Interesting, thank you.
Huh. To me, pin and pen are clearly not the same word. Merry, Mary, and marry all sound identical.
Anyway, I doubt this sort of thing affects reading.
You DID put it up front. In your OP and second posts; it was front and center.
I don’t see how you could have been more clear that he is under three, apparently interested, but that you have concerns.
My kids learned to read before that “three method” thing caught on, when the two main theories were phonics and whole word. At the time, the common wisdom was that phonics works better for most kids, but some kids really do well with whole word, and best practice is to introduce kids to both.
I still think this is good advice. I don’t teach reading to a lot of people, but I help teach square dancing to a lot of people, and what I’ve learned is that different people learn in different ways. It’s good to present material to help the auditory learner, the visual learner, and the kinesthetic learner. There may be fewer people who learn reading by “how does it feel”, but I’m sure beginning readers use different strategies. And I’m sure it’s helpful to present a kid with a few strategies and let them use what works for them.
I would certainly try to teach him to read via phonics. It’s SO powerful, especially when you come across a new-to-you word. I would also let him know that most readers eventually learn to recognize words, and he might try doing that if it works for him. Those “guess from context” things are, honestly, things that everyone does when they come across a word they don’t know. (Not a word they know to speak but not to read, but a word that’s actually new to them.)
And get him accessible books. Books with a fun story and words that you CAN sound out. Books that don’t use too many different words. Books that use words he already knows in spoken language.
Oh. So I did.
My ADHD has been off the rails lately. 
That’s what I never understood about whole word instruction. It seems if you start reading phonetically you just organically start to recognize words (and probably short phrases). Why would you not teach children about all the clues phonics gives you.
I just want to point out that “reading” isn’t a single skill, it’s a collection of skills. We recognize words we know. We decode strings of text we don’t know, and sometimes we find a word we know, and sometimes it turns out to be a word we don’t know, and we have to infer what it means. We can read “piecemeal”, a sound or a word at a time, and we can read fluently, in effect, thinking in the written words. (Like the difference between translating a foreign language into our native language, or thinking in a second language we know fluently.) The skills that help a child get started reading may not be the ones that same person relies on as an adult, at least, most of the time.
I’m very much in the “give them lots of tools” camp. But I also think that phonics is extremely powerful, and it’s a tool every child should be taught.
My only point is that you have no reason to apologize.
My thoughts are not so evidence based but opinions -
At this age I believe it is very important to have any reading instruction be more child than parent driven, with parents giving helpful nudges, not pushes, when a child shows interest.
For all children at this age I think the most important thing to have kids increasingly understand that “thar’s meaning in them pages” - the aha is not the joy of getting praise for being able to say the sound “-at” makes, but that there is good reason to want to know how to get that meaning out. Talking about what is in the book is, at this age, for all children, IMHO, much more important than mastering the skill itself.
For specifically a child whose parent has concerns about their language and social pragmatics even more so, even if the questions may need to be very concrete - The simplest Who, What, Where, When, and then How and Why, which can be tougher. For this child maybe a healthy dose of How Many too.
And way too early, but a book worth having put away for several years from now for a math oriented child is The Number Devil (pdf here), aimed for maybe 9s and 10s, but at some point I suspect he will love it.
Having been a parent during Peak Whole Language, the rationale was that it can go the other way … for many kids, maybe even most, if they read the phonics skills just organically happen, just like most us do not need to be taught the rules of sentence structure and diagraming the damn things out if exposed to language, or social skills like how to take turns speaking and how close to be. The argument was that phonics sucked the joy and motivation out of reading. We parents were not convinced. IMHO it is possible to do both. (It did not help that the promotional material they handed out had spelling errors ….) My other fear at the time was that explicit phonics instruction gave a chance to identify the dyslexic child who could not master coding/decoding earlier in the process and to get them the help they needed faster.
We’d just read simple books with our son, and I’d read to him during his bathtime. Just make reading seem like a reward rather than a punishment.
Also, some kids–hell, some parents–are just not reader types…
Which describes it as /ɑr/ or /ɑɚ/, as opposed to the nonrhotic /ɑː/.
Good grief. This is A Thing I Learned Today.
And I’m pretty sure I’ve said "ti -SANE’ to people and had them understand what I meant –
Wait a minute.
ti-zan, -zahn
We were closer to right than the woman you were talking to. At least, if she was speaking English – I’ve no idea about Irish.
It can, if it’s taught as ‘you must not try to read anything until you’ve got all this decoding down.’ The decoding itself may be fun for some children, but is likely to become a boring chore for others. I agree that including it among the tools available for children to learn to read is a very good idea.
I think it’s also important to explicitly tell children that not all words in English follow the same decoding rules. Learning to “sound out” an unfamiliar word is extremely useful. But teaching that “this letter is pronounced like this”, even with explanations about long and short vowels and combinations of vowels, is likely to lead to some children hitting a wall of frustration if they’re not also told “some words don’t follow the rules”.
This.
If reading becomes “I have to learn to decode this, which is hard work, or I’ll get a bad grade” instead of “how do I learn how to do this thing which is a lot of fun and also will help me do other things that I want to be able to do?” – the kid may eventually learn to read. But they’ll also have learned that they don’t want to read.
I think about this from a couple of perspectives.
In teaching phonics, there are still rules that I’m learning. Those of you who weren’t taught (and don’t teach) phonics, for example, do you know why butch ends in -tch but bunch ends in -ch? In writing that, I realize that’s sort of phonics and sort of orthography; but in any case I didn’t learn the explicit rule (a rule with plenty of common exceptions) until I started teaching a phonics program. And the kids I work with who are prolific readers and writers can still benefit from learning that a short vowel immediately followed by a /ch/ sound usually uses -tch, so they know better than to use spellcheck as a cruch. In fact, I’ve worked with a student or two who were marvelous readers but who had never had explicit phonics instruction, and while these third graders could read books on a seventh-grade level, thay cuDt speL thr wa owt uv a paepr dag. Phonics instruction is important for all kids.
But I’ve also worked with kids who learn to dread phonics lessons, because lots of their peers need tremendous repetition, and phonics lends itself well to choral responses and synchronized movement and lots of worksheets, and kids who don’t need that can find it gnaw-off-your-own-leg boring. Some kids pick up on the concepts quickly; some can even induce the rule from examples, given proper structure; and spending a week or two weeks or three weeks on vowel-consonant-e patterns is way more than they need. What they need is quick lessons, a bit of review every now and then, and then moving on to other subjects.
And then I think about the second grader I taught during my first year, who I thought might need to repeat second grade because her reading was so low. I used appropriately-leveled texts with her with short CVC words and explicit teaching of decoding skills. But she was more interested in showing me that her hands were tangled up in her sweater sleeves than in learning how to read.
One day she asked me if she could bring a Pokemon book out to recess. It was a certified terrible book, a cynical cash grab by the Scholastic Book Fair, and it was also far above her reading level. Sure, I said, because I’m not a monster. And that girl read that book every day for weeks, and I credit that book with her learning to read.
If children were fungible, if children were a commodity, I’d be a lot more comfortable suggesting that one strategy works for everyone. But they’re all so different and weird, and the best we can do is notice broad tendencies and apply default strategies, while also noticing individual children and what they each need.
Aw, that’s a great story!
No, but i know you can spell “fish” “ghoti”. (“Gh” as in “enough”, “o” is in “women”, and “ti” as in “education”.) And i know that kids find exceptions funny and entertaining.
The error made here is funny. Intentional?
Point though is that you learned the rule more or less inductively without ever being explicitly taught it.
Not arguing against phonics, mind you, and I find the rules interesting.
I completely missed this post until now! I have a LOT of thoughts about this, as someone who a) not very long ago saw both my kids and a niece going through the learning-how-to-read process, and b) has a child whom I could have written some of OP’s posts about and who was diagnosed as ASD at age 6.
First, per the OP: Phonics is basically always the way to go. Whole-word and “balanced” literacy methods and Lucy Calkins as a particular instantiation of the same are terrible for many kids. (Some kids, of course, will learn how to read no matter what method you give them.) I found out about a lot of this when I found out my public school district’s literacy rate had plunged since they adopted LC, and a local reading specialist working in one of the local schools ranted to me for a couple of hours about how she sees fourth graders who just do not know how to read.
1a: Per your OP where you say “am I really spelling things out phonetically? No, I imagine I’ve just memorized whole words.” – that’s not incorrect exactly, but misleading. Your brain has learned to detect a lot of patterns and words that don’t conform to “regular” English pronounciation and such as it is, but here’s the thing. If I gave you the word “Mikkopril,” which is a word I made up right this minute, you have not memorized that word. It doesn’t really look like any other English word. Yet you would have a pretty good idea how to say it! If it was the name of a company that your boss had mentioned the day before, you’d immediately think, “ah, that was the company Boss was talking about.”
(It was actually really fascinating watching my kid – my younger kid, because my older one wasn’t typical in a lot of ways, including that she basically didn’t show she was learning until she had it mastered pretty well – learning how to read, because he learned the phonemes, he figured out how to blend them together to form a word (which came months after the phonemes; I hadn’t realized until then what a different skill this is), and then he learned that lots of words in English don’t conform exactly and how to memorize/pronounce those, and patterns in general, but it was clearly built on the backbone of knowing the phonemes and how to blend them.)
Second: the thing I did that, I think, helped my kids the most was to treat phonics as a kind of game. The tool I used the most was a Bananagrams game (for those of you who don’t know the game, it has letter tiles that are sort of like Scrabble tiles). Similarly to what @Left_Hand_of_Dorkness describes, I would dump the tiles out and the kids and I would make up nonsense words and have the other sound them out. Mine would be reasonable though often nonsense words like “zup” and “mip,” and theirs would be long random sets of letters: dkwlfkhaqbmx, things like that. I would pretend to be horrified at the word and then sound it out. This had the dual advantage of (1) showing the kid that I was doing something that had rules and that mapped from the letters to sounds, and (2) the child had control over that word by controlling the letters! They both really liked this game.
Third: Going back to your child’s behavior: this part really got me:
My kid does not have sensory processing issues for the most part (some sensitivity to texture which she’s mostly grown out of, but then also she’s 12 so has had a while to grow out of it) but these paragraphs? I could have written when she was your child’s age. The bit about not really interacting with other people in a typical way, even with you? YEP. COVID related delays may have affected his relationships with peers, but not with his parents, presumably! And the rigidity – when my older one was diagnosed that was the big tipoff, although her rigidity displayed itself in a different way. (In particular, especially when she was 5-6 and learning how to write and doing craft projects in school and so on, she would always get over-the-top upset when the writing or craft or whatever she was doing did not rigidly conform to what she had in her mind. Uh, yeah, something for you possibly to look forward to!)
Anyway, yeah, an assessment by someone who knows what they’re doing is a good idea. Our pediatrician (who is otherwise great) was shocked when our child’s diagnosis came back, although at age 12 it is super obvious.
Aside from “otherwise they’d be the same word”? No, I don’t. – the pronunciation of the “u” is slightly different. Is that what you mean? That doesn’t actually affect how I ordinarily read things, though.
They’re both short vowels for me. They’re not the same short vowel; but I wouldn’t call either of them a long one.
I can spell just fine in English. But I read mostly by recognizing whole words; the right spelling just looks right to me.
I may have learned originally partly by non-explicit phonics – my mother sounding the words as she pointed to them – that’s way too far back to remember. I think we may have gotten some of it in the first couple of school grades, but I don’t remember anything like the decoding texts being talked about; only that we were probably told about sounding things out.
That is indeed an excellent story.
And good on you for seeing what was going on.
And a relief, to those who might otherwise have decided that they were just too stupid to get it, and might as well give up.
“This makes no sense to you not because you’re dimwitted, but because it genuinely makes no sense unless you go into historical investigations of how the English language evolved and how spelling and speech evolve separately” is a drastically different thing to be taught than “these are the rules and we’re not going to tell you about all the times they don’t work because that’s Too Hard and it’ll only confuse you. So we’re only going to give you books in which all the words follow the rules.”
– I grew up in a time in which a lot of libraries – school libraries included – would only let children take books from the shelves dedicated to books supposed to be appropriate for their age – I don’t mean only not sexual matter etc., but things designated by the Powers that Were as being easy enough to read. My parents checked out things for me from the older kids’ shelves or the adults’ shelves, thank goodness; but I remember being chased out of the entire section. Maybe this has also disappeared, I hope so. – I’ve been in libraries fairly recently and more than once heard a parent telling a child ‘no, you can’t take that, it’s too hard for you’ – not to a kid holding something likely to be adult-level sexual or gruesome, but to a child holding what was clearly a children’s book but aimed at a somewhat older age. I have to bite my tongue; yelling at a stranger in the library “Don’t do that to your child!” is likely to be the reverse of useful. At least the library itself wasn’t doing it.
My mother told me that I was a late talker, and they were getting worried about it (even in the early 1950’s); but then I started talking – in complete sentences. She thought that I’d been waiting to say anything until I thought I could say it right.
(People have been having trouble getting me to shut up ever since.)
Enthusiastically seconding this! Both my kids LOVE Beast Academy and they’ll totally read the graphic novels for fun. The books/workbooks go all the way down to first grade now – which obviously still may be a bit high for your child as yet, but my younger child in particular was totally reading the books before he was really developmentally ready for the math. (IDK if that was always good for him, but I wasn’t going to stop him.)
(I’ve also been using it as a way to supplement my kids’ math education, because it’s a curriculum that goes more deeply and gives more interesting problems than my kids’ school’s curriculum does. My older child has now graduated from BA and is now taking Art of Problem Solving classes, which I also highly recommend, although their intermediate math classes start to get really challenging!)
Let’s see, at around this age (maybe a couple of years older?) my kids also liked The Boy Who Loved Math (a picture-book bio of Paul Erdos) and Apple Fractions and Great Estimations (this one is aimed more at a grade-school audience, and I’m not sure how much my kids got out of it at the preschool level, but they loved that it was all about large numbers and bright colors). I’ll check when I get home to see what else I can find, but I think those were the favorite picture books.
As a writer, I feel her pain.
In his earlier days, I wondered if he might have OCD. The need for everything to be just so, and at the time, it seemed driven by anxiety. My husband is a specialist in OCD, but has not treated children that young. But my boy was a COVID baby, and everyone says COVID kids are struggling with everything, so we thought, well, we’ll put him in daycare for a few months and see if it helps. And it did help. He loves daycare. He’s improved in fine motor skills and his willingness to try a little bit harder when he’s frustrated. And he seems happier overall.
But on the flip side, it’s like all the major developmental issues have been laid bare. The social and communication problems are glaring. Right now we’re taking a two-pronged approach to getting him an eval - school district and insurance. I’m still waiting on the school district to call me back. For insurance, he has to be evaluated at a place they approve. Amazing how all these barriers pop up for a situation in which early intervention is critical.
Teaching the kid to read seems increasingly trivial in light of everything going on, but I think we just wanted to do something fun with him. His obsession with numbers has really started to interfere with everyday life. The latest thing is we are having trouble getting him to sit down in his rear-facing car seat because he insists on watching the dashboard clock change. So we just decided to flip the seat front-facing. He’s close enough to the weight limit anyhow. I don’t know if I should be encouraging this interest or not, but it’s hard to tell him no when he wants to watch my phone clock, when it brings him so much joy he can’t even contain it in his body and when he’s willing to sit right there and let me snuggle him while he watches the clock.
Ha! I meant, at that age, things like “the stem of the ‘d’ is too long!” and things of that nature, not which words she was writing, though as she got older those became more of an issue as well.
Anxiety may still be the case with ASD. I’ve just been talking to someone who has pointed out that a lot of my kid’s issues may well be driven by anxiety, even though it doesn’t at first glance look to me like that. Which isn’t so surprising, when you think about it – you live in a world where everything is unpredictable, and people are always being unpredictable, and as an ASD kid you crave everything to be just so, and gosh, wouldn’t that make anyone anxious?
SO familiar with a lot of this. I will tell you that our school district was not super helpful. They did send someone out to watch her at daycare (the daycare was worried about selective mutism at the time, because they said she didn’t talk, and I was surprised because she totally was chatty at home), and the district person was like, “yeah, she’s fine, she just doesn’t like lots of people around.” (Which was true! but not so helpful.) And talking to others I’ve found that it’s pretty common for the school district not to diagnose unless it’s so severe that it will clearly have an impact on the child’s school performance. We finally went private with my kid’s diagnosis.
(My other advice is not to stress too much about early intervention. Yes, the earlier the better. But honestly the fact that you’ve noticed, you’re pursuing a diagnosis, you’re already doing SO MANY right things in not being judgmental or chalking his differences down to willfulness – you’re already ahead of the game.)
I think this is a great reason! Doing reading (and elementary math) activities with my kids was one of the most fun things about that age, I thought. Actually especially with my older one, who didn’t do a lot of reacting to me in an emotional sense, so there was a lot less of an emotion-driven dopamine feedback loop than I had with the younger one. So being able to have at least an intellectual feedback loop where I could see her being happy about learning things was really good for both of us, I think.
Yeah, I’d say that if it makes him happy and can be accommodated relatively easily, at this point it makes sense to do.
(I flipped my younger kid when close to but under the weight limit not because of any neurodiversity but because he just got really upset he couldn’t see the world around him, so… yeah. As a parent you do what’s best for the family!)