How kids learn to read

[AllisonR]

My DS and DD are learning to read. But wow, do they have different styles. 

DD is very verbal. She learns words by sounding them out loud. M-I-L-K = Milk. 

 

DS is very visual. It seems to me that he does not listen to the sounds of words or sound them out. Instead he remembers the letter order, or the shapes of the letters together. Like a picture I guess. He sees the letters MILK together, and because he has seen them together before, he knows it is milk. 

I am assuming DDs reading style is more typical. I am curious about DSs style though - how common is it? How did your kids learn - by sounding, or by letter form, or some other way? Just curious. 

[laohaire]

The verbal style (left brain) used to be a lot more common but the visual style (right brain) is increasingly becoming more common.

I am left brained but DH is right brained. DD is right brained.

Right brained kids tend to read at a later age than left brained kids, but that does not mean any handicap (the main way to handicap a right brained kid, in my opinion, is to force them to try to read before they are ready).

[Cyllya]

My understanding is that your son's style of reading is how pretty much everyone reads once they actually know how to read. Sounding things out is only used for rare, unfamiliar words.

[laohaire]

True, but these are two methods for learning how to read.

Left brained children learn part-to-whole (initially sounding out, looking at the individual letters, but only later memorizing the shape of a word), right brained children learn whole-to-part (initially memorizing the shape of words, but only later seeing how the letters that make up the word correlate to the sounds). Ideally we all end up in the same place: reading by seeing the shape of words, but capable of sounding out any letter, and capable of looking more closely at a word if you assumed the wrong one.

[eclipse]

My oldest son really seemed to do both simultaneously. There was never a sounding out phase for him, but he definitely used phonics and seemed to intuit and broadly apply complex phonetic rules. Between 3.5 and 4 yo, he jumped from CVC words to chapter books. If he ever asked me what a word was, he would remember it seemingly indefinitely.

DD was a pure phonetic reader. She was also a young reader, but definitely went through the sounding out phase.

DS2 is just like your son. He has a huge number of words that he recognizes by sight (including lots of odd, long words that happen to coincide with his interests), but he can't sound anything out and he frequently gets words that are similar shapes mixed up (though in context, he 's usually able to figure it out. For example, in reading a litst of words, he might mix up witch and watch, but he wouldn't do that when reading a story about a witch.) By his age (5.5) my older two were both fluent readers - ds1 read Harry Potter the summer before kindergarten and dd was reading chapter books around the equivalent of the Magic Tree House series at his age. DS2 is not a fluent reader - but I'm not worried. It's coming for him, but I doubt he'll ever be a sound it out kind of reader.

[4evermom]

Your ds sounds like mine.  He learned to read through memorizing sight words that were important to him and expanded from there.  He didn't really start reading until he well into his 8th year (of life, not school, lol).  I'm sure he could have read easy readers at an earlier age but he had absolutely no interest and no patience for that level book.  And he hated everything about phonics although he knew his letters and sounds since he was 3.  I know he uses them for clues, though.  He makes mistakes with similar words from time to time but he has been sorting them out.  Kids like this tend to learn big words before small words. 

[L J]

My son is visual, like your son. He has memorized entire books and reads them to me, pointing to the words. When I try to work with him phonetically, he is lost and frustrated. So, I am just helping him to recognize more words. Actually, that is how I learned to read, also, and I am a very avid reader now, so it must be okay!

[jeteaa]

I'm thinking my dd1 who is 6 is a visual learner. ex: she can read the work "like" by seeing the word then immediately saying it. However, show her the work "bike" and she struggles to sound it out. So at some point the word "like" really stuck in her memory, but many other site words that she sees every day aren't sticking. 

[MomtoDandJ]

My son (4yo) learns by sounding each letter out.  I occasionally have to explain why a certain letter makes a certain sound (like the hard C, soft C distinction) but once I explain it he's fine.  He's definitely a auditory learner.

I found this article really helpful once my son showed interest in reading.  It has tips for introducing letters and sounds.

[Red Pajama]

I'm teaching my twin boys to read. I've noticed that one boy picks up new words very quickly, and is a sight reader. Phonics and sounding out are difficult for him.  My other son depends on sounding out, and has fewer words he knows, but is better able to sound out an unfamiliar word.  Both methods are valid, although children who read well early are often sight word readers.

Personally, I think the best instruction is a blend of the two methods:  lots of reading together for pleasure, books on CD, re-reading of familiar books, as well as a detailed instruction in phonics.

[LynnS6]

I had one of each - ds learned by sounding things out and building them up from bits. That's how he learned to talk to. Dd learned by learning the shapes of the words and then assigning meaning to the chunks. It's how she learned to talk too -- she'd have these great 'phrases' where you could tell what she was saying by intonation, and then suddenly, boom, there would be words there. Her beginning spelling was very similar. She'd have all the letters, but not the order. Snow could be "Sown" or "Snow" or "Swon" or "Snwo". She got a healthy dose of phonics in 1st grade and has blossomed into a great speller.

In psycholinguistics, these processes are termed "bottom up" and "top down". Some people focus more on the bottom up processes and are more detail oriented. Others are 'big' picture readers. There's a large developmental aspect to it as well. Most children start 'reading' by learning a few chunks, then they learn the pieces of the chunks and start sounding out, then they start recognizing patterns and putting the pieces back together as chunks. Most adults read by the shape of the word and not by sounding it out. Only when we hit words we've never encountered before (novel names, unfamiliar terms etc.) do we have to sound them out. But if you are a top-down reader, you may not bother to sound things out. It wasn't until I actually had to teach the term "arcuate fasciculus" that I learned to pronounce it. I remember reading the book Eragon and it wasn't until I heard someone say King Galbatorix that I realized I'd never sounded out the word. He was just King Gsomething in my mind. My husband and my son, on the other hand, have to stop and sound everything out.

Most teaching programs can (and should) focus on both kinds of skills - at least for English. If you're learning Spanish or Italian, you can skip the sight words and analogy because things can always be sounded out. If you're learning English, you need to recognize some patterns without sounding them out (sight, fight, light, right..) and some things by sounding them out.