Okay, so tell me about "teaching himself to read" - Page 2

[Galatea]

We do not subscribe to any particular educational philosophy other than following the child's cues for readiness.  Ds1 taught himself to read at age 5.  He knew his letters b/c we and his grandpa taught him those.  Then he wanted to write stories and captions for his drawings, so he would ask, "How do you spell ____?" and we would dictate it to him as he wrote it, especially if it was hard.  Once he got going, if it was an easy word, dh would say, "Sound it out."  They do teach basic phonics at our preschool, so ds1 knew the sounds the letters made.  Then he just read all at once, sort of like how he just started speaking all at once at age 2.5.  He had showed no interest in reading before this.

Ds1 is 5 and he is getting frustrated not being able to read b/c it limits his videogames.  *eyesroll*  He will be harder b/c he doesn't like to try new things, but he can write letters and knows basic phonics from preschool.

Dd is almost 3 and she really wants to read and pretends she reads, so I may just directly teach her.  She also spoke in complete sentences at age 1, so it makes sense that she is ready to read earlier.

Basically, we help them with the things they want to learn and that makes it easier for them to teach themselves.  I was directly taught at age 2 but do not know if it was b/c I wanted to learn.

[peaceful_mama]

I have a January 07 Sophie  :) is yours a Sophia or just Sophie?  mine's technically Sophia and that's usually how she wants me to write her name, but if you ask her she'll say Sophie....lol  anyway just in the last couple weeks she asked about writing her name and immediately wrote a very readable version of her name--yeah the "S" was backward but the name was *readable*.  back when I did preschool I remember most of my kids would "write their name" but it would be a couple identifiable letters for awhile....not many did it like her.  She's also into finding "S" everywhere and was very proud of her new ability to write the letter X about a month or so ago--so much so she wrote X's down a little strip of wall in her bedroom LOL--and then tried to blame her brother, who is 2 and scribbles...till I said "WOW he really knows how to write nice X's" or something like that...she just couldn't resist taking the credit then LOL
 

Originally Posted by St. Margaret 

Sophie definitely does both sight and sounding. She asked about letters when she was one and we told her the sounds. She knew upper and lower and names and sounds sometime before two I think. She did some early sight-reading like seeing the sign for the gap and saying grapes (we had a picture book about fruit) and names of family and favorite things she asked me to write out, probably a couple dozen words.

Sorry hit share too soon-- then she soaked up starfall for a while. Slooowly she added to her reading skills so she was always learning to read which was just her going through cycles of being really interested in trying and us helping her a bit. Lots of dr Seuss books helped her gain sight words. She could read so much by three and had been starting to write letters for a while. Over the past few months she just took off and keeps vetting better and better and now longer stamina. She can read easy readers on her own now. We have no idea how she learned so many crazy words as sight words-- just lots of reading to her I guess.