Support for Parents of Gifted Children, #4 - Page 9

[eilonwy]

Originally Posted by Daffodil

Actually, I don't think the Baudelaire I was referring to has been around quite that long.

:LOL

[Charles Baudelaire]

Originally Posted by NoHiddenFees

This is a straw man.

Really? In what sense? In what way is the argument weak? Moreover, it would only be a true straw man if I were setting up a deliberately weak argument myself to refute it myself.

"Pure" whole language without phonics expects students to memorize whole words, no? Many words in English, yes? "Pure" phonics expects students to memorize phonemes, no? 40-45 in English, yes? Which of my facts are wrong. I await your reply eagerly.

Sight readers often intuit the basic rules of phonics on their own, and I've even the staunchest whole language supporters among my teacher friends include incidental phonics.

I wholly agree that different students respond differently to different techniques; however, many, many students do NOT "intuit the basic rules of phonics on their own." Witness the sharp decline in literacy before and after whole-language programs were instituted in U.S. schools on a regular basis for ample proof that whole language by itself simply doesn't work.

OTOH, children taught by either method in a school setting who are then exposed primarily to texts carefully designed to contain no words or phrases adjudged to be above their grade level would suffer in comparison.

Now on this, we are in complete accord. :

[USAmma]

Putting my mod hat one for a minute

Um, the phonics vs. sight-reading debate is getting a little bit off topic. It's okay to discuss those issues relating to the special needs of your children. However if you want to debate this in general terms, you'll have to move it to another forum. Thanks!

[Daffodil]

Originally Posted by isisjade

I'm feeling slightly misunderstood, since it was my post you quoted, and I certainly didn't say anything about not using phonics when reading. In fact, in my previous post, I pointed out the same thing that you just quoted from NoHiddenFees about readers intuiting the rules. Did you read my post in its entirety? (I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely confused .)

I guess I did misunderstand you. I did read your whole post (really, I did!), but it sounded to me like you were saying that, although phonics is part of learning to read, proficient readers no longer use it. One or two other people had said basically that same thing, and I quoted your post instead of theirs just because you seemed to say it more succintly. Sorry for missing your point.

[Charles Baudelaire]

Originally Posted by Daffodil

What happens when you see a word like "thest" or "riddick" or "pruxollity?" Don't you find you can read those words essentially instantly, without consciously using any phonics rules? And yet, if you can read them, you MUST be using phonics. You certainly haven't memorized them. And I would argue that a person who can't read those words (or any other completely unfamiliar words) can't claim to have fully mastered reading.

Well and the problem is that beyond the relatively small group of words that pure whole-language students can memorize on sight, most words above about the fifth-grade level ARE about as strange as pruxollity or thest or riddick. Man, you should see what happens when we tackle Shakespeare. The problem is not that the words are unfamiliar; the problem is that they a) don't know how to "sound them out," b) they substitute lookalike words for the ones they can't read or c) skip the words altogether.

[Charles Baudelaire]

Originally Posted by delphinemere

Phonics is an integral part of reading. Phonics is also an integral part of Whole Language instruction.

Now it is, far more than it used to be, mostly as a result of discovering that the original way WL was taught resulted in widespread illiteracy.

Reading, however, is much more than phonics. Reading is a transaction of a reader interpreting words (not meaningless strings of letters) on the page. True reading deals with the construction of meaning from the text - you don't just get that from phonics alone. Phonics can work as a reading strategy, but for good readers it is a strategy that is far too slow to work in the long term. Young children who study within an intensely phonics-focused curriculum "sound" great early on, but then they fall behind around the middle of elementary school when the nature of reading suddenly requires readers to gather ever-more-complicated new ideas from passages with ever-more-words.

But to draw an analogy with what you are saying, surgery is much more than learning body parts. It is the transaction of a surgeon cutting and altering those body parts in a patient. Nevertheless, without the dog-work of memorizing what those anatomical structures ARE, the real surgery can't take place. Would you have someone thrust into med school with (ideally) a cadaver on the first day and have the professor say, "Okay, operate!"? That would be absurd. (Oh, and for th record, THAT was a straw man argument... :LOL )

Baudelaire existed long before current reading research so I'm not going to use him for anything other than some enjoyable old poetry to brush up on my French.

Yeah, unfortunately, I am about that old.

[oldcrunchymom]

Hey, USamma said "mod hat ONE" instead of "mod hat ON." She must be a product of the whole word movement! :LOL

(okay no more OT posts, I promise)

[USAmma]

Originally Posted by lckrause

Hey, USamma said "mod hat ONE" instead of "mod hat ON." She must be a product of the whole word movement! :LOL

(okay no more OT posts, I promise)

:LOL :LOL :LOL

or maybe I'm just sleep deprived

[eilonwy]

:LOL

Lisa, how's Hollis doing?

[NoHiddenFees]

I'm not going to continue the wl/phonics debate, I just want to clear up one point as requested.

Originally Posted by Charles Baudelaire

But to draw an analogy with what you are saying, surgery is much more than learning body parts. It is the transaction of a surgeon cutting and altering those body parts in a patient. Nevertheless, without the dog-work of memorizing what those anatomical structures ARE, the real surgery can't take place. Would you have someone thrust into med school with (ideally) a cadaver on the first day and have the professor say, "Okay, operate!"? That would be absurd. (Oh, and for th record, THAT was a straw man argument...

To be a straw man, the argument need not be weak, it can also be non-representative of the opponent's view. Your statement equating "pure" whole language instruction to learning Chinese was a straw man argument because you took an extreme, exaggerated whole language position -- one no whole language advocate I know espouses -- and knocked it down. There was no discussion of the utility (or lack thereof) of, for example, incidental phonics... just the "pure" approach.

You may choose to disagree with my calling your characterization extreme, but it is within this context I called it a straw man and stand by my statement.

[TiredX2]

For the younger kids (and my "olders" like it too---3.5 & 6) just to look at:

http://www.bemboszoo.com/

It is a kind of annimated alphabet. Kinda cute. I may have gotten in from this thread in fact

[NoHiddenFees]

Originally Posted by TiredX2

For the younger kids (and my "olders" like it too---3.5 & 6)

Heck... for me, and no one's called me "young" lately.

[ChristaN]

On a totally different topic than you all have been discussing : , I notice many people mentioning their children (plural) here. I am curious if most of you consider all or more than one of your children to be gifted? I know that, in my family of origin, I was identified as gifted as a child, but my brother was very average academically, if that. I don't know how common it is for multiple children in one family to be academically gifted.

I am quite confident that my 6 y/o falls into that category. While my younger dd (4.5) has had very similar development to her older sister (spoke very early, is reading simple books, etc.), she has a very different personality. My older dd fit all of the descriptors you hear of gifted children in infancy. She never slept, has perfectionist tendencies, had an amazingly long attention span even when she was very little, seemed extremely frustrated with her baby body and so on. My younger one is a much more even keeled person. She was a pretty normal baby & is a pretty normal 4 y/o other than being a bit fast on the development timetable for speech and academics.

As long as she is a happy little person, I don't really care what label she is given. I was just curious if it is common for younger children to follow the same curve as their older siblings.

[NoHiddenFees]

Originally Posted by ChristaN

As long as she is a happy little person, I don't really care what label she is given. I was just curious if it is common for younger children to follow the same curve as their older siblings.

It's my understanding that sibling IQ's are usually within 5 points, but that gifted seconds don't get identified as often as firstborns. I'm not sure this lack of recognition is still the case, however..

I'm not yet certain about DD2's giftedness, but I have my suspicions. She's cleverer with her hands than her sister was at that age and she's hitting her physical milestones earlier (though even at 98th percentile, she's substantially smaller than DD1 was). She can go down stairs correctly, but is generally not interested in doing so. She can already put large shape puzzle pieces in the right slot when she feels like it. She is definitely talking earlier, or at least I'm recognizing it earlier (with help from a friend : ). Her attention span for read aloud is not so great (aside from demanding to be told the names of things in the illustrations) but she will turn the pages of her board books quite contentedly without my input for substantial periods of time. To be fair, she hears me reading to big sis for at least 30 minutes a day. Maybe that's enough for her. She's impossible to redirect, out of sight has never been out of mind. Her receptive vocabulary is impressive, in spite of the fact she doesn't get nearly the one on one attention her sister did.

[eilonwy]

Originally Posted by ChristaN

On a totally different topic than you all have been discussing : , I notice many people mentioning their children (plural) here. I am curious if most of you consider all or more than one of your children to be gifted? I know that, in my family of origin, I was identified as gifted as a child, but my brother was very average academically, if that. I don't know how common it is for multiple children in one family to be academically gifted.

I've read that siblings are likely to have IQs within 20 points of one another, leaving a heck of a lot of room for variation.

My own children are very young and have very different personalities, abilities, and preferences; still, I am at least as confident that my 11.5 month old is gifted as I am that my 2.5 year old is gifted. BeanBean spoke a lot more than BooBah does, and earlier; BooBah's speech is easier to understand. BooBah has hit all of her physical milestones early/very early; BeanBean was on the early side of normal. In terms of attention span, they're about the same, but they focus on different things. BooBah demonstrated a sense of rhythm at 4 months; BeanBean still seems to have CRD. :LOL BeanBean will line up his cars and crash them into one another and line them up again for hours on end, while BooBah will not sit for a long time with anything that she can't put into her mouth or dance to/with. BooBah is very laid back, she's totally mellow about most things; BeanBean gets tense and hysterical much more easily than his sister does.

I don't think I have any point here. My kids are different from one another, but they both seem gifted in different ways.

It's interesting to me that you say that your brother was an average student. I've read that white girls are, statistically, the most likely children to be identified as gifted. Is it possible that your brother was also gifted, just unidentified? I've known many average and even poor students who were most assuredly gifted over the years, including myself.

[A&A]

Originally Posted by Charles Baudelaire

However, when a child is strictly taught by a whole-language method, that does something worse to English: it changes it into Chinese,




For one, you're confusing how a fluent reader reads with how a beginning reader reads. Here is an example of how this would feel like for you now as an adult.

But I'm not reading to my children in Chinese every night. English is already a language they are immersed in.

And, just to clarify, I never said "whole language only." I believe in whole language first, then phonics.

And we want beginning readers to become fluent readers -- the sooner the better; so why not teach them to think like a fluent reader?

Tying this back into giftedness-- my dd didn't just "become" gifted, perhaps good genes aside. We taught her to read in a way that made the most sense to her; then her reading skills allowed her to pursue all other sorts of knowledge.

[eilonwy]

Originally Posted by A&A

Tying this back into giftedness-- my dd didn't just "become" gifted, perhaps good genes aside. We taught her to read in a way that made the most sense to her; then her reading skills allowed her to pursue all other sorts of knowledge.

Does reading make a child gifted? All kids are average until they start to read? I don't think that anything I've taught my children has made them gifted, I seriously think that they were born that way.

[oldcrunchymom]

Originally Posted by eilonwy

Lisa, how's Hollis doing?

Thanks for asking, Rynna. Hollis is doing much better since we started doing the structured learning this week. The difference in his overall attitude is like night and day. I still feel bad for not starting it with him earlier, but I'm relieved he is feeling better. He is now asking for all kinds of help with stuff whereas he totally refused any kind of help before, so I'm confident this is the right choice for him at this point. We're finishing up a few workbooks he started/abandoned much earlier in the (school)year and when he's done with those we'll move on to some self-designed stuff yet to be determined. Definitely biology/chemistry and algebra/geometry will be in there, and Latin, but I'm not sure what else.

Not to be outdone, Nan picked up her 1st grade workbook again and blew through about 10 "weeks" worth of it in three nights. So they sort of have a little healthy competition going on there to see who can finish first. She's hot to finish the second grade one as well this summer--we'll see. The workbooks are those really big ones so she might burn out on them before she finishes. My mom (a teacher) claims Nan is academically way past the other kids her age but I don't know enough about what other kids are doing to make a judgment. My perspective on what's "average" is hopelessly skewed by now anyway. I know she is definitely not where Hollis was at the same age, but maybe she is hindered by not learning to read until just recently?

The kids are going on a Caribbean cruise with their dad and that WHOLE side of the family (seriously, like 20+ people) this coming week, so I'm going to use the free time to try to make some sort of "plan." Lord help us all! :LOL

Kind of tying into the "are both your kids gifted" question above... although Hollis did the academic stuff way early, he was just average with most physical milestones. And although Annika is more average with her academics, she's always been very precocious with artistic and physical stuff. They are opposites in practically every way imaginable, but fortunately they get along really well. Otherwise I would have run screaming into the night long ago.

[TiredX2]

Originally Posted by ChristaN

On a totally different topic than you all have been discussing : , I notice many people mentioning their children (plural) here. I am curious if most of you consider all or more than one of your children to be gifted? I know that, in my family of origin, I was identified as gifted as a child, but my brother was very average academically, if that. I don't know how common it is for multiple children in one family to be academically gifted.

...

As long as she is a happy little person, I don't really care what label she is given. I was just curious if it is common for younger children to follow the same curve as their older siblings.

Well, statistically, our children have a very good chance of being identified as "gifted" as both DP & I were. I have no doubt in my mind that DD is gifted. She is 6 and has followed the very classical "gifted"/highly capable path. Early speech, early communication, reading, math, etc... all years ahead of her peers. It is simply who she is. We know several very smart children so it did not become obvious to me until she was slightly older that there was something truly different going on with her.

DS, meanwhile, I am only beginning to consider gifted. I really do not know what to think about him. He spoke earlyish, but not as proficiently as DD. He isn't reading (and will be 4 in August). He counts and understands basic addition & subtraction but is far behind where DD was at that age. BUT, he has many signs of giftedness that aren't so academically focused--- he is very logical, he has always been alert (as DD was/is), very active, great at games & puzzles, understands a lot of things, has a firm grasp of sarcasm/irony and a great sense of humor (definately older than his age group), etc... BUT, DD seems to be very much like I was as a child so it is easier for me to "see" in her. I do not know if DS will be identified as gifted (as DD has been at this point) but based on the other signs/genetics I am just going with "it". It is not as if I do anything different "because" DD and/or DS is "gifted"--- I still follow their lead. If DD had not been as gifted (I would assume she is highly rather than moderately, but my friend who's sister graduated from the UW Early Entrance at 14 and then did law school before she became an adult says DD reminds her very much of her sister ) or not "gifted" as all, we probably would have made different educational choices but that is about it.

[isisjade]

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