May I have this for my sig, please?
My one daughter learned to read at 18 months. I was trying to teach my 3 year old, and a boy I baby sat, because there was an article in the Chicago Tribune on how to teach your child to read, She learned, but the other two didn’t. I would take her shopping in the grocery cart and people were amazed as she would see the signs and read,Veal, Beef ,lamb etc. by age four she had memorized many of the poems in the Childcraft books that went with World Book Encyclopedia.
What, no one here was reading in the womb? I am sorely disappointed.
My mother tells me I was. She also said that until I was four I was fluent in French and Japanese, but mysteriously lost it around four. She blames vaccines.
I was a late bloomer. I mean, I learned my letters pretty early on, but I refused to learn to read because “I can watch television instead”. Come second grade (the first year I was in special ed), some teacher or other convinced me that maybe reading was worthwhile. By sixth grade, I was reading at a twelveth-grade level. By twelveth grade, I was off the charts. I read often, I read fast, and I pretty much never watch TV.
The moral of the story is, you don’t have to start out a bookworm to end up as one.
Maybe someone should have taught you how to spell ‘twelfth.’
Just kidding, mostly.
My mom tried to have me read the Encyclopedia Brittanica, so that I’d be well prepared for the intellectual rigours of daycare, but stuffing it in there was simply too painful for her. 
I said I was good at reading, not spelling.
Nor does starting out reading early translate into a love of books and literature. Or great success later in life. Its just “one of those things.”
Indeed. We have a term for some of these kids: “word callers.” These are kids who are exceptionally good at linking a written symbol to a sound, but who cannot comprehend what they’ve read. Our second-grade reading assessments are designed to suss these kids out and find the level at which they can both read and comprehend–which is often far lower than the level at which they can decode the words.
True–with one caveat. A co-worker had a child transfer into her second-grade class from a Waldorf school, and that was a terrible idea for the child. She was dumped in the deep end, knowing very little about reading, while surrounded by second-graders who’d undergone a traditional US reading model in kindergarten and first grade. If you’re gonna go the Waldorf route, do it until literacy is established, I think.
I confess to some serious skepticism about some of the claims made here.
Well, I definitely didn’t understand every word I was reading; there are Mafalda jokes I finally “got” completely when I was in my 30s as I previously didn’t know enough about their political background, and I could ask things like “what is Sweden?” only so many times per day before my parents got tired. Being taught the alphabet was real handy because it made it possible to use a dictionary; again, the dictionaries I could access weren’t very big, there were questions a dictionary simply couldn’t answer (“who is Olof Palme?”) and I didn’t have that much patience myself. But Rosi and I still were several years ahead of 90% of the class, most of whom had problems with the dictionary in 5th grade (the first year we were required to use it, although one had been in the room since P2) (Rosi was the other “dictionary reader” in my class, the other two fast readers didn’t read the dictionary, at least during class hours).
The Nephew recognizes loose words (all of them nouns) and the letters, but he can’t read; he’s 4yo and between “interactive learning stuff”, pre-P and P1 he’s been getting the alphabet stuffed down his throat for over two of them. It’s the same thing with his “art:” the pre-P program “taught the children art” by teaching them to yell the names of four art prints, color me unimpressed.
I’m a little confused by this statement. Presumably by the time one reaches the 12th grade, one is pretty much as advanced a reader as they will ever become. What does ‘‘off the charts’’ mean when you’re 18?
I used to think I was really something special because my reading/writing level was significantly advanced when I was a kid. I don’t recall meeting any other kid who could even compare. I was an arrogant little shit, too. But by the time I got to high school, other kids had caught up to me. Just because I developed these skills at an eariler age didn’t mean I ended up with superior abilities.
Again, I have to attribute the development of my abilities directly to the fact that I was absolutely passionate about reading and writing and would rather do nothing else. I saved up $400 when I was twelve (it took a year) to purchase my own word-processor – not a computer, just a glorified typewriter. I easily spent 6 hours a day writing on that thing. That is the single best reason I can give for why I am still a damned good writer to this day. Had nothing to do with how old I was when I learned to read.
In Holland in grammar school they have two formal reading levels: technical reading and reading comprehension. I have one kid whose reading comprehension was high very early but his technical reading level was quite low, so he was not interested in the books at his technical reading level. He just skipped over the sounds and so on that he could not manage and figured out what they must have meant from the context of what he could read. But hand him a list of words to read and he was rapidly at sea. I have another child who had sky-high technical reading scores early but did not understand the books at his technical level. So he did not like to read them except in the sense that one likes to read a cereal box. Which is not quite the sense in which one would like to have a child reading his books at school.
Finding books for them was a challenge but in different ways.
On the comprehension part - I had my daughter at four or five years old “reading” E. E. Cummings for my own amusement one day. But comprehending E.E. Cummings, not happening at four. She could make out most of the words. I’ve been trying to decode that poem for eighteen years.
…nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands…
I also had them be able to do the square roots of numbers via rote memorization before kindergarten - again, for my own amusement. That doesn’t make them great mathematicians…it just was a call and response game in the car from when they were little.
Still working on the potty training, though!
My mother also said I was reading between 2 and 3 - she says she’s not sure how I learned because in the early sixties it didn’t occur to her to teach me, not even the alphabet and it didn’t cross my father’s mind either. She’s always been a reader though, and said one day I insisted on “reading” to her and she thought I had memorized her book, and I said no, I was reading, so she got the KJV down and had me read a random passage. Apparently they thought it was weird but didn’t do anything else besides provide me with reading materials and library access. For the longest time, I thought my classmates in kindergarten were faking not knowing how to read. My son was also reading by 3, although I did work with him.
My mother discovered that I knew how to read when I read an unfamiliar book aloud at the doctor’s office for my 3-year-old checkup. (I’d been “reading” my books to her for a while, but she assumed that it was because I had them memorized.) I learned mostly from Sesame Street, which was pretty close to brand new (I’m 41, and Sesame Street is 40). She had made no attempt to teach me to read, or at least so she claims. I’m willing to believe that she’s not misremembering the date because of the association with the doctor’s office - I was seeing a different doctor in a different state by my 4-year-old checkup.
My daughter is 5.5, and is just getting to the point where she can sit down and read a book for enjoyment, without too much struggle. She still goes very slow on unfamiliar books, but with one that has been read to her, she can read it again and “get” it pretty readily. Her kindergarten teacher claims that she’s reading at the 2.3 AR level (second-grade) at school, but I suspect grade inflation there. She was a pretty early talker, with around 100 words at 18 months, and she still has an unusually large working vocabulary - I suspect that this is closely related to the early reading. Oh, and she knew most of her letters at 2, but not by their names - she associated them with the pictures on her alphabet puzzle. So she would proudly say that her name was Door-Owl-Rooster-Owl-Tree-Horse-Yoyo (if someone had written it out for her). She first wrote her name from memory a month before she turned 3 (I know the date because we blogged it).
My son is 18 months, and probably can say about 20 words. He’s not as interested in the alphabet puzzle as she was, but he likes to listen to the song.
My kindergarten class was the typical size for a city school, and only three of us could read at the beginning of the year (my father had diligently set about teaching me to read the year before because he was tired of reading to me). Everyone else was reading the Dick and Jane books without a problem by spring. We did the letter people but I don’t think anyone was completely unfamilar with the alphabet when we began.
I don’t quite remember the details, but I think they said I was on a “twenty-fourth grade” level. Meaning… I read like a thirty-year-old? I have no idea.
To put it in concrete terms, I read a lot more than average. I can finish three or four books in an empty day, if I feel like it. I generally understand what I read (when I’m not skimming or tired). My favorite store is Barnes & Noble. I think I get literal withdrawl symptoms from not having anything to read.
Hope that helps.
24th grade reading level? WTF? That doesn’t even make sense. Every assessment rubric I’ve ever seen goes up to 12th grade and then stops. I don’t think there’s any official measurement for “reads at a 12th grade level but likes to read a lot more than average, therefore qualifies as a 24th grader.”