Oh, I didn’t say anything about actually reading millions of books, I was referring to being able to read that many, which is what JoeyBlades seemed to be saying. Apologies if I was being too literal-minded.
Yeah, a bit too literal. I would really have no way of assessing how many books she was CAPABLE of reading. I’m only saying that after that first year, she had demonstrated that she could accurately read and comprehend about a couple of dozen books or more (sorry I didn’t keep an accurate count). They didn’t actually start the reading program until about midway through the year, so I suspect if they had started earlier, perhaps she would have had a much more impressive number under her belt, though a million seems a bit of a stretch. As I said it was not just books that she was reading - she attacked magazines, newspapers, and the backs of cereal boxes with equal vigor…
I think you will find that in most kindergarten programs in the US, children have not gained the expertise to read many books on their own. They tend to focus on what they call “reading readiness” which is primarily about learning the letters and the letter sounds. Then they move on to simple sentences and they are usually taught about content and the concepts of a story. Typically, by the end of the kindergarten term, kids are reading simple sentences and may have been exposed to a book or two with supervised reading. It’s usually the first grade in the US where kids are first encourgaged to start unsupervised reading. There are, of course, exceptions.
Also, as Irishman points out. Reading is not the only activity that my daughter was engaged in… she had dance (Highland Dance, to be exact), piano, gymnastics, swimming, loves to play computer games, and you should see some of the engineering marvels she’s designed with her Ki’nex… Pretty normal kid, actually, and impossible to keep up with.
JoeyBlades, are you trying to tell us that your daughter is the bestest, smartest kid in the whole world? 
I could crush you all with the weight of my 10-year-old nephew’s accomplishments, but I don’t think there is enough room on this page.
Arnold,
Hard as I try, I admit that’s it’s sometimes difficult to maintain objectivity of one’s own progeny… especially in the face of so much praise from her teachers…
… did I mention the water walking incident? [wink]
Hmmm… I’ve been sitting here and reading through all of the posts to this thread. I was taught to read by the phonics-based method, and like a number of you had/have certain suspicions about the effectiveness of the “whole language” or “whole word” method. For one thing, it seemed to me that it would encourage bad spelling.
Then freido’s post caught my eye and caused me to re-think this opinion. I read in the same, whole-word way: by recognizing the shape of a word without looking at every letter. This is also the way I recognize, at least at first glance, that a word is misspelled, and how I remember to spell it correctly: the “shape” looks wrong and I remember what looks right.
Ergo, I am forced to conclude that the whole-language approach does not necessarily produce bad spellers.
Wrong. Chinese has many dialects but they all use the same written language. No way is it phonetic because the “sound” of the words in the different dialects is often completely different. Kanji is not phonetic, katakana is, but no one reads katakana (or “writes” it in the literal sense, but they do “type” it into the computer). (I could be confused here and mean hiragana, but the concept is still true.)
My youngest daughter started first grade in 1989, and this was the name of the program used to teach reading at her school. She was reading books within weeks and has done very well in school ever since. As close as I could figure, this program was a combination of phonics and whole word methods, with more emphasis on the latter method. At first her spelling was a little iffy, and it still is not always perfect, but she is an excellent reader with a large vocabulary.
My two older daughters learned to read phonetically and both of them also read very well, and have large vocabularies.
Probably reading will eventually be taught using the best points of each method.