Strange. My kindergarten teacher was very happy that I could read - it meant that she could split the class into two groups, and work with one group while I kept the other group occupied by reading to them.
It can work both ways though. If you were able to read fully, that is great, but some children come to school capable of reciting their ABC’s, and its a nightmare for the teacher.
Similarly with children who can recite the numbers 1-10.
Children might appear to know something, for example 1-10 or ABC, but all they are doing is parroting something they have no understanding of and they then have to be untaught before they can be taught and this can delay them.
It would be better for the children if the parents didn’t try to teach them to count or recite the alphabet.
If you must do something, pick up a synthetic phonics starter book (you can download the fill English scheme “Letters and Sounds” for free from the Department for Education website www.dfe.gov.uk, i think) and teach the kids the phonemes rather than the names of the letters..then the children will have a real head start. Don’t try to teach the numbers, unless you are also confident you can teach what the numbers mean at the same time, again picking up some books before attempting to do this would be a good idea.
A child who can read should be encouraged to discuss way they are reading, to ensure that they are comprehending (that important second half of the Simple View), to do this parents should discuss with the child what they have read and ask questions about it. Not just factual recall either, but test their ability to make inferences regarding character actions, emotions, what might happen next.
Lots of people say, oh I could read before I went to school, but what they mean is that they could decode… They had to be taught to comprehend.
Anecdote:
Our family lived in a major University town. Two PhD’s (friends and great people) that lived across the street had a child that taught himself to read at two years old. They didn’t push him, he somehow learned it from anagrams. He was just that intrinsically smart. I was not some ego effort on the part of the parents.
But, my younger sister who was a year or two younger than him taught him how to tie his shoes.
Hey, “smarts” come in a lot of different forms.
My kindergarten “teacher” was horrified to find that I could already read.
Your personal experience doesn’t match with mine at all. The only kids in my kindergarten class who’d had no exposure to letters never caught up to the rest of us while we were in elementary school together. And seriously, what child entering school (who isn’t horribly deprived) counts simply by rote?
There are different levels of reading, and while it’s fairly common to hear about children who learned to read on their own at a young age I suspect that few of these children could read with the degree of fluency that would be expected of a literate adult. I have a friend who could claim that her daughter was reading at three because she knew the alphabet and what sounds went with the letters, and if you wrote a simple word for her like “cat” or “book” she could tell you what it said. But at that age she couldn’t handle even a very simple children’s book of the “A fat cat sat on a mat” variety. If you pointed to a specific word and asked her what it said she could answer correctly, but dealing with a whole sentence was just too much for her. Some young kids are good at sounding things out and might be able to read “A fat cat sat on a mat” or perhaps some more complicated sentence pretty accurately but not necessarily understand what it meant or even really grasp that what they were reading wasn’t just a random string of words.
Reading and writing are also two different skills, and I think writing would be the one that’s more difficult to just “pick up” without any instruction. No cite, but I’ve heard that historically, when literacy was not a valued skill for women, it was fairly common for women to be able to read at least a little but not to be able to write at all. This seems strange since reading and writing are taught together and most of us today learn the basics at an early age, but think about what’s actually involved in reading vs. writing. Generally speaking it should be easier to recognize a letter or word (especially if there’s some context to help you) than to truly memorize exactly how it looks AND be able to reproduce it yourself.
Everyone in this thread could probably recognize a drawing of Snoopy, but I’d bet that few of us could draw a very good Snoopy from memory. And while drawing Snoopy requires more strokes of the pen than most words, Snoopy is at least still Snoopy if you draw him backwards or upside-down. If you do that with, say, the letter “b” you get a totally different letter. A sufficiently motivated illiterate person might be able to master the 52 symbols (upper and lowercase) of the alphabet without formal instruction, but it would take a lot of boring practice and they might still end up with strange, misshapen handwriting if they didn’t have someone who could already write to help them.
When I was living in Japan I learned to recognize maybe a few dozen kanji just from looking at signs and things, but I couldn’t have accurately written many of them out by hand. For instance, 女 means “woman” or “female”, and I quickly learned to look for this to make sure I was going in the right bathroom or dressing room. This isn’t a particularly complicated character, but remembering “the one that looks like two angle brackets on top of each other, or the Freemason symbol on its side, means ‘woman’” is easier than remembering exactly what this combination of lines looks like and writing it out myself. And I already know how to write in English, so at the very least I already have the fine motor skills necessary to control a pen.
It’s stuff I was taught whilst training as a primary teacher rather than experience as a pupil.
As a teacher, did you often encounter kids who could “count” from one to ten but who could not put exactly four blocks in a pile? I just can’t imagine teaching a child to “count” without asking them to count things . . . .it’s be like teaching them Red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet without actually asking them what color things were.
I’ve not taught kids that young (Foundation and Early Years is the specialist area for really young kids, I trained as a 7-11yo teacher and whilst “technically” qualified for an EYFS post, I wouldn’t apply for one or probably get one), but teachers who I shadowed during training told me that they had had children who could count to ten, but had no idea of the meaning of those numbers. This was evidenced when they were given four objects, for example, and asked to remove one, they struggle. One teacher was quite adamant about the damage done by well-meaning parents.
Similarly with the alphabet, knowing the names of the letters hampers the learning of the sounds.
I see that children in the US enter education much later (kindergarten = 5-6 yo) than here (nursery = 3-4 yo), so this might not apply to older children going through the US system, there are considerable differences between a 3 and 5 year old.
Interesting that US children begin full time education so late.
As an adult who moved to a foreign country, with a radically different writing system, I see a world of difference between kids and adults who learn languages.
A child of our friends’ (the father is from Kenya (really, with a Kenyan passport and birth certificate) and the mother is from Turkey). The son learned hiragana syllabary “on his own,” according to his parents. How did he do it? Like other kids learn colors, with feedback from his parents.
Adults rarely have someone that patient hanging around them. “Yes, Kit, that right. s-a-l-o-o-n is ‘saloon’, now let’s go get a shot on me.”
Even with all the text books and kanji dictionaries around, very few foreigners try to pick up reading Japanese own their own. Most people can read ten to a few dozen, just by selling them around, but most people just aren’t that interested or motivated.
There also is a world of difference between memorizing a few words because you see them all over and learning to actually read.
I thnk its pretty common in the US for kids to go to nursery school before kindergarten.
Oh well if it’s just stuff they teach teachers then we can take it with an appropriate heap of salt.
Oh dear who pissed in your cornflakes?
Another person who taught herself to read at the age of four. It was a rainy day when I sat down with a book about two Scotty dogs called Mac & Jeff.
By the time I entered kindergarten I was reading everything I could get my hands on, including the dictionary. The teachers gave my parents heck for “teaching me wrong.” This was back in the good old days (when dinosaurs ruled the Earth).
I’d give you harder books to read if you were in my class, you would be considered ‘Gifted’ in Literacy (‘Talented’ being the designation for children who excel in non-academic subjects). Possibly send you up to a older-aged class for your Literacy lessons. Ironically, you may have failed the new phonics tests due to you possibly having moved past reading using phonics, or never having learned through phonics (there are so many techniques for learning to read, phonics, of which there are two main varieties, is just the best one).
My guard in Cameroon was teaching himself to read and write. He was sixteen and had just moved to town from a very remote village. He’d spend much of the day tracing letters and working through a basic literacy book.
Good for you. Are you claiming you could read with the degree of fluency that would be expected of a literate adult, or did you just feel like sharing?
I cannot make sense of this. What “understanding” is there to be had in any act of reciting the alphabet? I can recite the alphabet, but my doing so reflects nothing I’d call “understanding.” It’s just a sequence of sounds I’ve memorized.
Having memorized them, I was then able to scaffold an understanding of phonetic relations between signs and sounds afterwards. But the recitation didn’t get in the way of this–rather, the recitation ability was built on in order to form the understanding later on.
Why would you need to “unteach” them anything? Why not just start with what they have and build on that? Under what circumstances could being able to recite these noises get in the way of learning about letter-sound relationships or relationships between numbers?
I’m not sure what the reading with the fluency of a literate adult has to do with children who learn to read at very young ages. I also learned to read before I started kindergarten, and while I doubt I read with the fluency of a literate adult, I did read with comprehension and could understand children’s books. I’d say I read with the fluency of the average second-grader when I started kindergarten (in those days we didn’t learn to read until first grade).Your friend may have claimed her daughter could read at three because she could recognize a few words, but that makes as much sense as claiming my daughter could read at two because she could recognize a Mc Donald’s sign.