Wendell, it didn’t sound to me like Jman’s intent was for his children to learn German, but to be familiar with sounds from languages other than English. Your remark reminded me of one of my younger cousins in Mexico, who giggled uncontrollably when I spoke English at him. He was about 2 at the time and thought it was really funny that I could spontaneously break out in whatever those sounds were.
I grew up speaking both English and Spanish because my parents spoke only Spanish to us at home. It was just how we communicated. I think that you can be successful with this as long as you clearly define where you speak a certain way. This can be as little as “we speak X during dinner on Tuesdays” to “we always speak X with Mommy.” My best friend is an American who lives in Germany and is married to a German. It’s always fascinated me to watch her children interact with their parents. The whole family will be carrying on a conversation and the kids will turn to Dad and participate in German and then turn to Mom and continue in English. You can almost hear their brains click as they switch languages. The kids are more fluent in German than English, but they read and write both languages (the writing is the most difficult part, but they have to do it for school now, so that forces them to practice).
The one short-term disadvantage of being bilingual is that you sometimes get a little bit behind everyone else because you’re juggling two languages. My brother and I both read a little later than average. He’s not an especially voracious reader, but the delay doesn’t seem to have harmed him at all. I acquired German along the way and always have several books going, sometimes in several languages (not as often as I ought to…). My best friend’s kids were a bit behind in speaking, but both of them will now talk your ear off (in either language) at no extra charge. Her son is a complete bookworm who has become a fluent English reader thanks to his love of Harry Potter, which always comes out in English well before the German edition. He gets a big kick out of being the first in his class to know what happens in the latest book. Her daughter has finally started to catch up with him, also thanks to Ms. Rowling’s works.
The year before my son started kindergarten (about 4 years ago), I called the school and asked them he was expected to know before he got there. I was told that while some basic skills - alphabet, able to count to 10, colors and shapes - were helpful to have, there were no real expectations from him. I was told that that was what kindergarten was for - to start building the skills that they’d need in first grade and further. Obviously this will vary from one school to the next, or one district to the next, but I was reassured that kindergarteners definitely were not expected to be reading when they got there.
My school system taught us to read in Kindergarten. I’m 33. They used those stupid (to me) books that used little (hard for me with my then-undiagnosed-myopic vision) pictures in place of some words, I couldn’t see why they didn’t just use the words. AFAIK, in this state at least this was the norm.
Bolding mine.
Wow, here in Kansas they expect that the child will have gone through pre-school and been taught those (bolded from the quote) things plus use of scissors IIRC.
We weren’t even taught until the first grade. This was a blessing for me though, as I was the youngest in the class, having entered school at 4 1/2 because I had the nerve to be born in June, and because I was so physically large that I was the tallest kid anyway, and they thought it would be cruel to hold me back a year. From memory, kindergarten might have had big colourful alphabets and such around the walls, but it was mostly being read to, painting, singalongs, and the like. In first grade, we had little folders with cardboard letters we’d insert into slots to make simple sentences; it was a bit like arranging type. As the kids “passed” that at their own pace through the year, we progressed to little reader books, and were writing our own sentences in pencil. It’s weird what you can remember - I still remember enjoying writing “…day, 1st October, 1976” because I’d gotten so bored with writing “September” for what seemed like an eternity.
Anyway, my stepson started the same New South Wales public education system in 2003, and they had him reading in kindergarten. They also had him bringing home a book every night as part of his homework. In the 70s, we didn’t even get homework for the first few years. It appears this level of learning asked of the class of '03 was not pushing any of the kids in his class beyond their abilities.
This all makes me think that the 1970s was really a nadir of education. It was all experimental crap (I think most of the people setting down the syllabus were probably out of their heads on acid). Then again, kids who came through in the 1980s often seem to be unable to string two words together. I tihnk it’s improved again now though, and reading in kindergarten seems pretty reasonable to me.
My brothers and I went to kindergarten and first grade back around 1970. Our school district didn’t even have kindergarten back in those days, although we did go to one run by the local Methodist church. Obviously reading was taught in first grade. How did it affect me? Well, I’m a voracious reader and a former translator of Japanese and German. My Russian’s a little rusty – it’s been over 20 years since I’ve used it – but I can still read Japanese. One brother is an even more voracious reader than I am. We used to joke that he went through a phase when he would read every book in town, then move. The other brother never has been into reading as much, but that’s due to lack of interest, rather than skill. All three of us tended to place in the top 1% on tests. On the other hand, we’re rather peculiar. Kids in our town wound up all over the scale when it came to reading, I assume due to the same factors which lead to kids winding up all over the scale today.
My point is, if you don’t teach your child to read by kindergarten, you’re not ruining your child for life or inhibiting his or her ability to read.
> Wendell, it didn’t sound to me like Jman’s intent was for his children to learn
> German, but to be familiar with sounds from languages other than English.
It still isn’t clear to me what Jman’s intent is, but if it was to teach his children to be bilingual it wouldn’t work. If it was to get them familiar with the sound of other languages, there are much easier ways to do it. Just let them listen to songs in other languages or the dialogue in foreign-language TV or movies. On the other hand, if you talk to them in your own heavily English-language-accented German, you will not teach them the sounds of German.
I don’t think I even learned the letters of the alphabet until I was in first grade, but now I read all the time and live in an apartment full of books.
Mom said that I basically taught myself to read somewhere between three and four. I don’t remember it. I do remember being four and looking out the window and watching the big kids (5-year-olds) going off to school and wondering what it would be like… and then seeing Mom coming up the sidewalk with a bag of groceries in her arms and a book for me sticking out the top.
This was kindergarten in 1968. There was no pre-K then; I understand from my co-workers that they get the kids started before the age of five these days.
In kindergarten it was mostly play, naps, building things with the wooden blocks, colouring in the lines (oh, how I wanted to draw my own lines!). In grade one, there were books about learning to read, I think. I get the impression now that learning to read was a major part of the goals of grade one, and fact that I could read was a major part of why they bumped me to grade two in the middle of the year.
ANYWAY, what I was going to say is that since I had to read that sentence 3 times, I probably can’t criticise the kindergarten kids for their reading skills (or lack thereof).
But yes, my mother taught me to read before kindy. The fact that I apparently haven’t significantly improved my reading comprehension skills since then shouldn’t be taken as a sign that those efforts were wasted.
In my experience, pre-reading in kindergarten isn’t mutant. My daughter started Kindergarten this year, she is one of three readers in a class of 19. That’s 15% of the class - not the tail end of a curve (all the readers are girls - but there are only 4 boys in the whole class - and all the readers are “older” kindergarteners - they will all turn six before Christmas). Now reading chapter books in kindergarten - that’s the tail end of the bell curve.
By the end of kindergarten, all 19 are expected to read 20 high frequency words. Some current non-readers will be able to read simple books, some won’t get through all 20 words.
I was able to read when I was about 3 or so… I think the first thing I read aloud was an ad for a car dealership out of the newspaper my aunt was reading while baby-sitting me. The parents were in for quite a surprise when they got home!
In my kindergarten, I and three other kids who could read would spend about half an hour a day with the teacher reading out of a very simple book while the rest of the kids… I don’t know… colored or something. In 1st grade, my group moved onto a new book while all the other kids were reading the book I had in kindergarten (though some kids who advanced quickly joined my group in the middle of the school year). It took me a couple years to realize what was going on with that.
So I don’t think it’s expected but nor is it exceptional. My mom didn’t do anything special, either. All she did was read to me constantly and have me watch a lot of Sesame Street (apparently I was reciting my ABCs not long after I could talk, thanks to that program).
I don’t think you need to worry whether your kids can read going into kindergarten.
If you read to them, they will do well.
I was never specifically taught to read. I went from sitting next to my mom as she read to me, to memorizing the books she read, to memorizing the symbols that made up the words and finding them in other books, to reading on my own.
And I also went thru the same “you can’t read, you’re too young” thing. In my case, from the librarian. We had “Library Day” in the first week of kindergarten, and I picked out a book that was on a fourth or fifth grade level. I still remember it - “Venus Boy”. The librarian was quite sure it was way above my head, but I insisted I wanted to read it. So she opened it at random, pointed to a sentence, and told me to read it.
I mispronounced the word “molecule”. Then she wanted me to explain what the sentence meant. So I did.
I thought she didn’t understand it herself, and my low opinion of grown-ups was confirmed at that moment.
In my kids’ school system, they’re expected to come out of kindergarten reading. It seems to me that much of the urgency is driven by standardized testing, by the need to get kids up to speed as quickly as possible so they have the proper foundation for learning the test concepts. Apparently, though, adjoining towns are not quite as gung ho.
FWIW, you can teach your kids to read at home with no special training. Start around two or so, teaching them the letters. They’ll surely be reading by kindergarten. And believe me, when it comes to keeping kids busy and out of your hair, the TV can’t hold a candle to the printed word. Get 'em hooked early, I say.
I was reading at three. According to my mom’s baby diary, the first words I read totally on my own were “Baby Animal Zoo,” the title of a kid’s book. I literally can’t remember not being able to read since my earliest memories are from around that time. I was one of the only kids in kindergarten who could read, though. I had my first IQ test around that time because I was pretty advanced in most of the subjects; one of the benefits of active parent teaching.
Official teaching for reading was in first grade. This was in 1980. Everyone had letters and some high-frequency words down by then. In kindergarten we had had pictures with words below them for colors, animals, and other kid-friendly stuff that were directly taught and then posted all over the place for passive learning. My school put me in 3rd grade classes for reading. It was still boring but they didn’t want to stick me in with kids who were a lot older than me. Most of the difference in ability evened out a bit by middle school. By then, I was only one of the smart kids, and certainly not the smartest one.
I kind of wish my parents had done more math-oriented stuff. My math skills were decently high, but nothing compared to my reading. I’m almost certain that was partly because they didn’t have great math skills themselves. I actually thought calculus was cool when I finally got to it in college. I wished like hell I’d been exposed to it when I was a kid so I’d be really good at it by the time I was older. If you want to do your kids a favor, start teaching them some basic math concepts and manipulations. If I’d known, say, trigonometry as a grade schooler I’d probably have followed through on that Engineering degree instead of switching to Literature. I would have thought it was cool to calculate the height of a tree by measuring the shadow and the angle of the sun, for instance. I’m definitely going to be doing lots of cool math stuff with my kids whenever I have them.
I don’t think there’s any problem if the kids learn to read at an early age. There could be a few benefits from it, actually, but then again I’m no expert on child development. I would think that discouragement of learning would always be a bad thing, though.
We should probably better define the term ‘read’ for this discussion. Learning simple phonics and decoding is certainly appropriate for 3 and 4 year olds…most will pick it up without any fuss provided they spend their days in a literacy-rich environment. And I think the key here is “without any fuss”. I am of the mind that no preschooler needs a curriculum, and that some may even be harmed by one. We find that it’s enough to point to the letters on the fridge and say “Y is for Yale, C is for Cornell, H is for Harvard…”
Reading to learn, knowing that reading is used to communicate something and understanding basic concepts of literacy on the other hand, are pretty sophisticated stuff, and I don’t think it’s outside the normal range for kids age 7 and 8 to just begin as emerging ‘readers’. Sadly, curriculum writers, ignoring evidence to the contrary, disagree, and people end up having anecdote-heavy discussions about reading attainment and throwing out words like “delayed” and “advanced” before they’ve sufficiently defined the terms.
In short, yeah, expect your preschooler to decode most 3 letter, short vowel words like dog, hat, and sat. Don’t be surprised if she recognizes a handful of oft-used nonphonetic words like the, she, has. But don’t call for an evaluation if she can’t read “The dog sat on the hat.” and point to the picture of the dog sitting on the hat.
I learned to read at a very very early age. My brother is four years older, so I spent most of my infancy propped up on the couch with my mom and my brother while she taught him to read. When I entered kindergarten (1984), I was the only one who could read sentences. I was given a big box of reading cards (little stories, two or three paragraphs, with reading comprehension questions on the back) to play with while the other kids learned the alphabet. I was only required to pay attention during math stuff. I finished the first batch of cards (maybe, 75 of them) in a few weeks, so they let me have free reign of the library. By second grade I was going to the kindergarten classes once a day for story time, where I was the reader.
I would tell my grandfather I could read, and he was convinced I was just memorizing books (because that’s what my brother did for a while). I read an article about the legislature to him from the paper. He never doubted me after that.
My experience is still that most kids can do letters, and numbers, write a little (their own name and phone number for example) and understand what words are, but can’t read sentences yet in kindergarten. I think the more important skills are sharing (still working on that one :D), and paying attention, and learning how to go along with a routine (playtime is over and now it is time to sing the alphabet song, etc).
My family still mocks me for having to read aloud to the rest of my kindergarten class. The teacher made me do it once a week and I hated it. I was intensely shy and horrified by having to sit in front of the whole classes. I kept trying to fake that I was sick and couldn’t go to school.
I still loathe Curious George. No, loathing is too tame a word.
