Wrong thinking about early reading?

@sozobe,

I only went to a half year of kindergarten (and I used to worry about that, that people would find out). All I remember from that was finger painting (I liked it) and not going back one day after recess and trying to walk home. Maybe I just liked the sand. I very faintly remember being left out - confused. I can picture the intersection. I knew to go south (I say from here).

My mother told me stories, about a lion taking care of kittens. I don't know if that was before or after or in between when she read me books. I'm not sure there were many books either, as she made up stories and sang. I remember an oilcloth book on the simple side. I've fair visual memory, don't think I had a lot of stuff, can picture the room in Ohio with my playpin in the middle. Some blocks. A doll named Sally, but that was later, a ragetty ann doll first. That one had a name too.

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@boomerang,

boomerang wrote:

Thoughts?

You're a terrible mother for not putting Mo under enough pressure. But you already knew that, dincha.

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Oops. I lost track of this thread when my computer wasn't A2King....

I don't usually cite Psychology Today as any sort of authority but they have an interesting article about learning to read and the war between whole word and phonics: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201311/the-reading-wars-why-natural-learning-fails-in-classrooms

In studies of precocious readers (kids who learned to read at an early age, without any formal instruction) they found:

Quote:

• Precocious reading does not depend on unusually high IQ or any particular personality trait. Although some precocious readers have IQ scores in the gifted range, many others score about average. Personality tests likewise reveal no consistent differences between precocious readers and other children.

• Precocious reading is not strongly linked to social class. Some studies have found it to be as frequent in blue-collar as in white-collar families. However, it does seem to depend on growing up in a family where reading is a common and valued activity.

• Parents of precocious readers report that they or an older sibling often read to the child, but did not in any systematic way attempt to teach reading. In the typical case, the parents at some point discovered, to their surprise, that their child was reading, at least in a preliminary way, and then they fostered that reading by providing appropriate reading materials, answering the child’s questions about words, and in some cases pointing out the relationship between letters and sounds to help with unfamiliar words. In essentially no cases, however, did they provide anything like the systematic training in either phonics or word recognition that might occur in school.

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@sozobe,

Your experience sounds very much like what the Psychology Today article says.

You might be uniquely able to answer a question I had after reading the article:

How do they teach deaf children to read. Surely it isn't phonics since sounds are not going to integral to their understanding of text, right? Do deaf kids learn to read about the same time that hearing kids learn to read?

I know you could hear when you were a kid but I'm hoping you can satisfy my curiosity on this!

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@Thomas,

Quote:

You're a terrible mother for not putting Mo under enough pressure.

I've been told that often enough that maybe, someday, I'll start to believe it.

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Wrong thinking about early reading?

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