How I Taught My Kid to Read

I love McWhorter but this is a disappointing mishmash. While it does seem that a lot of new educational techniques seem to be based on skipping past the underlying fundamentals and trying to teach kids to immediately start reading by whole words before learning the sounds letters represent and giving the brain a few decades to recognize whole words at a go (as McWhorter describes here), or by doing math by estimation before learning how to add or multiply (and thereby developing an intuition for what estimate to even make) as my daughter faced in elementary school, or as my accounting professor partner struggles with as fundamental textbooks attempt to de-emphasize debits and credits and just skip to the financial report; even so the lesson we should probably take is not “just use phonics dummy!” But rather “maybe use multiple methods and find individual paths for each student to be successful”.

We tried to teach my daughter to read using the exact book McWhorter praises when she was that same age. She hated the lessons and didn’t progress, and in fact didn’t learn to read until she was eight years old, and yet somehow she is now, at 17, an avid reader and writer, having completed multiple NaNoWriMo projects, an editor on her high school newspaper, and a star student in every writing class she can get enrolled in.

Ultimately she benefitted from patient teachers and a nurturing environment and a heavy dose of innate interest and the right disposition, not from a specific teaching method. The only right answer is that there is no one right answer for every kid.

For the child of average intelligence or higher, simply spending time reading aloud while the child looks and listens and eventuate tries to lead is sufficient to teach how to read. It takes hundreds of hours, but it's not rocket surgery.

I used this book to teach my daughter (and now my son) to read https://welltrainedmind.com/p/the-ordinary-parents-guide-to-...

Worked really well.

I first heard of this book on McWhorter's podcast, in a fascinating episode titled Why We Stopped Teaching Children How To Read [1]. Highly recommended!

The book has been fairly useful for my child, who at times doesn't want to do more lessons but at times churns through a dozen lessons at once. Overall, we're very pleased with it!

1: http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2017/0...

I'm always fascinated and curious about language learning. We seem to just pick up our native language so easily as we're growing up, but it seems difficult to pick up a new language with the same ease later on.

I don't have kids, and can't remember what my reading ability was at 4 years old, but I thought when I started reading that I started out by identifying individual characters and trying to sound them out piece by piece? I can't imagine that I built my native language using the whole-word system, but at the same time, that may explain all the spelling tests that I used to do.

I have been learning a completely new language (Polish) for a while now, but I started with learning the sounds of the language first (and how to pronounce the written language) which set up the framework for learning words and phrases later on. I couldn't imagine starting off with learning whole-words. That being said, I think once you have the basic framework start up, you naturally move on to whole words, sentences, and eventually become free with expressing ideas.