A. has learned to read, and it has just really interesting watching him learning how to read. (More interesting than watching his sister E, who I think was somewhat atypical in how she learned; a little more on that later.)
What was so interesting to me is that he had four separate epiphanies (over a number of months) as he was learning:
(1) learn how to pronounce letter phonemes, along with combination-of-letter phonemes (like "oo") (ETA:![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
conuly informs me that the correct word is "phonogram")
(2) realize that the letter pronunciations can be done run-together to form an actual word. This was a separate epiphany that came literally months after he knew how to form individual phonemes. (Over a course of about a week. It was really cool to watch.) This was the most surprising to me, that it required a separate and discrete understanding from simply understanding how to reproduce individual phonemes.
(3) learn that many English words do not conform to (1) and (2) and memorize those pronunciations. This was also a separate epiphany that came several months after (2) -- for a while he would laboriously and triumphantly sound out a word and I would say gently, "Well, you sounded that out correctly and it really seems like it should be pronounced like that! But because English is funny it is actually pronounced [like this]." The interesting thing was for a while that I would have to do this several times for the same word over the course of a week or two before he picked it up -- but several months after (2), he suddenly was able to pick up the word after I did it once. This may be less of an "epiphany" than a "now I'm comfortable enough with reading to memorize things," but I did get a distinct sense at one point that he actually did have the thought, "Ohhhhh, I need to sound out words sometimes but sometimes I just need to take the pronunciation and learn it!"
(4) Words are recognizable as patterns of letters, e.g., "ing" is always pronounced the same way. This came at around the same time as (3), and I'm not totally sure whether I should class it as a different epiphany (in fact it might be part of how one gets to (3)), but I do think it's a subtly different point.
I should append that his preschool has a "literacy-and-math" class that they go to for 15 minutes every day, where they talk about letters and numbers, do games with them, etc., and he's done this since he turned 3. This makes me strongly believe that when these epiphanies happen is highly individual, as obviously all his classmates have been doing the same thing, and very few of them have made the jump to actually reading yet. Of course at home we have talked about letters and putting letters together to form words. One of his favorite games (and E's favorite as well when she was that age) involved magnetic letters that we had from when I was a kid. We didn't use the magnet part (we have a sadly non-magnetic refrigerator) but A. would arrange random sets of letters on the ground (really random: bfkdqopcskwn, that kind of thing, only longer) and I would pretend to be horrified at them and then sound them out. This meant that although he didn't understand (1) or (2) at the time, he knew that I understood them, and he also knew I was doing something that mapped from the letters to some silly and fantastical word which he had control over and was nonsense, didn't have to be an actual word! And I would make up small nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant words ("vib," "mip," things like that) and we'd sound them out together. And of course we'd constantly read books to him (he loves being read to), and often I'd sound out words for him while reading, especially if it was a book with simpler words. So anyway, the point is that I feel that (1) and (2) were a sort of natural progression for him, and of course once you're reading at the (2) level, (3) and (4) come pretty naturally when you're reading books with English words that defy simple phonetic analysis :) So it was all fun and games to him, there was no stress at all, and it has been amazing to see his delight as he mastered each of those steps and saw the world open up to him. Seriously, he is LOVING reading cereal boxes and road signs etc. and realizing he can get all this information he couldn't before!
(When I say E was atypical, I mean that I didn't observe her having these separate epiphanies, certainly not in the very obvious way it happened with A. I feel as if her learning (1) through (4) was rather compressed -- I have something of a sense that it all kind of came together at the same time, or (probably more likely) that she didn't say anything to us about it until she basically understood all those things. We did do the same kinds of things with her, though.)
His slightly older (very bright) cousin O. has not yet learned to read. Of course perhaps her brain hasn't made those particular jumps yet. There are... several other things going on here as well, mind you . Thing #1: my parents live close to her and are Super Invested in their grandchildren Learning to Read Early. Because she who reads early wins, I guess?? *throws up hands* Thing #2: My sister is emotionally-if-not-intellectually invested in her child Learning to Read Early, partially I expect because she wants to please our parents. So even before getting out the gate, poor O. was burdened by the weight of all these expectations. And I don't know that it was presented as a game, as something fun. (Well, actually I do know. It wasn't.) And my sister would get stressed when O. was not learning things quickly enough. So she has a HUGE incentive to "guess the answer," is what I'm saying, where A. (who also likes to guess the answer, mind you) had rather less of one. (O. also by nature tends to be a people pleaser as well as highly emotionally intelligent and would easily pick up on things like her mom getting stressed, whereas I'm not entirely sure A. would pick up on that if I were stressed.)
Then there was Thing #3: My parents signed O. up for a reading class, one of those "guaranteed to teach your kid to read in two months!" kinds of things.
I wondered how the class could guarantee that, as my experience with A. had been that he had had to have these epiphanies, which happened at wildly varying, unpredictable times.
Well, I'll tell you: This reading class did BASICALLY ALL "SIGHT WORDS." (This is, like, flashcards with whole words on it. The class did very little phonetics.)
(Cynthia Voigt was writing about the evils of whole-word learning in the 80's! My school taught phonetics in the 80's! WHAT IS THIS??)
My sister, who doesn't have as strong feelings about reading pedagogy as I do but who knows a bad thing when she sees it, pulled O. out after a couple of sessions (my parents are still salty about this: "we even PAID for the class so our grandchild could learn to read and your sister just pulled her out!") but I think the damage was done. I think, mind you, that there are some children who can jump directly from (1) to (3-4) (I think E. might have been one of them, honestly; I was one of them, as my mom taught me via sight words before school;mildred_of_midgard, this must be you) because they have a lot of strong pattern recognition skills. But I believe strongly that not all children should. I think A. would have had a really hard time doing that. I also think it hasn't been good for O's reading skills. The problem is that if you do (3) before the others, it's easy to think the answer is to memorize everything. And that doesn't work for words you haven't seen before, unless you've also internalized (4), which is harder to do if you haven't yet done (2). Not impossible! But a lot harder.
When we saw them over Christmas I did the letter game with O. and she enjoyed the part where I had to sound out words a lot; the part where I tried to get her to sound out small words she was willing to do, but I'd put something down like "bim" and she'd sound out "bb... ii... mm... baby??" Really guessing, that is, and not having made that jump from (1) to (2) yet, but trying to skip to (3) and not really being able to yet.
Anyway, I don't mean to say that this is a big deal at all. O. will go to kindergarten this year and I think schools still do phonetics, right?? and she'll learn to read just fine, and my sister has about a billion books in her house and O. will grow up surrounded by books and the odds are 99% that she'll be more of a reader than E., who learned how to read super early. It's not a big deal at all, I just... feel like O. is a little frustrated right now, and that could have been avoided, and also I have strong feelings about whole-word/sight-word learningand why it sucks and stress on kids, is all :P
What was so interesting to me is that he had four separate epiphanies (over a number of months) as he was learning:
(1) learn how to pronounce letter phonemes, along with combination-of-letter phonemes (like "oo") (ETA:
conuly informs me that the correct word is "phonogram")(2) realize that the letter pronunciations can be done run-together to form an actual word. This was a separate epiphany that came literally months after he knew how to form individual phonemes. (Over a course of about a week. It was really cool to watch.) This was the most surprising to me, that it required a separate and discrete understanding from simply understanding how to reproduce individual phonemes.
(3) learn that many English words do not conform to (1) and (2) and memorize those pronunciations. This was also a separate epiphany that came several months after (2) -- for a while he would laboriously and triumphantly sound out a word and I would say gently, "Well, you sounded that out correctly and it really seems like it should be pronounced like that! But because English is funny it is actually pronounced [like this]." The interesting thing was for a while that I would have to do this several times for the same word over the course of a week or two before he picked it up -- but several months after (2), he suddenly was able to pick up the word after I did it once. This may be less of an "epiphany" than a "now I'm comfortable enough with reading to memorize things," but I did get a distinct sense at one point that he actually did have the thought, "Ohhhhh, I need to sound out words sometimes but sometimes I just need to take the pronunciation and learn it!"
(4) Words are recognizable as patterns of letters, e.g., "ing" is always pronounced the same way. This came at around the same time as (3), and I'm not totally sure whether I should class it as a different epiphany (in fact it might be part of how one gets to (3)), but I do think it's a subtly different point.
I should append that his preschool has a "literacy-and-math" class that they go to for 15 minutes every day, where they talk about letters and numbers, do games with them, etc., and he's done this since he turned 3. This makes me strongly believe that when these epiphanies happen is highly individual, as obviously all his classmates have been doing the same thing, and very few of them have made the jump to actually reading yet. Of course at home we have talked about letters and putting letters together to form words. One of his favorite games (and E's favorite as well when she was that age) involved magnetic letters that we had from when I was a kid. We didn't use the magnet part (we have a sadly non-magnetic refrigerator) but A. would arrange random sets of letters on the ground (really random: bfkdqopcskwn, that kind of thing, only longer) and I would pretend to be horrified at them and then sound them out. This meant that although he didn't understand (1) or (2) at the time, he knew that I understood them, and he also knew I was doing something that mapped from the letters to some silly and fantastical word which he had control over and was nonsense, didn't have to be an actual word! And I would make up small nonsense consonant-vowel-consonant words ("vib," "mip," things like that) and we'd sound them out together. And of course we'd constantly read books to him (he loves being read to), and often I'd sound out words for him while reading, especially if it was a book with simpler words. So anyway, the point is that I feel that (1) and (2) were a sort of natural progression for him, and of course once you're reading at the (2) level, (3) and (4) come pretty naturally when you're reading books with English words that defy simple phonetic analysis :) So it was all fun and games to him, there was no stress at all, and it has been amazing to see his delight as he mastered each of those steps and saw the world open up to him. Seriously, he is LOVING reading cereal boxes and road signs etc. and realizing he can get all this information he couldn't before!
(When I say E was atypical, I mean that I didn't observe her having these separate epiphanies, certainly not in the very obvious way it happened with A. I feel as if her learning (1) through (4) was rather compressed -- I have something of a sense that it all kind of came together at the same time, or (probably more likely) that she didn't say anything to us about it until she basically understood all those things. We did do the same kinds of things with her, though.)
His slightly older (very bright) cousin O. has not yet learned to read. Of course perhaps her brain hasn't made those particular jumps yet. There are... several other things going on here as well, mind you . Thing #1: my parents live close to her and are Super Invested in their grandchildren Learning to Read Early. Because she who reads early wins, I guess?? *throws up hands* Thing #2: My sister is emotionally-if-not-intellectually invested in her child Learning to Read Early, partially I expect because she wants to please our parents. So even before getting out the gate, poor O. was burdened by the weight of all these expectations. And I don't know that it was presented as a game, as something fun. (Well, actually I do know. It wasn't.) And my sister would get stressed when O. was not learning things quickly enough. So she has a HUGE incentive to "guess the answer," is what I'm saying, where A. (who also likes to guess the answer, mind you) had rather less of one. (O. also by nature tends to be a people pleaser as well as highly emotionally intelligent and would easily pick up on things like her mom getting stressed, whereas I'm not entirely sure A. would pick up on that if I were stressed.)
Then there was Thing #3: My parents signed O. up for a reading class, one of those "guaranteed to teach your kid to read in two months!" kinds of things.
I wondered how the class could guarantee that, as my experience with A. had been that he had had to have these epiphanies, which happened at wildly varying, unpredictable times.
Well, I'll tell you: This reading class did BASICALLY ALL "SIGHT WORDS." (This is, like, flashcards with whole words on it. The class did very little phonetics.)
(Cynthia Voigt was writing about the evils of whole-word learning in the 80's! My school taught phonetics in the 80's! WHAT IS THIS??)
My sister, who doesn't have as strong feelings about reading pedagogy as I do but who knows a bad thing when she sees it, pulled O. out after a couple of sessions (my parents are still salty about this: "we even PAID for the class so our grandchild could learn to read and your sister just pulled her out!") but I think the damage was done. I think, mind you, that there are some children who can jump directly from (1) to (3-4) (I think E. might have been one of them, honestly; I was one of them, as my mom taught me via sight words before school;
mildred_of_midgard, this must be you) because they have a lot of strong pattern recognition skills. But I believe strongly that not all children should. I think A. would have had a really hard time doing that. I also think it hasn't been good for O's reading skills. The problem is that if you do (3) before the others, it's easy to think the answer is to memorize everything. And that doesn't work for words you haven't seen before, unless you've also internalized (4), which is harder to do if you haven't yet done (2). Not impossible! But a lot harder.When we saw them over Christmas I did the letter game with O. and she enjoyed the part where I had to sound out words a lot; the part where I tried to get her to sound out small words she was willing to do, but I'd put something down like "bim" and she'd sound out "bb... ii... mm... baby??" Really guessing, that is, and not having made that jump from (1) to (2) yet, but trying to skip to (3) and not really being able to yet.
Anyway, I don't mean to say that this is a big deal at all. O. will go to kindergarten this year and I think schools still do phonetics, right?? and she'll learn to read just fine, and my sister has about a billion books in her house and O. will grow up surrounded by books and the odds are 99% that she'll be more of a reader than E., who learned how to read super early. It's not a big deal at all, I just... feel like O. is a little frustrated right now, and that could have been avoided, and also I have strong feelings about whole-word/sight-word learning
