How I Taught My Kid to Read

The problem with children is that we don't have an EEPROM erase function which works. So, every individual is an autonomous experiment of one, with no control and no repeatability: It is impossible to ever answer the question "if I had done this differently, how would things have changed"

I say this, because in matters of learning, the pedagogy, the mechanisms, especially when it comes to the learning of language and written language, is HUGE. Some of it is burned in (Chomsky) and some of it not. Some of it relates to age. Some of it relates to sound vs shapes. Its not simple to say "because I did this, it works for a vietnamese person" because the scripts and intonations and a whole bunch of stuff are different.

How well does it work to teach Chinese to people assuming left-to-right scanning when chinese ideograms can be read up to down? Or how about when its boudustrophon? How many written works assume left to right, and actually make little sense for a right-to-left reader?

In many economies, and I include my own (Queensland, Australia) the whole word vs phonics debate became hugely political. Its riven the early education community: It is now actually quite hard to have a rational conversation about teaching and learning in early childhood now.

Maths ability is similar. Start talking about rote learning and the "times table" and watch people foam at the mouth.

Kids have amazing models of abstraction in part wired in. This is why "I shutted the door" happens: its not because grammatical errors are in the child: its because rational abstractions Shut -> Shutted happen in the model

My child learned to read using phonics. We didn’t use this book though. At some point she asked us what the squiggly black “pictures” in her book were. Once she figured out that we weren’t just making up the stories and that they were there for anyone to read she was motivated. Then reading time basically became sounding out words with her until she could read. We were lucky to have access to a lot of books very cheaply and some good libraries in walking distance which helped.

You teach Russian or Spanish with phonics. You teach Chinese with whole-word. English needs a bit of both, since it is mostly phonetic.

An on-demand approach to phonics works very well. The rules and exceptions are pointed out as mistakes are made. This avoids the boredom of drilling endless phonics rules and the long-term difficulty of whole-word.

A common mistake with phonics is the accidental association of specific vowels with consonants. For example, B is not buh. It is equally bye, boo, bah, and so on. When describing the sound B makes, it is best to always resist giving just a single example. Instead: babe, boob, Bob, bib, bub. That mistaken association causes trouble when sounding out words, because the extra vowel ends up in the resulting word. Something like "baby" turns into buh-ay-buh-ee with 4 syllables.

Untreated speech problems also interfere, no matter if you want to call them accents or dialects or whatever. It is common to fail to distinguish running from run-in, or pin from pen. It is common, particularly in New England, to drop or add an "R". This makes reading so much harder. Teaching a person to read can easily turn into speech therapy.

Late readers face the additional problem of not wanting to read books that parents would buy for 4-year-old kids. (the intersection of things 4-year-olds like and the things that won't offend or embarrass parents) There really isn't much adult fiction with the vocabulary at the level of The Cat in the Hat.

I really wish people wouldn’t trying “hacking” education. Sure the system has its faults but it’s far better than the alternatives (eg waiting until your child is 9 before teaching them to read).

Ultimately it’s your own children that your disadvantaging in life.

Interesting, I really like the approach! Thanks for sharing!