and learned the letter sounds that way. Then when he was 2 yr. 9 mos. I discovered that he could read words like CAT, DOG, etc. I was shocked! I assume that he picked it up from the video, from DD and from being read to. It really didn't occur to me to teach my two year old to read He seems to read mostly by word recognition. He really had to be prodded to sound out unfamiliar words, but he does that pretty well now.

As for me, I learned to read before going to K. I'm not sure how old I was but I remember my eureka moment. It really did come to me all at once when I was looking at a STOP sign. Suddenly, I read it and understood that it wasn't just a stop sign, it said STOP on it. I shouted out in the car, "Mommy! That sign says STOP!" She didn't understand what I meant, LOL. She thought I had just recognized the sign from its shape and color.

I wonder if a sort of photographic memory component of the brain comes in to play with the early readers who just start whole-word reading. (mind you, this is coming from someone with no scientific evidence - i'm just thinking out loud here!) I learned to read at 3 or 4, but I don't remember it. But I do know I have a "sort of" photographic memory recall, because when i'm taking a test, I can picture where in a textbook the answer is when I don't know it right off the top of my head. Maybe a visual/spatial brain is wired one way compared to others. I better stop with my nonscientific babbling with all you engineers out there!

DS4 seems to be the whole-word type reader, versus phonics, although he played a lot with the leapfrog fridge magnets when he was 1. But he was definitely read to a lot (hours a day - it was one of the few calming things I could do for mr. fussy infant).

St. Pauli Girl, I remember where things are in books that I've read and the layout of the page that things are on. I can't actually read the text and I don't usually remember the page number. But still, this ability came in really handy for writing research papers in college. I would just read the books, think about what I wanted to write, flip to the relevant quotes as I typed in it, done! My classmates were laboriously copying things onto 3x5 cards and making outlines, etc. For me, papers just came fully formed from my brain.

We sound like we were separated from birth! I always did my papers really fast, and was sooooooo irritated if we had to do more than one draft. What was the point? Combined with my underachieving, I pretty much just added one or two sentences to the second draft...

And I couldn't understand why everyone wanted to be in those darn study groups in law school. ugh!

Hello, twin!

Kriston and Cathy,

Like you, I can remember where things are on the page, but I have a lousy visual memory. I have decided that I have a kinesthetic memory, though. I can remember where my eyes were pointing and how the book felt in my hands. I don't remember what it looked like, but I remember how I felt. Weird huh?

Reading is just part of language. Its like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what kids actually take in.

Stuff to us that is background noise like the radio or conversations in the book store, can be startlingly new to kids.

A more active mind will try to fit it all together.

The context of the word usage is the other half - where it is in the sentence and its role in the meaning of the sentence - also give clues.