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Reading before kindergarten
fisch
Posts: 570 ✭✭
Jack doesn't start kinder until fall 2013. I'm curious how many kids are able to read by the tIme they start kinder. A few kids can already read in his prek class, but one was held back last year and the other is a girl who is going to kinder in the fall. Jack desperately wants to be able to read, and does lots of pretending, but I can tell that it hasn't clicked yet that letters=words. As a preschool director, I was always of the philosophy that kids will learn when they are ready, that social skills are more important, that pushing or steering toward academics can backfire. That was before I had kids of my own. Now I get the anxiety that exists around kindergarten readiness.
I want to help him learn without turning him off. He is obsessive about his books, loves them, and memorizes them, so I know he will eventually get there....maybe I will talk to his teachers again.
I want to help him learn without turning him off. He is obsessive about his books, loves them, and memorizes them, so I know he will eventually get there....maybe I will talk to his teachers again.
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He is on a good path - his own path.
Progesterone therapy and baby aspirin daily
Two miscarriages in between (August 2012 - same donor as Maggie, and December 2014 with husband)
Maggie
We're going to do Waldorf education and they don't even start formal reading education until seven. Before that it's about being familiar with letters through their sounds, which naturally fits what she's already doing. She'll be 5+ 2 weeks when kinder starts and we're toying with holding her back but will wait to see who she is then before we decide.
I definitely agree that play, imagination, problem solving, creativity, and social and emotional skills are much more important.
Assessment that social skills are more important. In California by the end of kinder a child is reading small books with sentences like " Here is sad cat". By the end of first they are reading small chapter books. it is a huge jump but most can get there. My son is 7. Played with books from about 2. Memorized everything. Which is what you would expect. He started reading above grade level mid year kinder. It just clicked for him and wanted to learn. Before,that he was all boy and only cared about recess.
Kindergarten teachers are dealing with children who don't know their letters or colors (or how to sit quietly at a table with others). They have to start with the basics. Heck, in my state, even though basic reading is all over the educational standards, the test to skip grades K through 2 must be given orally because the kids can't be expected to read the questions!
Lilianna knows her ABC's, colors, numbers, etc, inside out. She also loves to "read" (looking at the pictures and telling a story based on what she thinks it should be). But all of her progress to date has simply been the result of purposeful play, and mimicking what she sees me and her teachers do.
I have no intentions of teaching my child to read. That what school is for (not that I'm lazy, but simply that I want her to learn when her classmates are learning). For now I plan to enforce the joy she finds in her current "reading" level, and I plan to enforce the lessons/skills that she is taught in school.
Sometimes I think that encouraging a child to be more advanced than their classmates creates emotional termoil. It's not easy to be labeled the "teacher's pet", "smarty pants", and/or to have to constantly live up to high expectations that were set at a young age. I also think that been too advanced leads to boredom in the classroom, and thus behavioral problems.
this is what we do as well but sometimes i work in a few things like handwriting.adri's lastest interest is natural disaters.tornadoes,volcanoes,meterors,icebergs,earth quakes and tsunamis.lol
i'am worried about this for adri.i hope with it being such a good school they can keep her interested and challenged
Yes, but she is 4. I started reading at 4. I think it's normal for some kids. That is totally different than pushing sight words and claiming your child can read at 1 or 2 years old.
Yep. That's my memory of my own childhood. My mom or dad having me read stuff out of the TV guide to their friends to show them what I could do. There is definitely a difference between reading words and reading comprehension. Shiloh is safe though. I don't get the TV guide!
ETA: I do beam with pride when she can recite the Pledge of Allegiance :cool: But again, while she has all the words, there is no comprehension of the meaning behind them.
At any rate if you are practicing at home just make it fun.
She is using phonics - "correlating sounds with letters or groups of letters" according to the dictionary. She has learned the sounds the letters make from the sight words she knows, and applies those to other words. Thanks for giving an illustration of my point!
I get that education has shifted from explicitly teaching phonics before reading, and how that is a good thing. My point was that we all eventually use phonics instead of rote memorization of word shapes. This is how we read words we've never seen or learned before, as Adri is doing now.
oh good!1 letter can make more than 1 kind of sound and so the english languange can be quite a challenge to get down.so i've been trying to teach each letter's sound but its going really really slow!much slower than i thought it would take.she learnes words by memorizing so much faster.
From what I understand about it, that is one reason for the shift from learning phonics first (without context) into learning some sight words and words from pictures, and going from there. But whether it's taught first or as part of a broader language learning method, phonics is always involved at some point. It's hard to remember all the rules and tricks without any context, but if she recognizes air and fail, it's easier to understand how the -ai- combo can sound different, and makes it easier to learn hair and hail. For some kids, it's easier to know from the beginning that they can sound different.
Thank you for your post, as it helped me realized the "my child has been reading since 1 year old" is all about semantics. I define being able to read as being able to decode a series of words and letters one has not seen before. Sure, word recognition is part of reading, but I wouldn't say that someone (of any age) who can recognize a handful of words is able to read. Since sight words are part of reading in the broader definition, I see now why some parents are saying their child can read, though they could not 'read' words they haven't already been taught.
That said, a fellow second grade teacher (now retired) was often asked, "What can I do to help my child read?" and her response was always, "Let us take care of it, and you provide the experiences we can't" like dance classes, music lessons, and trips to science museums. But I feel that there's also a strong argument for supplementing schooling at home, particularly during the summer. Elementary school students lose two months' learning if they do nothing over the summer. Our school is rewarding kids for reading and doing math lessons during the summer with our own version of the Olympics. 1= math lessons = bronze medal, 15 = silver, and 20 = gold. For reading, we're trying to create a paper chain (1 link per book or chapter read) to go from one end of the school to the other. I'm hoping lots of kids are participating this summer, because the summer slide is pretty bad for some kids.
As for teaching reading . . . well, Justin can recognize a J. I'm not sure how far beyond that he knows. I downloaded some apps on the iPad for tracing letters, but haven't pulled it out once this summer. We've read close to 75 books since summer started, and we work on comprehension and determining fiction vs. non-fiction. I have him point out clues in the story that show that it's a fictional work (i.e., chickens don't wear clothes or talk in real life). I use large vocabulary words around him, then define them with common words he knows. We try retelling stories with three factual sentences about the plot (First . . . , then . . . , and finally . . . ). I have him recall two things that happened every day and have him tell me about them (What was the best thing that happened today? What was your least favorite thing?) We stop a book and make predictions about what might happen before continuing. He's started taking a music class at daycare, and he's finally singing along with songs, so we're watching the same Wiggles DVD 50 times over in the car so he can sing along and I clarify words he doesn't understand in the songs. Basically, I know he'll be doing a lot of letter work in preschool next year, so I'm working on the other aspects of learning to read.
As for kindergarten readiness, I was sitting in the teachers' lounge last year when the PreK parents were filling out the K screening tool. One mom looked at it and said, "Are you kidding me? I think I just failed it!" I asked to take a peek at it, and it was all about how much sleep they get at night, what their children's temperament was, how often they cried, if they were shy, etc. This year I designed the document for our kindergarten readiness screening tool at another school. The kids were shuffled from room to room by escorts for vision and hearing tests, fine motor skills evaluation, simple math and reading screenings (sorry, I didn't get to see the actual tools they used), and casual interviews. The comments on the K readiness were mostly about whether the parents and/or kids had anxiety separating from one another, if the child refused to participate or cried or was excessively anxious, if they might need speech/language services, if they spoke a different language at home, any behavior issues that cropped up, etc. The actual letters/"reading" piece of it is quite small in comparison to all they're looking at.
Also, interesting points about kindergarten readiness. When I toured the Montessori school that I eventually want Kate to go to for Elementary the youngest (pre K and K) kids have more of an evaluation, older kids test in. When I asked about the evaluation she wouldn't give a lot of details but the one thing that kept coming up was "readiness" as in OK leaving parents and being in a classroom environment.
Mel, you crack me up. But I'd really like to see someone try to read a word they have never seen before without sounding it out. How does that happen? They must be.....Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious???? or "Atoning for educability through delicate beauty."
Not always, but we both know you haven't been entirely truthful about more than a couple things here over the years.
Breaking words into pieces is what we're talking about. I wasn't saying people sound out words aloud. It's part of the reading process. I'm surprised that concept is so hard for you to grasp, since (you have said in the past) you were an English teacher. Like Shanny said, people read unfamiliar words by putting together familiar sounds, which they know from familiar letter combinations. Do you really disagree with that? I can't imagine you do, as it's exactly what you said Beckham does.
I'm still laughing at the thought of adults "sounding out words in their head". Beckhams new and wonderful word is carnage. He read it on a DVD we told him what it meant and now he uses it every time he can fit it in a sentence. He never saw the word before.
This has become a personal issue and I'm very sorry to the OP.
Something left out of the prior discussions is the importance of modeling. As well as reading to our kids and helping them with their reading, it's extremely powerful for them to see us reading. If reading is an important, valued adult activity, it helps create the desire and value in young readers.
The link: http://books.google.com/books?id=yzLcvlYFoT0C&pg=PA18&lpg=PA18&dq=how+does+reading+work?&source=bl&ots=6VYeDlHG8e&sig=uj20RQxL2coP9Tq3bOR1cH0r_ok&hl=en&sa=X&ei=DrYCUMGKM8WR6wG16ODtBg&ved=0CGgQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=how%20does%20reading%20work%3F&f=false
Well, let me take it directly from a website:
"The Dolch-Sight Word List is a list compiled by E.W. Dolch in 1936. The list contains 220 commonly used words that should be recognized by "sight" for fast or "fluent" reading. The compilation excludes nouns, which comprise a separate 95-word list.
Many of the 220 Dolch words do not follow the basic phonics princples, so they cannot be "sounded out." They should be learned by sight. Dolch words are now often referred to simply as "sight words." "
http://www.spellingcity.com/dolch-words.html
Sight words are meant to be memorized because they don't follow the rules. Examples of sight words include could, again, blue, come, down, if, how, and after. The rest of the words are meant to be sounded out following phonics principles. Here's the complete list: http://www.mrsperkins.com/dolch-words-all-freq-by-grade-printable.pdf
If you don't learn to sound words out using phonics then you'll never be able to pronounce words like plagiarism, nuance, harangue, labyrinthine, ensconce, lachrymose, abstemious, ephemeral, etc. [taken from frequently-used word lists for the SATs]. You have to rely on phonics and sounding out individual letter sounds, common letter combinations, known language rules, etc. There are no sight words found within those words.