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Stories of learning to read

2K views 23 replies 11 participants last post by  Nazsmum 
#1 ·
I'm curious about how it happens. Not the age, so much, but the actual process. Did they ask to be taught? Figure it out somehow? How? I learned to read too young to remember it, and when I look at my own kids, I find it hard to imagine how such a thing is even possible -- how anyone ever makes that leap between sounding out c-a-t and reading a book.

So I'd love to compile a list of stories of how it actually happens, to help me (and hopefully others) a little more able to relax and watch it unfold.
 
#2 ·
When I first decided to homeschool, I bought a book called "The Three R's," in it the author assured me that if I simply read to my kids frequently and explained phonics in a natural and casual way, answered questions about reading when they ask them, that my kids would learn to read. So I have done it that way. My six year old (all boys) has always focused more on numbers but in the past few months he has become very interested in words and how they work. He has started sitting down with simple books and figuring them out based on words he already recognizes, context, and phonetic clues. Sure enough, he is learning to read according to his own pace and interest. My four year old recognizes probably every letter now and he's learning to read numbers as well, he seems to just absorb what I talk with his brother about.

Today we have snow (unusual for our area) and my six year old wanted to make an entry in his nature journal. He wants my help with spelling the words correctly but he writes the words and decides what to write on his own. When he's trying to read a book, he asks me if he doesn't know a word (which is often at this stage). When he's writing, he asks me if he's confused about how to shape a certain letter.

As far as teaching him, I didn't do much really. I provide fun reading and writing workbooks throughout the house that he explores at his leisure, and those have provided a lot of opportunities to talk about what letters make what sounds etc but the pace and the content has been all him. I used to worry about it, I watched my homeschooling friends who use curriculum shove reading and writing into their four year olds. My friends daughter in Montessori writes in cursive, although it seems very adult-directed and coerced to me... I got a lot of pressure from my mom because she had all of us reading at a very young age, but the more I learned about true, cognitive reading readiness signs, the more comfortable I felt with our relaxed pace. With the way he's going now, I think he'll have mastered those simple books by the end of this year, but again I keep it very relaxed, so if he hasn't that's ok too. I just want him to love reading with no pressure. So far so good! It happens very naturally if you just read to them a lot and explain what it is you're reading.
 
#3 ·
My now 17 year old and 13 year old who are in school, both taught themselves how to read. The older one, my daughter, was very driven, intense and determined from a very young age, however, she didn't start school until she was almost 6 and when she saw her little friends getting early readers, she insisted to get them too, and so she progressed on a pretty steady track along with her grade peers. We always thought if we had of worked a little harder at it she would have been reading at three, but we didn't care too much. By the time my son was 5 he was on the computer, and watching Pokemon. And that's how he taught himself, I don't remember if there were subtitles, or just the name of the Pokemon popped up, but between the show and the cards, he taught himself. Now my 9.5 year old, started homeschooling this year because of the trouble he had in school. I did a bit of All About Reading with him back in September, but I don't know if it helped. More help probably came from the archives of this forum, where people told similar stories to ours, and that their kids evolved into reading on their own. Little is watching some Mario video on the computer, which is subtitled, he can pause it, read it, and continue. He wears headphones so he reads quite loud and so we track his progress with that. He can't sound out and has the classic dyslexic middle of the word blindness, so right now he is building his mental library of every word.....and that will be how he learns to read.....I think.
HTH
Relax, your guy sounds super brilliant, he'll shock your shorts off one day when he picks up a book and reads it from cover to cover, (if I remember correctly he said when he is 11? Yes)
Do you wear shorts in Alaska?
Anna
:)
 
#4 ·
My children mostly learned invisibly, privately.

My eldest gave me one clue very early on that she could sound things out ("press" off the seatbelt release), and then she put up a brick wall on the learning-to-read issue and that was that. I believe she gained fluency by poring over mail-order catalogues, since her apparently-sudden startling fluency in reading had been preceded by several months of odd obsession with such material.

With my ds I was pretty sure he was reading some computer-game menus, and I could see he was trying to type some meaningful filenames to save game progress (URABADEMOME = 'you are a bad mom' was the name of one memorable file-save, when I had called him away from the computer to give his sister a turn). I remember picking up "Danny and the Dinosaur" at a bookstore on a family holiday and helping him read through it with some difficulty, and he was amazed that he could do so well. Once every month or so thereafter I made an effort to sit down and "practice reading" with him (he didn't seem to want to do this often) and within 6 months or so he was pretty fluent. He was clearly reading stuff on his own in between, whether environmental print or actual books.

My middle dd learned to read while I wasn't noticing. One day we were driving through a city a few hours from home and she said "Montana's Steakhouse, does that mean they only serve stake?" and I realized she had read the sign. Poor third child with oblivious mom.

My youngest was a bit more transparent with her learning to read. She asked questions from an extremely early age, tried to sound things out, asked for help spelling things and so on. Her ability to decode seemed to arise more gradually than her siblings', over the course of 2-3 years, but I think that difference was more apparent than real. It seemed more prolonged because she was less perfectionistic about her early efforts and therefore more open about her learning. And partly it was the result of her unrecognized severe hyperopia holding her back; I think she was probably ready to progress to full fluency a year earlier than she did, but because she couldn't see well enough to get meaningful practice reading, she got stuck. During that year or so, I did a bit of what I had done with her brother, sitting down and sharing the reading aloud of simple early readers once in a while, but because she had little stamina and wasn't making much progress we didn't do much. After she got glasses it was just a few weeks before she was fully fluent, and I didn't do anything during that time other than express amazement (and feel guilty, lol).

I know that there are some kids who seem to need or at least want more help along the way than mine did. My kids were just seemed to reach a point where things clicked and at most they needed help feeling confident (like my ds and Danny and the Dinosaur) or seeing (like my youngest). My guess is that your kid is just the same: he is so bright that he is very aware of what reading is all about and what his brain needs to be able to do to make it work for him, and he knows it's just not happening for him yet. He will probably just reach the point where he can start making connections and seeing patterns and extrapolating and inferring, and quietly, internally, he'll put all the pieces together and then he'll knock your socks off (pretty sure you have socks in Alaska!). I can't promise this, of course. It's possible he'll need something different from what my kids did. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if he was just like them.

I have a friend whose unschooled daughter learned to read just before her 10th birthday. Tessa went from not really reading anything to reading everything in the space of a couple of weeks. My friend was telling someone: "Tessa learned to read in two weeks!" Her friend, a wise mama of older homeschoolers, said "Ah no, she has been learning to read for ten years. You just didn't see it until now." I would tend to agree. So much is just preparing the soil and watering the seed. And then it germinates, and something you still don't see anything happening. Some seeds put down deep roots first, before breaking the soil.

Miranda
 
#5 ·
Sometimes I get so caught up in poetic descriptions of natural learning that I forget to mention the other stuff. I sometimes mentally categorize it as just a natural part of creating an environment conducive to learning within our family. Stuff I surrounded my kids with, or that just grew out of their interests and their play.

Maybe it's worth mentioning some of it ....

Magnetic alphabet letters on the fridge for free-form play
Nursery rhymes and poems, rhyming songs, Shel Silverstein and Dennis Lee and the like
Magnetic poetry (the large text, simpler words sets), again on the fridge for free-form play
"Pretend writing" with word processing programs and big fonts
Me adding captions to the kids' drawings
Creating storybooks from their imaginary stories and illustrations, me transcribing the text, and they could "read" these books to me from memory.
Comics ... Garfield especially (I think 'lasagna' was one of my ds's first sight-words!) and also eventually Calvin & Hobbes
Graphic novels
Computer gaming, menus, cheat codes and Easter eggs
"I Spy" with "that starts with the letter __" and "that rhymes with ___" used liberally in the parental clues
A sight-word dictionary ... a scribbler with the pages labelled with letters of the alphabet, into which we wrote words a particular child could read, starting with "I" and the child's name, and to which we could excitedly add any new words that were recognized, so that the child could see progress as the entries began to accumulate.
Interest-driven fact cards (a pack of dinosaur cards for my ds with all sorts of immense latin names and info accompanying the illustrations, world geography game cards for my eldest).

Who knows if any of it made a difference, but we had all that stuff around and happening over the course of four kids.

Miranda
 
#6 ·
I learned to read by having a book on tape "Planet of the Hoojibs" that I listened to over and over and over... I had it memorized, and eventually sort of figured out how to parse the words on the page from it being completely memorized. A lot of the figuring out of phonetics followed that.

I am using a similar memorized text method with my son with dyslexia - lots of reading of the same books over and over... and he is doing great.
 
#7 ·
I should say first and foremost phonics makes zero sense to me. Some only learn to read through phonics...not me. I have some phonics based materials just in case but I don't intend on using them. (My mil doesn't think I can do it...because I don't have a license or phd!)

My son walked up to me at 2.5 and asked me to teach him but I wasn't sure it was him vs my personal hubris so I put it off and then about 8 months later he read me a book we had never read him. But until this fall (he's 6.5) didn't write, draw, color, paint...you get the idea. (I stumbled onto cursive and that solved everything.) when he was 4 or so he became frustrated by not being able to read Everything he put in his hand. We did some self esteem building, made sure we he saw us struggle to learn new things (my husband had a new video game...I made drama and pretended things were harder and vocalizing my internal monologue in learning or remembering when he was lurking behind sofas or rooms or "not paying attention"...

My daughter (4) is just starting this journey. Reading is not easy for her. She needs to be taught...but it needs to be an inception deal where she thinks its her idea.
When asked in September she said she didn't have to learn to read because someone would do it for her. Luckily my son started reading chemistry books.

Whenever possible I adapt montessori to fit our lives. They use sound/object alphabet manipulatives where 1 thing for each letter is used then move onto word groups which they organize by color. Very interesting...but that's not what I'm doing.

I scoured our toy box, the bottom every thrift store toy box to find little things. Little plastic alligators, paper sandwich coaster from the $ store (bread, bacon, lettuce, etc), Christmas ornaments, so on. I made a muslin and sharpie mini quilt and an air clay zucchini and so on. I sorted them by letter. During the week of each letter, they may play with the toys in each bag.
Every week we do letter of the week. For each letter, I print part of the 1+1+1=1 alphabet packets (free), the corresponding alphabet puppet from quality-kids-crafts (free), the letter from the oriental trading comp alphabet crafts (they have upper and lower case), a letter card, 1 alphabet book (of which I have 27 like...the ocean alphabet, the Vermont alphabet, curious George learns the alphabet, dr Seuss ABCs, etc), the corresponding Sesame Street book and the sweet pickles book, and the Dover alphabet coloring books corresponding letter pages, and the kid zone letter print outs, etc. This is work for her to do at her leisure...sometimes she does all of it, seldom none of it. That week we refer to the letter by the sound it makes not the name of the letter...and the constants are worked with each vowel (da, de, di, do, du...sometimes dy ^_^).
By about half way through the alphabet she started to have a vested interest as she was actively collecting letters. No external pressure is being put on reading. She is starting to sound words out and compare words...like ice vs water on the fridge, play vs stop on the music player.

We also have the Brand New Readers which I like at this age. They do a good job at matching pictures to short sentences. (Mouse runs. Next page: Cat runs after mouse.) they also try (successfully) to be funny...or comedic. She is making progress.

And then I made a card with the name of each object and lined section to copy the word down below it. Dolch words are also included in each pile arranged by letter.
We will do letter of the week again this time matching the word with the object and (with luck) work dolch words. As well as introduce writing these letters and stuff. And I Spy books, other beginning books.

If need be, we will run the alphabet a third time but I don't think we will need to...

It sounds like a lot but I try to make it busy work she controls. It gives me about 2.5 -4 hours a week I can focus on my son.

In addition we play the supermarket game where we have to find something with a letter of the alphabet, or rhymes with, or I am looking for something in this aisle that starts with J (jelly!) the winner puts it in the cart...or my son is sent to another section to get things I "forgot" like paper towels my daughter discovers Jelly, for example. We also play rhyming games and stuff like that.

Does that help?
 
#9 ·
My girls had two very different experiences in learning to read. I read them loads of books at the time (say, 20 stories every day, including picture books, board books, chapters of longer books). The girls would have been about 3 and 5 at this time.

DD2 liked to pile up books and look through them. We would have around 75-100 books from the library at any given time, plus our own and she would sit on the big papasan cushion by the bookshelf and pull them out one at a time to look at them. When I read on the couch, she would pull up a stack on books to look through (partly because I read big, "boring" books to her sister). Once when she was 3yo, I was reading a picture book in Spanish (an interest at the time) and she suddenly asked, "Momma, what's pahLLo?" (L's pronounced). She would have had no idea, because I would have been saying "poYo" ("pollo"=chicken).

So, her understanding that written words=spoken words, and that the letters symbolized sounds happened very early. But then, that was it for a loooooong time. Occasionally she would painstakingly sound out words (like this one from a Chinese restaurant sign) "Puh-AAAAAAAAAAAA- NNNNNNNNNN- Duh- AAAAAAAAAAAA, stretching it out interminably. But mostly, she just looked at books incessantly. She made a little cardboard box "desk" that had a cubby in it. She would store feathers in holes she poked in the top and slowly trace the letters with them like Hermione Granger. She looked at everything from board books to dense nature books.

Slowly, she just emerged, bit by bit, but it's only been since she was 7 or so that she has been comfortable enough reading at length for pleasure.

DD1 took a different trajectory. She had always been an intense listener, and enjoyed the Mowgli stories, Just So Stories, LoTR, The Hobbit, Harry Potter, all by the time she was 5; and Winnie-the-Pooh and Pippi Longstocking and the original Pinocchio when she was 2yo. For some reason, she looked at whole words, or skipped over the middle letters and made a guess. After being familiar with letters and words blah blah blah, it was really an English/Spanish storybook that got her on her way. Spanish is nice and comforting in that each letter is almost guaranteed to have the same sound every time. Being a perfectionist, she was probably mostly held back by English's trickery. It also helped her slow down a little to not trip over the middle letters.

She liked graphic novels and liked to try reading the speech bubbles while I read the narration. She liked comics collections, namely Garfield, and loved to make the sound effects ("AIIEEEEEEE!!!!!") She also loved reading the trivia questions for our LoTR game, and other game cards. She loved reading out the lengths and other facts in our beloved Oceanarium book.

For her own reading, she loved her horse book. She would copy the facts over and over (her sister liked to copy books as well). This was a slow process, and just like her sister, it's just been in the last year (since 9yo) that she has felt comfortable enough to sit and read for fun. She resisted mysteries for a long time because the work of reading interfered with the story itself, but just last week, she inhaled a (Jigsaw Jones?) mystery all by herself.

Our wooden alphabet puzzle has gotten loads of mileage. They used to love arranging the letters in a string for me to "sound out": KJHGFDSALPOIUQWEYRTMNBZXCV. Hmmm, let's see.... :p DD2 would steal my sticky notes ("my"--ha!) and trace the letters so she could make long words on the living room window. Between that toy and the game cards, those were our best reading practice tools. And the loads of books for *all* ages, of course.
 
#10 ·
Thanks everyone who's added their story. It's very interesting to read all the different strategies kids take. It seems like reading, more so than other things, can be a "sudden leap forward" thing for some children, and it's hard to know what shape it will take. So far, I haven't seen anything else like that, watching my kids. Everything else (math, general knowledge, ability to zip coats and open doorknobs, drawing and writing skills, turning your skis or climbing a tree, folding a paper plane, understanding complex concepts, etc...) seems to proceed on a more continuous trajectory, faster or slower depending on the kid's interest in the subject, where reading may be more of a "you've got it or you don't" kind of thing?

Looking at my two, I suspect my 4yo will probably be more the memorizing story type (she's been quoting the rhyming book I wrote to me for a week) and my 6yo might learn through navigating websites. Though I almost think he purposefully skims past words the way many of us grownups skim past ads, narrowing in on visuals and numbers and chemical formulas and trying to ignore the rest of it. Knowing letters and sounds and basic phonics rules, and being able to sound out simple words (which both kids have been solid on since about 3 yrs old) doesn't seem to have much bearing on it. If there's one niggling wonder I have, it's just that -- how a kid can have the basics for such a long time with no progress. But perhaps this is an area where long lulls and sudden leaps are more common.

I'd love to see any more stories if anyone pops into this thread later on. It's nice to have a picture of all the ways a non-coerced kid might come around to reading.
 
#11 ·
I think at least for my girls it only looks like a continuous trajectory from the summary. Especially as some of our kids our 9, 10, 15, 20! It is really in fits and starts, but unless those are really long, you just don't remember them that specifically.
 
#12 ·
This is great. I actually trained as a literacy coach a long time ago before having kids but because I learned to read before I started school and reading was such a huge part of my life, my anxiety about my kids' reading is bad.

My 7y.o. started with a few words "free", "stop", "baby" when she was between 2-4 but then she didn't progress much until recently. At 5 we read The Little B book continuosly and she picked up the word box. She also decided around age 5 that she wanted to learn lots of words and would ask me to help her. She'd also make paintings and stories that she needed to put words to and I'd help her with that.

We got sight word flashcards and likes to play with those sometimes and she has a few books that she is reading a little. dd7 started on starfall when she was 3 or 4 and has known all the basics for quite awhile, but she just doesn't usually want to work on reading. Recently she told me she wants to work on it every day so we write stories together and I write sentences (only 1-3 letter words usually) that she reads. She tries to read through all the sentences every time, so if she messes a word up or has to sound it out she starts over to read it again.

I can see that sometimes she is going by memory(or maybe most of the time) and looking at the words only briefly sometimes, seeing only the first letter then guessing, but other times she will sound them out. But there are some words like coconut that she recognizes, not just in the book she learned it from, but anywhere. She is also learning to read in Spanish simultaneously but the same thing goes with reading in Spanish. She's great at writing and knows the sounds but still has trouble or is just very, slowly learning.
 
#13 ·
A really odd thing is going on with Middle, my d21 year old daughter whose accommodations for dyslexia include me (for reading to her and editing for her). This is the kid that we spent a lot of time working onphonemic awareness, phonics, spelling, reading....

Although she has Dragon Dictate, it is still ill trained and she claims to be able to think better when she types, so our usual modus operandi is that she shares a Google document with me and I wait until she has a paragraph head start, and then I can just about keep up with her, fixing all the misspellings and adjusting the punctuation...this is with a Google chat window open so I can ask for translations of some of her more eccentric spellings...and tonight I noticed that almost all of the short words were spelled correctly. I asked if she was using some autocorrect program, and she said no. "Your spelling is getting a lot better. A LOT." She didn't believe it, but it's true: something about the way we are working on the documents together is improving her spelling. (There doesn't seem to be a corresponding increase in her reading ability...if I ask about a word, she has to have the computer to read her sentence to her in order to figure the "bad" word out. And she asks me to read the essay prompts so we can go faster than a snail's pace. But still, very interesting.

Deborah
 
#14 ·
I have read the responses with interest but perhaps not as much investment as Mckittre, so I missed the part where it was all leaps and not trajectory, so I wanted to clarify. My Little was in school for 5 years. The majority of that time was daily phonics lesson. At the end of grade 1 while talking to a friend who is a learning specialist we realized that he had no blending and if after 3 years of Ay a Bee buh he wasn't doing it, it was time for a different tactic. Three years later he said this morning, " when I was little and couldn't read....." OMG, #thankyouhomeschool again! Because two weeks ago he would get very angry and yell " I can't READ!" if asked to read something, even if it was something he knew.
So really the leap was mental/emotional, but the skill was 6years in the making.
If he had homeschooled all along? Yes I do believe he may not have started reading much earlier, but he would have a much better sense of self.
Anna
PS Deborah, that is really great about Middle, proving perhaps the trajectory/leap theory doesn't end ever?
 
#15 ·
"Deborah, that is really great about Middle, proving perhaps the trajectory/leap theory doesn't end ever?"

I'm not sure what to think...Middle has an amazing visual memory, and one of the things that we did when she was much younger was practice making mental "snapshots" of words, like "hippopotamus", based on something I gleaned from a book about dyslexia. It seemed promising at first, but it seemed there was only a certain amount of room in her mind's "Spellings of Words" closet. One thing that is interesting about her spelling is that sometimes she has all of the letters of a word, but in the wrong places, or most of the letters in the right places but with some missing. I'm pretty sure phonics has only a bit part in all of this, if any at all. She was disbelieving when I mentioned how much her spelling had improved; she can't tell, so assumes that whatever she writes is mostly wrong! She does have some consistent misspellings like "piople", "outhere", "witch" (for "which"), "then" for "than", "viewere" for "viewer", "fuger" for "figure"...but yesterday she actually spelled "painting" correctly (one common variant is "painging")...I've tried to get her to replace "chon" with "tion" with no effect at all so far. People who don't know anyone with this issue probably can't imagine how I excited I am to see "camr" for "camera, but my context is attempted phonetic spellings that are so off that sometimes when I see something like asptneh and I say "is that 'aptitude'?, she'll say "I don't know how you got that" and I'll say "I don't either", but actually it's because like her, I've become very good at figuring out mystery words from their context, and because I do all of her readings, something like "sntpis" is "easily" decoded as "semiotics"... ;)

Deborah
 
#16 ·
My husband who is slightly dyslexic talks about having all the letters but not in the right order, and his sister about how she has trouble knowing which vowel to put in a word, and that they all sound the same. Both have improved their spelling substantially as adults by using spellcheck.

I'm not really worried -- my kids are so little! But it does help to know that long long stalls (where kids know basics and don't progress in reading for multiple years) are not so out of the ordinary. I just had to turn in a little "report card" for him for our school district's homeschool program. Which is nothing more than me brainstorming a few sentence list of activities we might have done in each subject and then checking the "outstanding", "satisfactory" or "needs improvement" box for each subject. So, no need to say whether he can read or not, but it did prompt me to realize that he can't read any better than last year or the year before really, but has improved so much in everything else.

It does annoy me that some people seem to expect my 6yo to read already (he just turned 6!) prompting him to yell "I can't read!" in an exasperated voice. I don't know how much reading an average kindergartener can do, but I'm pretty sure the people who do this aren't even thinking about age, but somehow assume that a kid sitting there lecturing you on the chemistry of acid strength and hydrocarbon rings must be able to read.
 
#18 ·
I don't have a lot of time but wanted to say that I too am following this thread with interest and am glad you ask it mckittre. My oldest son is 6 soon to be 7. He has voraciously listened to stories (we've read long chapter books for years) since he was very small. However, except for spelling his own name he has no interest in writing or spelling. He is content therefore at this point I am content. He has always made it clear that he will do things his way in his time and not a moment before. Push him and he pushes back - hard. I do love reading stories of the "really late" readers. It gives me something to share with Dad and Grandma when they get a little uneasy. ;-)
 
#19 ·
I just took the time to rereading this thread and thought I'd repost my ideas...because the first wasn't long enough.

Art, language, walking...these are hard wired into our typical brains upon birth. Reading and writing are not. We aren't just born with the ability to read. We must learn.

Some kids are lucky to "break the code" while others struggle for many reasons (dyslexia, visual learning, just their way, etc). I had the lucky displeasure of both. I taught myself to read in Spanish but then had to learn to read in English when we came to the US. I remember the pain of reading letters that made words in both languages. Ugh. I just remembered how awful school was...

I worked with kids with disabilities for a while...I wasn't as good at teaching to read as I was teaching to enjoy books which, I think, was more beneficial long term.. I always saw it as arc and plateau. In an arc...progress, progress, progress (slow or fast) while plateau we just hung on steady, exploring as much in that area as possible using lots of repetition...or taking a break, waiting until the next push. I have skipped merrily down the path and I have pushed jello uphill. (Pushing jello is not the same as dragging kicking and screaming.)

Generally it goes (correct me if I'm wrong) but it can happen in different orders, right? A kid may need more time on any of this.
-understanding reading is looking at the uninteresting stuff on the page and saying it.
-letter discrimination (letter vs number E vs 3 and orientation n vs u and V vs ¥)
-letter sound... K = k not Kay.
-letters make words, words make sentences,
-words that are just memorized "two" vs words that can be sounded out "is" vs language...pare, pair, pear
-and then the wiring magic happens (or doesn't) which determines further assistance
-oh and...intrinsic desire (or inception)

Often writing develops at the same time but isn't necessarily the same thing.

There are many experts and "experts" who say when reading should start ranging from 3months to adult teeth coming it but it is ultimately determined by the child. (And I really don't get baby reading so I'm sorry if I offended anyone.) So while a "ready" 4 year old (not my daughter) might be learning dolch, but most are developmentally ready to understand letters.
Sorry this is long...
 
#21 ·
Deborah -- When my son was 4, he was a prehistoric creature nut, and would lecture people on all the geologic ages and which creatures evolved in each one. Got a lot of stares for that too. No spelling of "Cretaceous" though.

Generally it goes (correct me if I'm wrong) but it can happen in different orders, right? A kid may need more time on any of this.
-understanding reading is looking at the uninteresting stuff on the page and saying it.
-letter discrimination (letter vs number E vs 3 and orientation n vs u and V vs ¥)
-letter sound... K = k not Kay.
-letters make words, words make sentences,
-words that are just memorized "two" vs words that can be sounded out "is" vs language...pare, pair, pear
-and then the wiring magic happens (or doesn't) which determines further assistance
-oh and...intrinsic desire (or inception)
Sorry this is long...
Interesting list. I love the "wiring magic happens" part. I think both my 4yo and my 6yo are right there, waiting for the magic reading fairy to arrive. :) Not sure they actually have memorized any words, but they certainly know that there are phonetic and unphonetic words, and that such memorization is possible.
 
#20 ·
Great list of skills, thanks mamaprovides, it made me think of what kind of skill list we work/ are working with.
..................
Letter recognition is there
Letter sound:unavailable-he struggles-less now, but that's homeschooling
Moving from left to right across the page
Visual vigilance
Frustration tolerance-I once heard a story about a girl who if there was a single word on a page, would shut down,
the remarkable thing being she could scan the whole page of text in seconds to see if it contained unknown words
Willingness to make mistakes
Willingness to accept help
Ability to sit still long enough to listen to, or engage in, story
Not get distracted

Wow
I feel like I discovered the real reading readiness list
Off the top of my head, too

Thanks mama provides for starting that thought train
Anna
 
#22 ·
I know that is an old thread. I just wanted to share what happen today. My N (9) almost 10 has only started to learn to read. He was/is learning. Today he just sat down and read a whole storybook out loud by himself to me. No mistakes. He could not do that a few months ago. Amazing!

I think that for him he needed the time. I have worked with children that I have always believed needed more time. I saw this same thing with my son. Yes, he has need me to sit down with him and work on the phonics. But once he was allowed to work it out in his time he has started to gain ground fast.

This is one time that I can say I am so happy that I unschool.:wink:

Sorry for mistakes...I need sleep in the worst way.
 
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