I used to tip waitresses, until one fell completely over and got hurt.
Five is kindergarten age – so how is learning his letters such a huge leap? I probably learned my letters when I was around that age (four or five), but that’s because I watched Sesame Street all the time. (That didn’t mean, mind you, that I knew how to read or anything, just that I knew the letters of the alphabet)
It doesn’t sound like he’s such a prodigy, just that he’s right in line for his age.
(Then in kindergarten we had the Letter People. Remember them? “I’m Mr. M, with a Munching Mouth!”)
QFT. When listening to one of those parents, I’m never impressed with the level of genius their child shows, but always impressed with what an asshole the parent seems to be.
I generally use the phrase “Wow! My kid is functionally retarded compared to yours.”
I’m sorry your child is so slow.
I haven’t the foggiest why this person thinks it’s a stretch that a kindergartner would learn his letters. My son is in preschool and has been learning his letters, whether just by the ABC song (which is really learning a song) or shown that each is a symbol for a sound, since he started in preschool at age 3 or 3.5. He’s got 'em all down already, but that hardly makes him a prodigy. Since the kids are around when that comment is trotted out, I have to bite my tongue.
I don’t understand what “reading at a college level” means. In first grade I somehow went from struggling with Dick and Jane to reading complete Jules Verne books with comprehension. I certainly understood the plot. What I didn’t understand was the role of harpoonists in whaling, Nemo’s cultural background, and a whole bunch of other context.
I doubt there is much you read in college which you couldn’t read in junior high, but I also doubt you could comprehend it unless you magically got the context you learn from maturing injected into you. Superficial comprehension is a lot different from real comprehension. You do pick up bits and pieces, but I’m not sure you are any better at really ready than LHOD was on the violin (and an excellent story that was.)
Yup.
Not only that, but I think people tend to vastly overestimate the correlation between early reading comprehension/IQ/’‘giftedness’’ and real-life success. The reality is, no matter how far ‘‘ahead’’ you are as a kid, eventually everyone else is going to catch up. I’d love to do a poll of child prodigies and gifted children on the Dope and ask them what they’re doing with their lives now. Chances are very few of them are working at NASA or President of the United States. I have no doubt that some are pretty successful (lawyers, doctors, professors, etc.), but so are a lot of smart people… it doesn’t take a genius to perform those jobs. If it did, there would be far fewer of them.
I’ll be your first data point. I wasn’t a child prodigy by any stretch, but I was reading early (my mom says 3-1/2). I am not brilliant and in fact consider myself pretty average. I have a middle-management-type job. I do still love to read, and both of my children are big readers. My son read pretty early, too. But that’s about the long and the short of it.
Though this originally had some kind of TV connection, that has long since disappeared; I’m going to move this to MPSIMS.
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
I agree that I’m not sure there is any benefit from a child knowing how to read very early.
EXCEPT that I think it may help the child develop a love of reading, or at least a like of it
Since reading is an active activity rather than a passive one (like listening to TV or radio) it helps teach a child how to think, well at least a bit.
YES!!! Why turn limited parent child interaction time into "Enrichment Therapy 101?
God, some of the parents out there…they think they have to cram formal learning into EVERY SINGLE mintue of a kid’s life. Kids DO need some formal learning ops, but there’s plenty of time for that during school. God, any day now I’m expecting to hear about " AP Preschool.
Hmm. Skepticism in a social context results in heated words being exchanged. Surprise, surprise.
Anyways, I don’t think that reading level SHOULD mean anything about comprehension. There’s just too much variation within that for any statement to be meaningful. If you want to classify comprehension, call it a comprehension level. Say something like “He reads at a third grade level, but his comprehension is only that of a kindergartner.” That actually some information. If you just said he read at a kindergarten level, you’d be misleading at best.
Finally, I will admit that the only reading I did at 3 or 4 was memorization. I distinctly remember it. My mom played along, but it was clear she knew I couldn’t actually read. I did stumble on math a lot earlier, but that was mostly do to a school system that did not hold you back. I did two digit multiplication in kindergarten, and maxed out the math curriculum in fourth grade–I did 6 digit square roots by hand.
I climaxed at 7th grade, getting a 26 on my ACT. Okay, so I got up to a 32 my senior year. Whether this fits olives’s hypothesis or not, I’ll let you decide.
And yes, I know it comes across as bragging. [childish]But everyone else got to do it![/childish]
You’re wrong.
I think it DOES fit my hypothesis. There were plenty of people in my school who scored in their 30s on the ACT in high school, and none of them were able to do that level of work as children. This suggests that by the time you were a senior, there was really no difference between you the prodigy and them the normal smart kids.
I was an advanced writer for my age, but, again, I did it all the time. I mean I easily spent 6-8 hours a day as a child writing on my own time. In junior high I had a file-system for my loose-leaf writing–organized by genre. When I was 12 I used the $300 I had saved expressly for that purpose in order to purchase a word processor–not a computer, a glorified typewriter. And I used it every day for years. I wrote my first full-length novel on it, which I finished when I was 16. Writing was definitely instinctual in a lot of ways. When my husband first met me, I wasn’t writing, but a couple years back he had the misfortune of experiencing ‘‘olives in novel-writing mode.’’ When I’m into something, I eat, sleep, and breathe writing. Nothing else matters–not work, not videogames, not human relationships. Chances are if your kid has a passion that intense, he’s going to get good at it.
I see what you did there!
This.
I learned how to read very early. By 3 I had memorized a lot of words, and people thought I could read. I really wasn’t, knowing the symbols for each individual word does not mean one can read. But I liked it, and I got better. I was homeschooled (mom is a teacher), so when I took an exam to see what grade I’d start formal school at they sent me to 3rd grade (two years ahead of my peers). My mom refused, and I started in 2nd grade instead. I was a misfit, I was too young for my class and never really got along with my classmates. By the time a year difference didn’t matter I was thought as the insufferable know-it-all. None of my current friends were my friends in high school.
It wasn’t until I started university that I crashed into the reality that I was just some other smart teenager. Not really even that bright, all things considered. I know I am smart, I am just not as smart as people thought because I learned how to read early (even if I didn’t understand half of what I read), I had great diction and a knack for language (at some point I spoke 4 languages with varying degrees of fluency), so they fooled themselves into thinking that took genius.
My daughter is doing brilliantly in school (she’s 4, and like me the smallest in her class). She already speaks 3 languages as fluently as it is expected of a 4 yo (we raised her like that, out of need). But I keep telling people not to expect too much of her, she’s just a normal kid, there is no genius in what she does, any kid with normal intelligence and sufficient resources can do the same.
A year or so ago, an off-hand comment another teacher made was a revelation for me. “Until second grade,” she said, “students are learning to read. After second grade, they’re reading to learn.” First, I wish I remembered the name of that rhetorical flourish, if only because you sound super-smart if you know the names of rhetorical flourishes.
But it’s true. I spend a lot of time with my low students working on phonics: teaching them about the magic e, that says nothing itself but whispers in the ear of the vowel preceding the consonant, “psst! say your name!”; reminding them to read the endings of words; teaching them that when two vowels go walking, the first does the talking; teaching them to chunk words; and so on.
With my high-readers, I don’t do that. They generally can read any word they come across. I expose them to a lot of vocabulary they’ve never encountered before, and although they can read the words aloud accurately, they have no idea what they mean. So I teach them how to use a dictionary, and moreover how to infer meaning from context. I teach them to reflect on what they read, to ask questions of the text. I teach them how to discuss literature–that is, not simply to think of smart things to say in the post-reading discussion, but also how to listen to other students and to play off what other people say, to help answer questions, to elaborate on someone’s question, to build their own connections.
Those latter skills are absolutely a major part of reading. These kids are reading to learn (and they love it! There’s more fun in those groups than anywhere else, to be honest). For them, it’s all about comprehension, not simply about decoding the text.
There’s good research showing that a person has a certain reading stamina, a certain amount of mental energy that they can devote to all the tasks involved in reading. The more that they’re devoting to decoding the language, the less they can devote to engaging with the ideas in the text. As a teacher, it’s really important to know whether a kid is spending any energy engaging with the ideas. If they’re decoding perfectly, but that’s taking all available energy, they’re not ready to move to a more complex text: instead, they need to spend more time at the level they’re at, practicing the skills necessary for textual engagement.
You’re right that it’s a little clumsy to conflate decoding with interpretation, and in a perfect world (e.g., a world with class sizes of 6 or fewer students), that wouldn’t be necessary. But we have the world we have, and I need to be able to group kids for work with reading, and saying that a particular kid is reading on a level 16 or whatever is a necessary evil. in that group, I’ll work both on phonics and on base-level textual engagement. As kids master the decoding skills necessary for that level of complexity, they’ll have more attention available for things like noticing character development or setting; and within a couple of weeks, we’ll move to a more complex text.
IME, there are three successful ways to teach a child to love reading (says the mother of two adults and one about-to-go-to middle school kids who all love to read):
One is: Read to them, early and often. My MIL criticized me (gently) once for reading to my 4 month-old daughter. “Why would you do that? She doesn’t understand what you’re saying!” said MIL. I replied “Yes, but early on, she’s going to associate her mother’s voice (which babies are hard-wired to like) with books. That’s a good thing.”
Two is: Modeling behaviors you want them to have! I have a magazine by my chair in the living room, a couple of books in the bathroom, a couple more books by my bed. Our kids see us reading all manner of stuff (and I count fairly intelligent message boards!) often. My hubby and I are both readers.
Three is: Continue reading with or to your child, even after they are quite capable of reading on their own! This reinforces ‘reading as a bonding experience’, which reinforces the pathways in the brain that says “Reading Is Good”. Whatever age your kid is, find a book/story you loved at their age, or a book/story they are particularly into (my 10YO is very into the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series) and read it with them. With my 10YO, whenever we go to a movie, or to lunch or dinner, we take one of her books with us. While we’re waiting for whatever, I read to her. This reinforces the idea of reading while you’re waiting. It’s a good thing.
I cannot tell you how many people, over the course of my years, have mistaken me for someone with a college education (I only graduated high school), and I credit this to my early and frequent love of reading. I’m hoping to pass this on to my children, as my father passed it on to me.
I attempted to teach BabyDivine baby sign language starting at about 4 months. I signed and signed and signed and signed some more, and for months he would just look at me like I had lost my mind - and I felt like an idiot. Then around 10 months, he started signing back to me, and it was great - really helped ward off a lot of the Terrible Twos because he was able to communicate simple concepts with me before he could speak clearly.
I was amazed when he started using the sign for “Finished” (meaning, “I’m finished with my food/there’s no more”) to indicate that he was done with something in other contexts, like “I want to leave” or “Get me out of the stroller.” It took a lot of patience but it really made life easier when he was pre-verbal.
Oh, and for the record, LittleDivine is just a regular kid, he’s not a “special snowflake” - he’s just one of the bunch!
Besides having my IQ tested, they tested my reading comprehension in 4th grade. According to the test I was already reading at a 10th grade level. All grown up I have a job that doesn’t even offer health insurance. I bet your poll would be pretty grim.
It’s called antimetabole.
I confess I didn’t know that off the top of my head, I had to look it up!
I was bright like that when I was a kid. I could read a little before I was three. Yes, Mom did get through the whole set of flashcards, but I was correcting the spelling on toy packaging before I was four* and my favorite book by the time I was five was – I shit you not – a book of Oscar Wilde’s children’s stories. I do not remember a time when I could not read.
I know I sound like I’m tooting my horn pretty damn hard. Wait for it.
My mother, for all her flaws, was adamant that her child would be smarter, more talented, and more successful than she was. It’s at least 75% luck that I ended up being pretty clever. She also put me in Montessori school when I was two – the rule was that you had to be toilet trained, I think. I remember a lot about that place, including the peer pressure in learning to read. She sacrificed a lot to send me to that school and to dance lessons. We were living on food stamps and welfare cheese and she had to pay the Montessori school teacher to keep an eye on me after school for a few hours until she got out of work to pick me up, but by God she was going to make sure her daughter had the opportunities she never did.
We moved with the military and got to Florida. I had to start kindergarten not long after that. They gave me the typical placement tests. At this time, at least, these tests did not really include reading. They included a lot of other stuff, though, including physical fitness and manual dexterity. Despite dance and violin classes, I was pretty pathetic at both of those – not to mention being a really, really shy kid who was uncomfortable around all these people without Mom around. They placed me somewhat south of average and slung me into developmental kindergarten.
Mom was enraged. I thought I spent two weeks there, but time is funky to a six year old – it was more like two days before she got me in front of the principal and sat me down to read to him from the newspaper. They agreed to more testing and found out that I was indeed reading at a college level. Yes, I comprehended what I was reading. I understood plot, theme, motivation, character development. No, nobody ever taught me this stuff.
They pulled me out of kindergarten (I was disappointed – kindergarten was easy and fun) and plunked me into second grade English, first grade everything else, and the gifted program that took me out of normal school one or two days a week. Mom continued to have problems with me reading everything in sight. She never needed to have ‘the Talk’ with me: she just bought me the “What’s Happening To My Body Book for Girls” when I was about eight or nine (with the understanding that I should come to her with questions) and knew I’d understand that a lot better.
And what did that get me? Not much. I can spell and my grammar is a good bit better than average. I made fantastic grades in high school with minimal effort. Because of that, I never learned how to work or study – at least, not until I was almost done with school, and by then I was tired of being a student. I’m regretting it now that I realize I want to go back to school and use my very greatest talent and most ridiculous obsession to make a living. So far it’s gained me a pretty little clasp I was given as a reward for placing in a small contest.
To sum up: yes, a baby can be taught to read. Yes, I think it’s a good thing: my life has been infinitely enriched by reading. No, I don’t think there’s any problem teaching little kids all sorts of things. Kids thrive on structure and order. They need love too, obviously, and that more than all the rest, but to a small child, anything can be fun and anything can be a game. Use common sense and compassion and you’ll probably be fine.
*There was this set of Duplo-or-whatever toys that misspelled Pirates. They spelled it Priates. I was pretty upset that they got it wrong. I thought I was six or so when I reminded Mom of it years later but she explained, a little shocked, that no – I’d been three.