Yeah, we hear that a lot. I think it’s meant to be reassuring, but I’m not anywhere near in the neighborhood of feeling reassured about my child’s development right now. We’ve been listening to people tell us it’s no big deal for at least a year. Our conversations have gone from “Should we get him evaluated?” to “When should we get him evaluated?” to “Right now. We need to get him evaluated right now.”
I thought it would be fun to teach him how to read. But if that’s going to be too intense for him right now, I suppose we can back off.
I certainly didn’t mean to suggest that it would be too intense. I’d absolutely teachvhim to read, if he is interested. My point was just that any method is probably good: teaching him one method now won’t make it harder to use a different method later, and you aren’t under pressure to find the most efficient method, because hes got time.
One thing you might look at is Beast Academy. It’s a homeschool math curriculum, and probably too advanced for him, but all the instruction is in these really fun graphic novels that he might like: books about numbers would combine two interests. They are all written as Socratic dialogs, so it might be a way to connect conversations to books and numbers.
For me, being able to read was the differentiator between me and my sibs. We had The Athlete, The Cheerleader, and The Special Needs slots already taken by the time I rolled around, so what’s kid #4 gotta do to get noticed?
I became The Smart One. Learned to read at 3, yadda yadda yadda, “John, tell us some crazy facts” (I loved trivia and I loved showing off how smart I was (sibling rivalry!)). I was seven when this bad boy fell in my lap:
And that was all she fuckin’ wrote…
For my kid, I genuinely do not remember how she learned to read, but it was largely a done deal when she walked into her 1st grade classroom the first time. Her big reading issue was summarizing - for years she couldn’t tell you what a book or a movie was about, she’d have to run through the plot.
What’s the movie about?
Me: 3 guys who go fishing
Her: Well, it opens with this one guy. And he is in his car. And he sees his friend while driving and they decide…
My eldest sister, ten years above me, gave me a good star every time I read Green Eggs and Ham correctly. I remember even at three to four having felt I was tricking her by just having memorized it but then I was reading other things with my older brother passing down comic books mostly.
My four kids all had different tempos. One very early, and I think for him being in early speech therapy helped. The process of the therapy included breaking words into sounds and rebuilding. He was and is methodical. One was in first grade upset that he was not reading but his friends were and then literally overnight it clicked, next day he could read grades above level. I saw it as akin to an Amish house raising.
Kids be weird.
I really appreciate our resident professional educators who recognize how one size does not fit all. We lived through phonics to whole language and back … with many teachers quietly using blended methods as needed under the radar because they cared what helped that child.
Lol, yeah. But I wanted to highlight a different motivator which got one of us to read. In short, as parents, we don’t know what the trigger will be, or if it ever comes.
And to that last: never, ever, consider yourself a failure as a parent if your child doesn’t love, or even like, to read. It’s OK! It really is!
And there’s also the fact that, perhaps, maybe we should focus as much, if not more, on our child’s strengths than weaknesses. Your kid doesn’t like to read but obsesses over numbers? That’s not a problem, it really isn’t! Not in today’s world!
Maybe… focus on the math? Guarantee you, nobody will care if your child doesn’t like to read fiction when s/he is holding that Fields medal. Or being awarded tenure. Or being the math whiz behind the latest Fintech startup.
My daughter is fantastic. And she developed at her own speed in all things, which means that there are some skills she still sucks at. And that’s fine: we have an entire lifetime to learn and, as parents, we only have 18 years, at best, to assist in this process.
So, to the OP: You’re doing a bang-up job even if you don’t fully crack this nut. You really are.
Our son had delayed speech as well as sensory issues. Maryland has something called the Infant and Toddlers program, where they send speech therapists and occupational therapists to the home to work with the child. We learned that the part of the brain that makes the mouth form words and the hands/fingers work are the same. He understood everything, but couldn’t form the words. It only took a few weeks, maybe just 3 or 4, before the words came rushing out. The OT piece took longer, and we had to fight for an IEP before he entered pre-k. Once it was in the school’s hands, as opposed to Central Office, he got tons of support. Fast forward to 2022: he graduated from college with honors.
Yeah, I got him these little rubber counting dinosaurs, I was thinking he might like to learn to add. We were waiting for his birthday to give them to him. I think he will pick up on it pretty fast.
Mars was like that at that age. What he really loved was just talking about numbers. “A trillion” thrilled him. The idea of infinity. You can play War if he can recognize numbers, or even count pips. Just take the face cards out.
We played a ton of Monopoly the summer he was 5. Like, daily. We made change entirely in tens. Everything was piles of tens. It took forever (months) for him to understand “how about you give me a 50 instead of 5 tens?”. But even doing it in 10s was thrilling for him.
As I understood the OP, however, this particular child is trying to learn how to read; he just appears to want to do it all on his own. The question is how to nevertheless help him learn something that he wants to learn; not whether or how much of a problem it would be if he didn’t want to learn it (at age 3, none at all. But he does want to learn it.)
Thanks, that’s actually very helpful advice for my own situation. My son is in 7th grade. He is ok at reading, but hates it. He’ll do anything to avoid it. On the other hand, he loves math, and is currently two years ahead of “normal” there.
I’m not sure if he could learn a reciprocal game like War, but we can give it a shot. I’m numbered out this morning. We’ve had three number-related meltdowns today and he’s been counting for hours. I will cut that rant short.
Its hard to say: we have always dobe a lot of trying and backing off when it wasn’t time yet.
If your bigger concern is conversation, he might enjoy watching you and someone else play, and ypu could be modeling talking as you play (talk about who wins each play, and why).
For the life of me, I never understood why they got rid of phonics. Was it based on empirical evidence or did it just sound good?. It seems to me that sight reading just develops automatically once you have seen a word a few dozen times. In any case, I clearly remember sounding out “Imperial” when I saw it in the side of our car. It was a revelation that even long, unfamiliar words could be figured out. My reading took off quickly after that.
As a teacher I’m a bit horrified by the anecdotal “I think I remember I learnt to read this way” as answers in Factual Questions!!
There is clear evidence that teaching through a systematic synthetic phonics program is the most effective and best in the long term.
It requires quite a bit of knowledge about the English language though. The example you gave about teaching your child 3 letter words illustrates this clearly … whilst CAT is 3 letters and 3 sounds … CAR is 3 letters but 2 sounds.
The best start is to teach children the most common sound that we say when we see letters versus letter names. Look online for correct pronunciation (p is not puh!!). This is a great way to start … and getting children to identify easy starting sounds in words as you read to them gives them an in to the world of print BUT you need to check the word beforehand: eg ‘c’ is taught as a ‘k’ sound at the start … so don’t ask them to identify it in word like ‘circle’ or ‘children’!!!
There is free online training available for a program called SoundsWrite that I have had parents do to help their children at home.
You can also access “decodable” books online (these use the most common sound/letter relationships). Some of the best free ones are Australian (but can be used with all accents!): New Series - Set 1
“Sight” words are quite misunderstood … we decode words very very fast … and when children learn to read they are very slow! There was the belief that memorising words was a valid strategy … but it backfires once they see new words … and for a child learning to read … every word is NEW because they can not scan the letters the way we can. A good piece of information (probably not relevant for a child this young though) is about which words really can’t be decoded: https://www.reallygreatreading.com/heart-word-magic
For your child … focus on letter sounds … lots of opportunities to see a letter and say the most common sound (out driving, on packets, etc). Educate yourself on the most common sounds … and of course … reading wonderful books to them and asking questions about what they think might happen, what happened and why!
That isn’t a flaw, provided they designed the study right. I mean, presumably you weren’t the only person in the study; OISE probably got a random sample of children who were educated with the whole-word method, and a similarly sized random sample of children who were educated with some other method. As long as the two samples were large enough, it shouldn’t matter whether you were a self-taught bookworm, since the experimenters would have been averaging all the scores in each sample together. There was probably, by chance, another self-taught bookworm in the other sample to balance out the scores, and even if not, your own scores probably wouldn’t have affected the average of your sample all that much. (Or, alternatively, the experimenters discarded the outliers in both groups before further analysis.)
If this is in reply to my comment, I agree 100%. To me, phonics is the way to go. I just meant that once you phonetically figure out that “quick” is pronounced “kwik” you learn to organically recognize it after you encounter it again and again.
