Speaking from experience, and from some discussions with my Mom (early childhood special-ed & pre-k teacher for about 20 years), I think it depends on the level of individual attention paid to the student.
For example, I could read by 2, and was reading novels by 2nd grade (The Hobbit, Sword of Shannara, etc…). However, my math skills were squarely on-level with the other kids my age. Skipping me forward a year would have given me trouble with that, while satisfying my reading/language needs. Simply staying in my grade would have made me bored to tears (and did to a certain extent), in everything except math.
Luckily, my school had both accelerated math and a gifted/talented program that was focused on everything else. So basically I was challenged where and at the level I needed to be challenged.
My mother taught me to read at 3, as I was bored and acting out. I was happy enough in my class, but I got to read whatever I wanted, instead of (or in addition to) the assigned reading. I was in the top 10 in every subject in every year of school, without really having to study or push myself.
I did end feel fairly unchallenged throughout most of school, but having a goal to work for (needing top grades to get into med school) really pushed me the last few years.
On the other hand, mum decided to move my sister up a class, and she was always pushed from the beginning. Now she’s much more diligent about working, while I tend to leave things until the last minute and wing it.
I don’t remember at which age I was able to read; I know it was somewhere around 3, but it did help to some extent. I went to a different school district for K-1, and transferred for the rest of my schooling. When I got into 2nd grade here, the teacher realized that I knew everything we were going to learn that year, so I moved to 3rd grade. The same thing continued… I still got underchallenged, straight A’s, etc… and in 6th grade, my teachers had considered moving me up another grade, but decided that being 2 years behind my peers (age) would cause psychological harm. So I continued to be bored all throughout elementary. A side effect of boredom? Laziness. So my laziness did hurt me in the long run… but I still do read. Keep your child working, and try to learn him to read and do basic math, and it will help him a lot, assuming that your school has something setup to recognize his abilities…
And the plural of anecdote is not data. Which, unfortunately, I don’t have either, but I’m very suspicious of claims that learning to read and write before starting school would make a significant, more-than-short-term difference in educational outcomes. There are simply too many potentially confounding factors. Students who learn to read and write before school are likely to have many legs up over those who don’t: better educated parents, more educationally involved parents, higher socioeconomic family status, higher IQ (although that’s rather more difficult to test at that age), fewer distractions from learning, lower incidence of physical and mental health impairments - and all of these factors overlap heavily with one another, too.
OxyMoron: The ability of a five-year old to enter kindergarten already proficient in reading and writing is usually the result of a confluence of the factors you named. Of course those children will have an advantage – it’s in their environment and their blood. Consider the impact of an extended family’s involvement on that child’s learning, too: many young students are being reared primarily by 40-ish grandparents these days, and their parents are only minimally involved in their lives (if at all).
rjung: A word of advice. Make an appointment to talk to your child’s teacher about his/her classroom procedures for dealing with demonstrably advanced students first before going to the administration. Initial educational concerns like this should always go to the primary educator first, since (presumably) s/he would have the assignments, test scores, portfolio examples and other projects on hand to support your claim your child needs the extra enrichment. The charming myth of “No Child Left Behind” notwithstanding, many primary school programs are simply not equipped to deal with truly bright 5, 6, and 7-year olds until they reach third grade.
Thanks. We’ve got some sort of “orientation” scheduled for next month (I think the school wants to see if the kids are able to behhave well together), so I’ll try to bring it up then. I dunno if they’ll have teacher assignments that soon, but it couldn’t hurt to talk to the principal. And I plan to make sure the topic is covered in parent-teacher meetings as well.
Oh, I know all about the train wreck that’s called “No Child Left Behind.” :rolleyes:
On the other hand, I was a fairly bright first-grader, and was fortunate to have a teacher who (a) gave me extra work to test my ability, and (b) recommended that I skip a grade to avoid classroom boredom. I don’t want to be a pushy parent, but I don’t want my child to be bored out of his skull in class, either.
Anybody care for yet another what-a-gifted-child-I-was anecdote? I started kindergarten reading at, I’d guess, about a third-grade level. My parents never tried to force early reading on me, but there were always books around, and they read to me a lot. I stayed at least a couple of years ahead of grade level all through 13 boring, boring years of public school. The elementary school Gifted program was, IIRC, an hour a week of special classes – I enjoyed it, but there wasn’t enough of it to do me much good. I don’t think that skipping a grade would have helped, either – I’d have still been bored, and it would have caused all kinds of social problems – I had a hard enough time fitting in with kids of my own age and maturity level.
To throw something else in the mix, I was a kid who was the other way. When I started school, I couldn’t read, and I didn’t learn how until about grade 2. I just didn’t get it and I couldn’t do it. By the end of primary school, I had won an academic scholarship to an elite private secondary school, and I finished my schooling with excellent grades (98th percentile). I just couldn’t read until I was 7 or 8.
On the other hand my sister, 18 months younger than me, raised the same way in the same house was reading before she was 3, reading The Hobbit at 4. But she was kept down in 4-year-old preschool for a second year because it was felt that socially, she wouldn’t cut it at school. She also won a scholarship to the same private school and finished schooling with excellent grades (99.90th percentile).
The primary school we both went to was particularly bad - there was no special attention for anybody, and the government closed it shortly after we left there. We transferred to another primary school mid-way through were we both blossomed.
Two kids, given the same opportunities and experiences before they start school - one of them starts off slow and can’t read even after she begins school, the other is reading at a very advanced level before school, but they both end up in similar places.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it depends on the kid, and just because they don’t take to reading early, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t highly gifted.
Well, my brother started kindergarten able to read and write. He hated school. HATED it. He found it stupid and boring and pointless, and that attitude held all the way through. His grades, as a result, were mediocre at best, despite his remarkable intelligence.
Afraid the same thing would happen to me, my mother threatened the life of anyone who taught me anything before I started school. I knew my colors, and I could probably count to ten, but that was about it. I didn’t even know the alphabet, much less how to read. Within two months, I was reading. By the middle of first grade, I was reading beyond the advanced reading group, and they had me and another student working our way through the encyclopedia for reading class. My grades were always good, and I wound up getting quite a lot of scholarship money for college, where I was usually on the Dean’s list.
Long story short, an early start isn’t going to help a kid who despises academia to excel academically, and a late start isn’t going to hurt a kid who’s academically inclined.
I had written a big long reply to this, but it got lost when I had to subsequently log in. Dammit. Anyway, the book listed above is said to show in a convincing way that children who are presented with academic materials later (7-8) do better than children who are presented with them earlier (3-5), and not the other way around.
I could read before Kindergarten. I hated school. I was bored, I developed compulsive, repetetive self-stim behaviours (such as pulling all the hairs from my fingers and arms - behaviors I retain until this day) in an attempt to keep quiet and nondisruptive. Sneaking extra reading materials into class got me in trouble over and over, so I had to do something to keep myself busy while other kids struggled through the same assignment I’d finished in 5 minutes. I know the teachers (and kids) saw me doing this stuff, and thought it was weird, but apparently the teachers preferred it to me reading extracurricular material.
I’m so grateful, you know? I love having compulsive, repetetive behaviors. They endear me so much to my peers. It’s so much better than reading above age level.
Bottom line, IMHO, is that if a child is not yet ready to read, nothing anyone does will cause that to happen. Either the brain has matured to that point or it hasn’t. I think if one is ready, it is kind of mean to try to hold her back, as CrazyCatLady implies happened to her, but obviously at least in that case there were no ill effects.
I also believe that it would be far better to teach new languages to primary and even pre-school children and forget the math until later. The brain is at its most receptive to any and all language input in early childhood. We usually, at least here, don’t make much serious effort to introduce a second language until about puberty, which is just about the time when it’s too late to become fluent easily.
I may be a little biased here, but why are language skills so much more important than mathematics? Yes, arithmetic can probably be taught as well past the early plasticity of the developing brain, but this is a very myopic view of mathematics.
Mathematics is really about reasoning and rational thinking. Fiddling with numbers is sort of beside the point. Why not use the plasticity to train the developing mind to appreciate spatial relationships and reasoning skills rather than churning out polyglots? If a person can’t think clearly, what does it matter how many languages he can express his muddled thoughts in?
Sorry if I was unclear. Both are important, but everything I’ve read on the subject indicates that the brain of a young child is the best it will ever be at learning languages, but many are not yet ready to grasp the most important points of logic and reason you’ve mentioned. Yes, a 6-year-old can be taught to memorize the times tables, but many can’t really understand the concepts as well as they will later, whereas a six-year-old could easily learn a second language.
Many kids, IMHO, actually get turned off to math and believe it’s hard and that they are no good at it precisely because their first exposure is to the rote memorization of arithmetic. Very young children often have great difficulty with the kind of abstract reasoning math requires. For example, if you show a pre-schooler a tall thin glass and a short wide glass, they will almost invariably insist that the tall glass contains more, even if you demonstrate that the two hold the same amount while pouring the contents from one glass to another.
There are a few well-documented cases of children who were for one reason or another not exposed to language in those important pre-pubescent years. The younger they were when moved into a normal environment, the better their language skills were. Those past puberty never developed any real language skills at all. Yet it’s entirely possible to teach math concepts at almost any age.
What I was told was that the ability to develop language is present from (or before) birth, and that it pretty much stops at puberty. Of course there are exceptions - I knew of a professor at the University of Washington who could learn to speak almost any language within a month of exposure to it, and I mean effective fluency - but in general, it’s stupid to wait until High School and University to teach secondary or tertiary languages.
As to the math, I have a 6 year old who can do very basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division (as long as the numbers fit on her hands so she can visualise them). But more complex mathematics appear to be beyond her at this point. She might memorize them under duress - I doubt she could understand what she was memorizing. I think she’s an utterly typical child at this level, at this age.
That’s a really good point. I was reading short books (like Harold and The Purple Crayon) and beginning to write by my 4th birthday. When I was tested at 9 years old, they decided my reading comphrehension level was equal to that of a student in the second half of their sophomore year of high school. (when I was retested in 6th grade, it was just labelled “beyond high school level”) And yes, sometimes Language, Reading and English classes were boring. Luckily, reading was the class I was pulled from for the gifted program that met a couple of times a week.
However, I am, and always have been terrible at math. (for example, I used a calculator on Saturday to add up two checks, since even simple math is shaky for me and I still failed to transfer the numbers properly.) At best I did as well in that subject as other kids - which lead to “you need to apply yourself more” comments from teachers who knew how well I did in other areas, but that’s another issue - so you can bet I was never bored in math. Frustrated, yes, but not bored! Likewise with spelling, although now I know from reading countless papers written by students, that I am not a “bad speller” as I was lead to believe. I spelled at least as well as the average school kid.
My point is reading and writing are only part of what you learn in the first 13 years of school. There’s horrible math, science, history, other languages, shop/home ec, and so forth that while they might be enhanced by one’s higher reading level, still are new learning experience. You learn a lot about other subjects from reading on your own, but inevitably, you don’t learn enough to pass your tests without learning along with your classmates.
To disprove the theory that students aren’t as successful in school if they wait until that time to learn how to read, I offer myself as an example*. I didn’t learn to read until elementary school, but I soon had a fluency while doing so aloud that my teachers remarked on. I’m identified gifted. By sixth grade, I was reading Dickens and Shakespeare.
*I’m not trying to brag, I’m just trying to make a point.
