Alan Kay: "I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me."
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I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
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Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#62I learned to recognize individual letters at ~18 months old, and read fluently at ~3yo (by way of adults responding to my curiosity about letters). I’m 41 now; AMA.
What's your IQ in adult ages and how did you do on SAT? Have you ever done any form of science Olympics?
Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are they the same sex? I seem to recall a study where there are some - not huge, but statistically significant - differences in first onset of movement vs. language in boys vs. girls.
The common wisdom is that that girls often speak earlier than boys.
Yeah and anecdotally this is what I've noticed in our family and our friends' families at a pretty high percentage.
Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#64Can he understand anything of what he reads? It seems robotic; the point of reading is to get the meaning, not regurgitate the sounds. The best teacher is want.
I think that's unlikely if the kid is doing it on their own they're likely getting something out of it. Even if they're not fully understanding what they're reading it's REALLY unlikely they're just mechanically translating words to sounds on their own with no additional processing.
Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that just the phenomenon of subsequent children leveraging the benefits of a slightly older sibling? Combined with some training of the parents by the first child, and therefore a significantly different mindset being exhibited towards the second child. > The ability to teach your child to do something depends almost entirely on the child ... Is this a summary of your personal experience or are you citing research…
I can second the OP. Children can be wildly different, and development can be influenced both ways. The age gap between children also matters. Yes, children can piggyback off the achievements of their older sibling in social development and play. However, I found that I am unable to devote as much time with my second child because my attention is split.
First Child: ooh I know nothing. Nothing works.
Second Child: Ok, We've got this. Except, No, completely different.
Third Child: At least we've got the range. No. No you don't.
Big issue we had with the first was that he was reading several years above grade level, and we ran out of interesting things for him to read that were age appropriate. When they can read the Hobbit at 7, but are scared, it's really difficult.
Of course, he's now reading things like type theory and scares me with Nix advocacy, so I guess it all comes around.
Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#66I have two children roughly OP's age, they couldn't possibly be more different in terms of motricity, senses, intelligence, etc. Polar opposites. My first said her first words at 9 months old, "ba" for ball, bath, and 2-3 more meanings, and made a repeated sound pointing towards the object of interest, sound which cannot be described in words. Before the age of 1 we had amassed over 50 words, most up to 3 syllables,…
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Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#67[deleted]
Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#68I taught my five-year-old to read in approximately three months. We progressed from simple letters to sounding out two letters, then three, then words with hyphens, then simple stories, and finally children's books. We practiced daily for 5-20 minutes, five times per week. There were plateaus, but also huge jumps in ability, especially when we took a two-week break. Now, she can read two to three pages of an A4 document in one sitting with great speed (i.e., she looks at the words and sentences in one quick pass). She still slows down and makes some errors with complex new words.
Note that our language is Hungarian, which is much easier to teach because writing and sounding out words are nearly one-to-one in terms of letters and sounds. The AI part: Phonemic orthography: A writing system in which each letter (or combination of letters) consistently represents a specific sound (phoneme), and each sound is represented by a consistent letter. Hungarian is highly phonemic, meaning you can usually tell how to pronounce a word just by looking at how it's written, and vice versa.
Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#69But, why? Now the kid will be bored at primary school. You could have diverted him toward skills you aren't going to learn in school (checkers, chess, music,...)
Holding your kid back because they'll be bored by the ponderous pace of public school education isn't the answer you're looking for. Continue to be an active parent and find them a different school or a program within the school where their above grade level reading is embraced. Also you don't always get to just choose what the kid gets interested in, they're going to focus on something and at that age you're just overjoyed if it's not destructive or expensive.
I had a similar problem in my elementary school in the 90s having learned reading early and pretty easily and even had a 2nd grade teacher get a little peeved because I was just reading ahead during group reading exercises and didn't know where the group was when it was my turn. The solution was getting the teacher to stop and the next year getting a better teacher and into a little group with the other good readers and tested for AIG early.
Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old
#70Maybe one day I'll get used to people people putting pictures and videos of their 3-year-olds on the internet, but that day has not yet come. I see it there and can only think, oh the poor kid. It even says he's shy at one point in the article.
More on-topic - I recommend Grace Llewellyn and John Holt on learning, to anyone. Truly life-changing material. Finally got around to John Holt recently, and am very happy to eventually read his work.
You can't get back the years made painfully lesser by the school systems we put people through - myself included - and you probably can't undo all the damage done, either. But you can face the absurdity of the situation, and try to improve your own mental life, and that of the people in your life.