Addressing the Special Needs of Gifted Children, #7 - Page 9

[Girl Named Sandoz]

This discussion on reading is fascinating for me.

While reading it I realised that somehow I only view my ds as 'reading' when he is decoding phonetically. Interestingly, I was chatting to my mother about ds' reading and she didn't really think 'sight' or 'whole word' reading counted as reading - only when I told her that he is decoding words phonetically did she say: "Oh, so he really is reading!"

Ds has been recognizing words by sight (such as the STOP on the stop sign) from around 18 months, and he knew phonics (as they correspond to letters) a while before that. Deriving from my own experience (I have a photographic memory) I didn't count as 'reading' when he exclaimed "Stop!" upon seeing a stop sign. Instead I put it down to visual memory skills (here, again, I now realise that I mentally seperated visual memory/ sight reading skills from 'phonetic' reading skills and only counted the latter as 'real' reading).

This thread has made me think about the definition of 'reading' and the skills involved in an entirely different way. Everyone's experiences are very interesting and thought-provoking.

[loraxc]

Ds has been recognizing words by sight (such as the STOP on the stop sign) from around 18 months, and he knew phonics (as they correspond to letters) a while before that. Deriving from my own experience (I have a photographic memory) I didn't count as 'reading' when he exclaimed "Stop!" upon seeing a stop sign.

We didn't count it initially either when Froglet did the same thing--but when I wrote "Stop" on a piece of paper for her and she "read" that, we realized she was sight-reading....though I do agree that it isn't the same as full reading. Froglet also knows phonics, as in what sounds letters make, but she doesn't seem very able to apply it yet. The wheels are turning, but slowly.

[ChristaN]

DD#1 is a whole word reader, too -- her reading just took off once she started reading that way and we stopped trying to help her sound out words that she didn't know and just told her what they were. One tip that I picked up from the GDC's handouts on visual spatial learners and spelling was having the child picture the words in his/her head to remember how to spell it. Those of us who learn in the whole word manner and are also good spellers (I'm probably not the best speller, so maybe I shouldn't include myself here ) seem to do that naturally. Dd definitely does.

In any case, I was trying one of their methods last night in helping dd practice for her spelling test: write the word on a piece of white paper with the 'hard part' in different colors; have the kid hold it at arm's length and study the word; then have her close her eyes and visualize the word in space and have the letters do funny things like dance; now have her close her eyes and spell it backward, then forward; now have her write it down just once. I tried this w/ dd, and she was spelling words like "fairness" and "compare" backwards on the first try.

[Girl Named Sandoz]

That is how I spell too: I have a visual image of a word in my head and copy that onto paper. Only when the mental image of a word is 'blurry' for some reason, do I need to use phonics to aid with spelling.

loraxc - I did the same thing. I wrote STOP on a piece of paper and he read it. It wasn't dependent on the contextual information of the red stop sign. That's when I knew he was sight-reading but I still didn't count it as 'real' reading.

Only by reading the responses and experiences of others here do I realise that some children skip the 'phonetical decoding' stage all together. However, I see incorporating knowledge of phonetical rules as beneficial in reading [as ds is starting to do]. I feel that it will help with the decoding of new and unfamiliar words. It also seems that it will be easier to be able to decode foreign-language texts with the knowledge of [their] phonetical systems. Since ds is bilingual, this issue is important to me.

Any input?

[eilonwy]

Originally Posted by ChristaN

In any case, I was trying one of their methods last night in helping dd practice for her spelling test: write the word on a piece of white paper with the 'hard part' in different colors; have the kid hold it at arm's length and study the word; then have her close her eyes and visualize the word in space and have the letters do funny things like dance; now have her close her eyes and spell it backward, then forward; now have her write it down just once. I tried this w/ dd, and she was spelling words like "fairness" and "compare" backwards on the first try.

You wanna know something weird? I can totally do this stuff, I remember learning music that way... highlighting accidentals in different colors, then picturing them...weird.

I have no trouble remembering things backwards and forwards, especially if I can see them on a piece of paper; I've got an excellent visual memory (not quite photographic, but damned close when it comes to words and numbers), but in terms of my own position in space I'm totally clueless.

[Nora'sMama]

Originally Posted by eilonwy

You wanna know something weird? I can totally do this stuff, I remember learning music that way... highlighting accidentals in different colors, then picturing them...weird.

Wow, reading the recent posts on VS learners has made me realize that I must be one of them. The first word I "read" was an EXIT sign. I don't remember ever learning phonics. I picture words in order to spell them. (They either "look right" or they don't.) And with music, I am a good sight reader...EXCEPT for notes way above or below the grand staff, or way above/below the other notes nearby in the measure etc. I don't really have it memorized (after all this time) that a certain note is "high G", but rather I know it in relation to other notes around it...and if there are no other notes around it, I frequently get it wrong when sight-reading. A lot of my music has "idiot marks" in it where I write in the really low and high notes...very embarrassing to someone who learned to read music at age 5! I don't actually decode key signatures, either.

This makes so much sense to me...why I was 'hyperlexic' in some ways, a terrific speller, and then had bizarro stupid moments that made me doubt that I could even read (I'd be reading quickly and mistake one word for another that had a similar combination of letters, etc.).

(OK, epiphany over, carry on! - I know it's probably annoying that my posts are all about *me* and not my gifted child...but I'm learning so much about my struggles as a child through this thread! Please forgive me!)

Elizabeth

[EXOLAX]

This is interesting... Our DD did similiar things. Was recognizing stop, exit and open signs at 2. She wrote her name before she turned 3 but I honestly think all of it was memorization. We would sit at her art table which has a top with a roll of paper that comes out over it and she would scribble and draw and we would do the same. I wrote many "I love you"'s and included her name so I figured it was memorization. She could "read" words out of context as well but again I still believe it was from memory and not actual reading because she new her letters. I'm not sure how backward she did things but she wrote before she read. She new all of her upper case letters and would write words (me dictating spelling to her) and would go through periods of wanting to learn to read which she would soon loose interest in (read: become frustrated with) until shortly after she turned 4 and got the bug to learn to read and it held fast.

Phonics drive both of us nuts. She can phonetically read and has learned lots of the rules of the english language but thinks it's really very silly. Even the word "phonics" annoys me. ;-). She went through a period this summer of being frustrated with guess spelling, wanting to spell everything correctly and feelign really frustrated when she new she got it wrong (drew a picture of a circle and wrote 'crcl' saying she new it was wrong because she didn't use any vowels"). She seems ok with creative spelling now, but still asks if she spelled things "the right way". Much of our language is memory based because so many words just don't make sense phonetically.

[Nora'sMama]

I'm just curious...several of you have referred to non-phonetic or whole-word reading as not "real" reading...um, if the reader can decode text and understand its meaning, why would that be any less "real" than if they had done so phonetically? I really don't get that one. I totally understood what I read when I was 4 even though I wasn't reading using phonics...I could read new material and talk about it with you, no problem. Seemed like real reading to me!

As far as I know I never did the phonics thing and I'm a very fast, able reader at the age of 30...although I sometimes have those tics where I see one word for another word, I quickly correct myself and it's usually when I'm reading at warp speed. So I don't think that being a "whole-word" reader has hampered me one bit. Why is reading this way less desirable?

[Nora'sMama]

Originally Posted by xaloxe

Much of our language is memory based because so many words just don't make sense phonetically.

Right; I would think for readers of English phonics would be next to useless as a system for learning to read - more exceptions than rules. A language like Spanish would be much easier to learn to read phonetically.

[Girl Named Sandoz]

Nora'sMama - That's what I've been trying to say in this thread, that I now realise (after reading everyone's experiences) that some children skip the phonetical decoding stage and are natural 'sight readers'. I'd count it as reading if it's done with understanding and the child can read unfamiliar texts, i.e. decode unfamiliar words.

[Girl Named Sandoz]

Yes, of course, all reading has to be done with understanding. Whether it's phonetic or 'by sight'.

The definition of reading I gave above is not my own. My degree is in modern language studies. This is how reading is generelly defined in education. I'm not saying that a child who is reading fluently but needs some help with a new word here and there isn't reading. This is different from a child who relies on memory alone for a collection of familiar words and cannot decode any new words on their own.

I'm generelly in favour of a mixed approach, incorporating both phonics and 'real texts', i.e. reading in context. This type of approach has been shown to be most effective in educational settings. Most important however is, IMO, to discover our children's unique learning style and adjust our teaching style accordingly.

[eilonwy]

Originally Posted by Nora'sMama

I'm just curious...several of you have referred to non-phonetic or whole-word reading as not "real" reading...um, if the reader can decode text and understand its meaning, why would that be any less "real" than if they had done so phonetically? I really don't get that one. I totally understood what I read when I was 4 even though I wasn't reading using phonics...I could read new material and talk about it with you, no problem. Seemed like real reading to me!

Decoding text and inferring meaning is not necessarily reading. If you wouldn't recognize or be able to decode an individual word, you can't read it. That's my opinion. If you only recognize one configuration of a word (i.e., as a capitalized word at the begining of a sentence) but don't recognize any others, you're not reading it. The way I see it, reading is the ability to decode and infer meaning from words and from text.

I know that most people here will disagree with me, but in my experience people who read whole words exclusively often have problems later on. I've personally encountered people who would appear to be literate but who still guess when they see new words, or have a whole vocabulary of words that they can't pronounce at all and that they've only learned one definition of (in other words, they learned the words from context and never learned that the words are useful or more appropriate in other contexts). Lots of people wouldn't consider these things "problems" at all, but call them quirks and move on, or simply not be aware of them, but it's important to me. Most people will say that there's absolutely no difference between someone who learned to read phonetically and someone who learned to read whole words; In my experience, this simply isn't true.

Yes, there are plenty of exceptions to phonetic rules in English, but most of the language is phonetic. Sorry, but it's true. It's not 100% phonetic, but it is more phonetic than anything else. Lots of kids can learn to read whole words, but a fair number will not learn to read until they recieve explicit phonics instruction. Percentage-wise, there are more kids who *cannot* learn to read whole words than kids who *cannot* learn to read phonetically. The idea that "everyone can learn to read whole words" has been thoroughly disproved; the idea that "everyone can learn to read phonetically" has also been disproved, but the fact is that the majority of kids can and will learn to read when taught with an explicitly phonetic approach.

I have very strong feelings on this subject. I hear things like, "Why is it okay for a grownup to guess but not a kid?" Um, it's not! Then long arguments about how most people will intuit the rules of phonics when they learn to read whole words (only true of, what, 30% of the population of kids who are capable of learning to read whole words?), or how it takes so much longer to read phonetically (failing to recognize the differences between fluent readers and begining readers)... it drives me crazy. Maybe the issues are minor for most people, maybe they really don't come up at all, but I've seen them in my own life, and seen them cause problems for people that I'd personally like to avoid with my own kids. If you can learn to read whole words, bully for you; in my (non-professional) opinion, there's still a great deal of benefit to be derived from learning/teaching explicit phonics.

That's all I have to say about that.

I've got a headache, and the kids are wild today. The weather is absolutely lovely, though; I feel guilty for not taking them outside, but there's no way that I can chase them-- I just want to go to sleep. My eyes are blurry, and I'm feeling generally run down and miserable. It sucks. Maybe when Mike gets home, I'll be able to talk him into taking the kids to the park. It would be good for all three of them to get out a bit... besides, that punk took a nap when he came home from work yesterday and ruined my whole evening. : It's my turn to take a nap!

[mamaverdi]

I tend to like phonics.

Let's talk math for a minute. Saxon, Singapore, others. Or link me to where we already did....

Math manipulatives is the kind of thing I'm looking for. Something kinesthetic. Montessori-ish.

[darien]

I agree with you, Eilonwy.

I may be booed back to semi-lurking, but I have to put my support for phonics out there.

I'm a reading teacher, so I've been lucky enough to see how many, many different kids approach learning to read. One thing I'm convinced of is that sight-reading and phonics are both necessary for optimal reading skill.

But... (and here's where I expect the vegetables to start flying)... I've come to believe that phonics is more important and should be overtly taught, BEFORE sightreading is an entrenched habit. My reasoning is this: 1) Language is a code; phonics is the decoding system. Even if there are many holes and oddities, it's best to know the "rules" before you play the game. 2) Sightreading places the burden of reading on the memory. This can strain even the most prodigious memory. Even very gifted kids tend to flounder as they get older and read material full of words they've never encountered. 3) Relying only on sightreading is hard to unlearn. The kids I've encountered who could (sight)read before learning phonics tended to be resistant to "sounding out," preferring to guess instead. Even with basic materials, this strategy doesn't work too well!

On the other hand, kids who learned phonics first seemed more relaxed (didn't panic at seeing an unfamiliar word). After lgetting comfortable sounding out, THEN they began to sight-read-- remembering words they'd sounded out previously/words that don't follow phonetic rules. So, they had TWO reading strategies available.

I'm not debating that different people learn best in different ways, or that differing methods of learning to read can have merit. Still, I think especially for gifted kids, who are likely to read early and spontaneously, some straightforward phonics instruction is a good idea. :

[eilonwy]

Originally Posted by Britishmum

But when would that be with so many gifted kids who learn to read by the age of 3? Should we start teaching phonics to toddlers, just in case they start recognising whole words? Dd was going around giving name tags to people at about the age she learned to walk, so should I have started phonics lessons immediately?

Truth be told, this is why I don't feel too guilty telling BooBah the sounds that letters make. She absolutley loves words, is already making an effort to read, and I want her to have the exposure to phonics beforehand. So, if your toddler is ready, heck yeah.

Math-- I started a math thread over in Learning at Home and Beyond. I kept meaning to ask a mod to make it a sticky over there, but I forgot. At any rate, it might be helpful to you. I don't know if math programs have been discussed in any detail on this thread. BeanBean is doing Singapore, and I'm seriously considering getting EarlyBird 1A for BooBah (who wants to "do homework" with her brother ) but I haven't had a good look at it yet. I am finding all kinds of ways to include manipulatives in the Singapore program, it's not at all difficult to add to it.

[EXOLAX]

Originally Posted by Britishmum

With dd, she came across phonics through a computer game that I foolishly let her play once. I saw her suffer the same stress as myself - she started decoding madly and barking at print that in the past she would have read comfortably. It became a chore, not a pleasure. I stopped the phonics game after that and after a few months of 'de-phonic-ing' she started to enjoy reading again.

I think this was a poorly done game. The problem we have with phonics is that DD knows the sounds of letters, and reads words, but ends up reading them incorectly or using imaginative spelling that is innacurate because there are so many exceptions in the english language. For sure when introducing phonics I don't feel it's appropriate to inundate the children with confusing words, "is" being a very simple example (which DD pronounced phonetically when first reading until quickly memorizing to read 'iz'). This is the problem I have with phonics, but we do it none-the-less, with whole-word reading mixed in and memorization. For perfectionist children phonics can be confusing, and I see perfection as a common trait amongst bright children.

For math we haven't started any kind of program yet, but DD loves the "Sir Cumference" books and for older children I would recommed "G is for Google" as I mentioned earlier. We're still using a hands-on play based approach to math concepts with simple addition and subtraction and some fractions.

[darien]

Britishmum, I think you're misinterpreting me. I apologise for not expressing myself well. I didn't mean to suggest oppressing or repressing any child with phonics-- not forcing it on them, not boring them to tears, not making them change their reading approach. I simply mean that phonics is important information, so burgeoning readers should have it brought to their attention. If they don't want or need it, so be it.

I'm not an advocate of forcing square pegs into round holes. I have an unschooling, gifted ds who is about as "oddly shaped" as they come. I just wanted to share what I've experienced teaching reading; I'm not trying to mandate anything....

[Nora'sMama]

Hey, I just thought of something re: whole word reading vs. phonics. I assume I was a whole word reader, but I definitely learned French (and subsequent foreign languages) phonetically. Even though French, like English, is a complicated language phonetically, I can't imagine having learned it otherwise. So maybe the answer is to let whole word readers do their thing but concomitantly teach them a foreign language to open them up to using the tool of phonetics? (Since I agree with whoever said that having BOTH strategies as tools is ideal...did someone say that, or did I just think it? )

However, I wouldn't start with French, ideally. Spanish and Italian both come to mind as languages that are easy to learn phonetically.

[mamaverdi]

But I love French!

mv

[eilonwy]

I love French, too. But I'm still starting with Hebrew, which I suppose is truly phonetic... as long as you're always looking at the nikudot (vowels). I think that one of the reasons that foreign languages always seemed so easy for me to pick up was that the first one I learned had an entirely different writing system. After Hebrew, everything else seemed easy... of course, the theory isn't perfect; of the 5 other members of my immediate family, only one other has the same facility with language that I do and they were all introduced to Hebrew early on. I'll have to work that one out eventually.

SIL has been playing this Spanish computer game with BeanBean. He's learned all of his colors in Spanish, but he has SIL's most atrocious accent. Don't get me wrong, I'm by no means a native speaker, but her accent is so horrible that the words sound incorrect to me. I've got a great ear for languages, and it drives me buggy to listen to them sometimes. The game uses native speakers, SIL just has a tin ear; in much the same way that she can't hear pitches (and, oh, she really can't!) she can't hear accents. If I can't remember how a word is pronounced in a foriegn language, I won't say it. I'd rather not train my kids' ears to hear the wrong sounds, you know?

I've been getting Muzzy ads in the mail. They're cute, and they make me feel kind of guilty and depressed. I'm going to have to unsubscribe from their list.