<p>All kids can’t learn with phonics as not all kids have phonemic awareness.
I learned to read before school. I was four. I think I just picked it up, i was quite a voracious reader, we went to the library, but owned very few books.
Oldest also learned to read before school, she was three. She was read to a lot, but I didnt teach her. We had enough books FOR a library!
Youngest had dyslexia, she learned when she was 8. She read by memorizing the words, and when reading out loud would often replace words she didnt know by context.</p>
<p>My now 22 year old son learned to read with the Magic School Bus books. I think I was looking for a way to keep from being bored while reading the same books over and over. The main characters had certain phrases that they say in each book so I would have him “read” first the names and then “read” some of the really common words and then the phrases. I taught third grade in an elementary school in a very low-income area 10 to 20 years before I had him so it was really interesting to me to see how very early reading starts with a kid who is read to as much as my son was. I continued reading to him every night long after he was reading independently and actually worried for awhile that he didn’t want to read to himself. My husband thought I was crazy when I got hoarse from hours of reading Harry Potter together but we both loved the book and I didn’t want to stop. Son finally got to the point where he wanted to read on his own because it was faster but still wanted me to read a little with him.
His GraceFillsMe, the fine motor skills assessment is interesting. My son also is a lefty and I was told by his private kindergarten to encourage him to play with Legoes and another game with tiny pieces. We had him repeat kindergarten when he switched to public school the following year. The only “C” he got in 13 years of report cards was in handwriting in one quarter of third grade. By fourth grade he got “A’s” in handwriting.</p>
<p>Do you remember the moment you learned to read? I can remember the "AH-HA!’ moment like it was yesterday. Sitting on the floor in kindergarten class, and the teacher had a big poster-sized picture of a G-O-A-T (speaking of a word that does not lend itself to phonics!). She was saying the word and pointing to the letters with a pointer, and I remember thinking, “OH! You put the letter sounds together to get a word! THAT is what they have been going on about.” One of the high points of my life 47 years and thousands of books later. :)</p>
<p>From my reading educational books years ago, my recollection is that some students learn best from memorizing words and others from phonics, most will do fine with a combination. I’m living proof that kids will learn at their own pace when they are ready in the way that works for them.</p>
<p>Both kids got read to every day at least until they were 9 or 10.</p>
<p>My oldest is very visual, photographic memory, hates secrets, loves codes. He learned to read at the same time he learned to talk. The first thing he read was “hi” and “lo” on a lamp, then he went on to “Exit” “Pizza” and other words of interest in his world. By the time he was three he had absorbed the way reading worked and was able to decipher words he’d never seen before. We did a bit of phonics on the refrigerator door, but very little. He was just as precocious in math by the way.</p>
<p>My youngest did not pick up reading at all before school started no matter what I did. He talked much more fluently than his brothers, but wasn’t good at anything that seemed to involve multple steps like using the VCR. By the end of first grade he was still struggling with the simplest primers and I stamped my feet and he was put in reading recovery at the end of the year. He spent the summer after first grade slowly working his way through books like Nate the Great and Frog and Toad are friends. Some time in the fall of second grade I am reading Harry Potter to him - he is looking over my shoulder and then suddenly he realizes he can actually read it. I’ll never forget him shouting, “Mom, I can read! I can read Harry Potter! Can I go down and tell Daddy I can read Harry Potter?!” From then on he could read anything. It just clicked. He was reading The Lord of the Rings in third grade. He was a terrible arithmetic student, but always understood math. In 4th grade we had him tested for LDs. No firm diagnosis, but his scores on the various parts of the WISC went from slightly below average to the top depending on the section.</p>
<p>Both kids did almost exactly the same on the SAT critical reading section by the way and they both were and continue to be avid readers.</p>
<p>D did phonics at school and while she did well she mixed up letters and words sometimes to the point I thought she could be dyslexic. But she didn’t seem to have all of the symptoms. I got a book on teaching reading (a brand new system that was being adopted by a regional school system in our state) and lo and behold part way through was her problem spelled out to a T. She was going too fast and not really looking at the words actually in front of her. Her brain “filled” in certain sounds, vowels that she had been used to seeing in phonic drills. Simple solution was having her read to me and whenever she glossed over a word and got it wrong I’d have her slow down and look more closely at the word. Thank goodness!</p>
<p>So when son came along and not trusting the public system–I taught him before he started kindergarten using that system. It was easy, structured and pain free–15 minutes a day max. It had to be fun. We didn’t finish the book–he started reading sooner than that. The “reading readiness” (and the authors cautioned to not try the book teaching before this) part was simple sound games you could play anywhere (car, grocery store–it was fun). Once your child could really discern differences between certain sounds and got good at the games you could start the book. Who knows? Maybe it had more to do with the games and less on “lessons”. Maybe the lessons helped make the bridge in his thinking between the spoken and written word.</p>
<p>The interesting part of the system to me was that letters are totally secondary–only sounds counted. So the major part is not learning letter names (they hated the alphabet song) but the actual sounds of the letters. In fact they said DON’T teach the alphabet letter names if you can help it. There is too much to unlearn. So the letter F is not “ef” but pronounced as in “f…rog” since nobody says “ef-rog”. It was basically a structured phonics program but SO much better than what my D had. It was a “no skipping ahead” program–letters with multiple sounds were handled in a specific learning order and not necessarily at the same time. No mixing stuff up.</p>
<p>I wish I’d had that system so long ago–I remember cutting out “long vowel A” pictures vs “short vowel A” pictures. I (one of those million book readers now) couldn’t get through first grade cut and paste stuff. I was too confused A picture of an apple starts with “A” but doesn’t count because it isn’t a “long” vowel? Give me a break. I HATED that stuff. “Long” I? "short I? Big, tall, short, fat? Huh? Get me OUT of here! Can you fail first grade if “A” isn’t really for apple?
I did have a “light bulb moment” where all of a sudden I could read. And I remember the moment clearly as others have said. I had another one when I suddenly “got” algebra in middle school. My dad is yelling (in a loving fatherly way 
LOL) and all of a sudden–BAM–I get it. Easy as pie. It’s like layers of ice melting away in a major heat blast. </p>
<p>In my last paragraph of my too long post–my dad was yelling at me in frustration while trying to TEACH me algebra (not just yelling). God bless him. But while sitting on the floor of my living room very upset and dad ranting in the kitchen about WHY don’t I follow his instructions like he wants me to—the world suddenly did a “flash” (it felt like the electricity from the lamp glowed brighter) and I just “got it”. Just like that.</p>
<p>
My almost to be 23 year old also spent many hours on the computer versions - “The first day of school was over; Mr. Ratburn …” Also the “Jump Start” CDs were a big part. Brings tears to my eyes thinking of those days in the 90s. </p>
<p>All three of ours could read before Kindergarten but I put my main emphasis on math/sci rather reading/writing. It did what we wanted - all three wanted to go to sci/engg majors on their own without any prodding from our part when they reached HS.</p>
<p>I had one kid who was very phonics oriented, so phonics oriented that he learned to read in another language better than in English initially. The other language sounded every letter, English doesn’t. Good thing we don’t speak French.</p>
<p>Hmm… my kids (who learned to read much better with phonics ) were AWFUL in French. Many years of it, and really, really terrible at it. Maybe there is a connection I never thought of.</p>
<p>I don’t remember learning to read myself, but my mother always told me I was reading when I was 2. I thought she must be remembering wrong, until I had my own kids. We read to both kids all the time when they were young–my son was reading at 3 and my daughter (who has Asperger’s) at 2. In fact, I thought my daughter was just memorizing what we already read her and reciting it back to us verbatim (which she often did), until the day she got a new book and was telling me what it said. Both kids were whole language learners and never really did the phonetics thing–my daughter was (and still is, at 16) reluctant to sound out words she doesn’t know.</p>
<p>yep - both kids just started reading without any formal instruction. We read a lot to them and they lived in a “print rich” environment. D was around 3 and S was around 2 1/2. They were in Montessori day care and I remember S’s teacher telling me that he was reading. He was not particularly verbal, so we had never heard him read aloud. But he would sit for hours “looking” through animal encyclopedias. Guess he was actually reading them. </p>
<p>We never made a big deal about it. We just assumed that our kids would be readers, since their parents were/are. D still loves to read for pleasure. S - not so much. Early reading doesn’t necessarily mean enthusiastic reader. </p>
<p>I don’t remember being taught to read, I just remember always loving to read and hiding ellen tebbits under the covers with a flashlight. </p>
<p>My son learned in K and his first book with 10 apples up on top - figures it was a number book as he’s a real math guy. He is dyslexic but interestingly he learned to read before his sister. When his sister was in K we were told specifically during her evaluation to please not teach her, they wanted to do it their way. However, come October of K her teacher told us if she didn’t learn the sound letters make by Thanksgiving she’d hold her back. Sheesh. We got hooked on phonics - which she called fooked on gonics - lol. She learned to read by the end of K.</p>
<p>I just don’t think there is a rush. I think kids learn when they’re ready. </p>
<p>To this dday I do not get the whole language concept.</p>
<p>I once asked my dad who was an elementary school teacher about the whole teaching reading thing. He said that many kids essentially teach themselves to read without formal instruction, many learn readily with the first instructional method the teacher tries, a few more pick it up with the second method the teacher tries, and a few others with the third method, and so on, until there are some who still don’t get it who are sent off to work with the reading expert at the school who almost always does manage to find some way to help them figure out what to do. After 40-some years in elementary school classrooms, he didn’t have any particular favorite method. The method-of-the-moment was fine to start with. The trick was to have several back-up methods that might be currently out of favor to try with the kids who didn’t get it the first time.</p>
<p>I read constantly to my kids when they were young. They were both slow to start reading on their own. My S '16 has some LD’s and reading is not his favorite thing to do. He was 2+ years behind in reading in late elementary and middle school. I think he has almost caught up, but not entirely.</p>
<p>D, who is 21, started elementary school at a school that was very lacking in resources. And, she is a kid who tried hard to fit in and blend in when she was young. She was barely reading on her own when we left that school mid way through her 2nd grade year, though that was probably normal for that school. At her new school she was placed in a classroom with very high achievers who were reading Harry Potter books independently and writing Harry Potter plays and doing all sorts of things. Again, she was the type of young child that wanted to fit in and blend in. So, barely 4 weeks in she went from barely reading Dr Suess books to reading Harry Potter books with no help from me. She has never looked back and has soared.</p>
<p>My son is dyslexic and I gave him all sorts of exposure and early reading instruction, had him in Montessori, and plenty of phonics, reading to him, etc. I didn’t work… that’s what dyslexia is. (Usually can’t learn to read by traditional or typical forms of instruction – needs more targeted intervention). He became a reader at age 11.</p>
<p>Daughter was a very early reader, but I could see huge differences in the way each one responded to print. Son used to love being read to, endlessly --but showed very little interest in the letters and printed words on the page. Loved the words …poems, new vocabulary, etc. D. had no patience for being read to - she’d spend the whole time squirming around and pointing to words on the page and demanding to know what each word said. Just before she turned 4 I got frustrated and said something like, “I’ve told you what that word says 3 times already. Don’t you understand that the same letters spell the same word every time you see them?” That was the aha moment for her – she was reading on her own by the nd of the day. </p>
<p>Son was more of a reader in his teen years than daughter, and did markedly better on SAT’s. D. has always been a strong reader and writer, but I think that son was more motivated to read, whereas daughter was more extroverted and physically active didn’t’ have the patience for much reading as she got older. </p>
<p>My grandson is now age 4 and nowhere near where my daughter was at the same age in terms of reading ability. After the experience with my son, I’m pretty sure that I know what to do with my grandson if and when he runs into problems, but it’s too early to tell. MOST kids (on average) are not developmentally ready to read until around age 6 - those of us who learned on our own at an early age are above average. (I didn’t learn on my own, but I was put a year ahead in school and caught on very quickly when taught at age 5; I do have specific memories of being taught).</p>
<p>But it’s a huge mistake IMHO for parents to push a kid who is not ready, because it can backfire. Instead of learning to read, the not-ready kid gets a lot of negative “I can’t” type of messages simply because he is being expected to do something without adequate preparation. Parents of preschoolers need to focus on the foundational skills-- such as teaching the child the letters of the alphabet, helping them to see that text is read linearly from left-to-right, using dialogue with the kid to build up understanding of words and stories, etc. I think if the kid is ready to read, then it will show – if not, the parent should allow for appropriate normal developmental variations. I’m not saying that parents should wait until the kid is 12 - just that the non-reading kid without other overt signs of a learning disability should be sent to school at the regular age, with the parents holding off on formal intervention until the kid is at the age where the majority of kids are picking up on reading. </p>
<p>There is absolutely -0- correlation with age of reading and intelligence-- it’s just a different developmental path. My son was way ahead when it came to math and spatial reasoning-- in fact, I used to worry that there was something wrong with my daughter (intellectually) because she was slow to talk as a baby and didn’t seem to be able to do the same sort of shape sorting puzzles that my son had been so good at. (Her IQ tested out at 140 at age 6… but I remember she didn’t do so well on the “block design” part of the WISC. So again – it’s just a different pattern of development.)</p>
<p>If it was “normal” for kids to read at age 4, then reading would be taught formally in pre-schools. It’s taught to 6 years old because that is the age, on average, that teachers will be most successful at getting their students to read. </p>
<p>@happymomof1 - my mother-in-law, a retired schoolteacher – told me essentially the same as what your dad said. Over the years she had seen methods come in and out of vogue. I think the problem is with the adoption of uniform, one-size-fits all methods. An experienced teacher like your dad will have familiarity with multiple approaches and be able to shift gears with kids who don’t seem to be picking up – a newbie teacher will have whatever was taught at her teacher’s college and whatever is being used at the school. Of course the school will say that they carefully have chosen the very best reading curriculum … but it just doesn’t work that way in real life.</p>
<p>I sometimes draw the analogy to lactose intolerance. The school may serve milk to children in the cafeteria, and no one could deny that it is a nutritious offering for most kids – but the kids who are lactose intolerant are just going to get sick. So the school cafeteria that also offers a non-dairy substitute is going to do a better job at feeding all of the kids.</p>
<p>@vabluebird - “whole language” is more of a description of an educational philosophy than a teaching method. It is NOT the same as “whole word” teaching – which, back in my day, was also called “look-say”. I learned to read by that method – it’s the method that used the Dick & Jane style readers-- and I gave my daughter a stack of those old readers the day she had her “aha” moment. Maybe in her case, being encouraged to sound things out was holding her back, because perhaps in her not-quite-4 year old brain, she thought she was supposed to sound out each word every single time she saw it. So being told that memorizing the word was o.k. might have been a real source of liberation – she had an almost photographic memory. </p>
<p>But “whole language” refers to a classroom environment that includes a mix of methodologies that focus on reading enjoyment and comprehension skills as well as decoding. It was introduced because of a perception that the Dick & Jane type readers were boring and lacked relevancy to kids’ lives, and that kids were falling behind because of lack of motivation. So the idea was to introduce more engaging literature into the classroom – keeping in mind that many kids weren’t getting that at home-- and a wider range of literature based instruction. </p>
<p>Teaching phonics only gets the kid as far as decoding - it can’t by itself lead to reading fluency or strong comprehension skills. Many - perhaps most - kids will make the transition from decoding to fluency, understanding, and reading for enjoyment on their own, once the have the keys through decoding. But some kids don’t. I think that if the decoding part is too difficult, they won’t progress – and if the instruction is limited to decoding strategies, the kids may not ever develop other skills that will help them bridge whatever deficits they have when it comes to decoding.</p>
<p>The thing that I never got is why we focus so much on phonics for English, which is a very frustrating, non-phonetic language. The only way that written English can ever make sense in my mind is if the person is taught how to pay attention to roots, affixes, word derivation,etc. To understand that in English, word meaning is as much an element of how the word is spelled as the letter/phonics. (That is, to see the word “phonics” as sharing the same root with phonetic, phonograph, telephone, etc.-- and understand that to be totally different from words that sound similar, such as “fun” or “fawn”)</p>
<p>My very vivid memory from first grade is the day the teacher wrote the letters S-C-H-O-O-L on the board and asked if any of us knew the word. I struggled to sound out the word …sss, kuh, ha… didn’t work. Then the teacher told us the word and said that some words could not be sounded out and we would just need to memorize them. So that was my “aha” moment. It was only somewhat later that I made the morphologic connection on my own – oh, “school” and “scholastic” and “scholar” all come from the same root. If I was in charge of designing a reading program, I’d put that part in at the beginning, along with the phonics. I’d give kids the “why” of homophones from the start. </p>
<p>Mine are old enough that I owned Jim Trelease’s original Read Aloud Handbook. We read to them from birth, pointing to words sometimes and just going with the story at other times. I also used reprints of the old McGuffy Readers because I believed in phonics. So whole language and phonics together. They all became fluent readers early but reading was also a primary value at home…we read more than we watch TV or play video games or whatever…
I worry that as a society we value literacy less and less. My students (5th grade) are so very literal and have a hard time reading nonfiction for content. These are top SES students. Their parents hire private coaches for sports, pay for fancy camps, but I never hear that they curl up on the couch and read aloud as a family. I guess I’m a dinosaur.</p>
<p>I grew up in a home with so many books that the local (small-town) library would sometimes send students to my house to do their research projects. I learned to read at the usual time (K-1st), my brother learned late (4th). My house is also full of books and my husband and I read all the time, and read to our kids. However, our daughter had trouble with reading so we had her tested and found out she had dyslexia. She needed an enormous amount of individual instruction but after years of tutoring her reading ability finally caught up with her vocabulary and interests, and now she is an avid reader. My son had trouble with reading also, but after knowing our daughter’s history we began intervention even earlier and he caught up sooner. Both of them read at or above grade level and both love to read.
I sometimes get annoyed when people say, “I read to my kids all the time and set a good example so they are great readers!” Unfortunately other parents can do all the same wonderful things for their kids and it doesn’t work as well.
Interestingly, both of my kids had speech delays, and some people think that is related to reading issues. The idea is that dyslexics have trouble hearing individual sounds in words, which makes it difficult to decode words for reading. My kids both still mispronounce words, and have great difficulty with foreign languages, so I can see the connection.
One teacher told us that reading ability is related to teeth - kids who get teeth early also read sooner. I thought this was a crazy theory but I will say that both of my kids got their teeth very late. :)</p>