I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old • Hacker News Board

Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

#101

Post by euroderf » Sat, May 31, 2025, 6:53 AM UTC

They tell you to use words that the kid can relate to. So I made a set of flash cards with the names of body parts.

I hacked an HTML so that the cards would come out in only two different sizes, and then laminated & cut them. Also simple words like left, right, front, back. I used font attributes to grey out silent letters and oddities like "gh" (this was for English), and I used for the occasional unusually long word.

Then my kid and I played "The Body Parts Game". I shuffle the cards and go thru them one by one. Each card, I ask him to say the word and then point to the body part.

It went really well. It kept a 2yo entertained and he knew he was learning something important.

Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

#102

Post by bmacho » Sun, Jun 01, 2025, 7:25 AM UTC

nathell wrote: post #75

lostmsu wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your IQ in adult ages and how did you do on SAT? Have you ever done any form of science Olympics?

It’s something like 130. I was educated in Poland, so never passed SAT, but did well at the ~equivalent matura. At the uni, I was a mediocre-ish student, though. I approached the math olympiad back in high school, but found it too challenging. Looking backwards, I think I might have benefitted from having a better math teacher.

Did you learn to read Polish or English at that age? As someone whose first language is written as it is spoken, I believe that reading English for English kids is much-much-much harder. Reading in a language with a letter-sound correspondence is entirely trivial. You speak that language, you learn the characters, you're done. Reading English requires to learn an entirely new language, hundreds of words. (Especially if reading English is taught simultaneously with writing English--I don't know about that.)

I can't find any real studies about this subject with numbers; how much effort does it take for an Italian/Spanish/Finnish/Polish/.. kid to learn to read vs for English kids. Or, for example how many of them are able to 'teach themselves' to read just by looking at the picture books, and asking parents about letters.

Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

#103

Post by bmacho » Sun, Jun 01, 2025, 7:57 AM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #18

explorigin wrote: post #11

People are different; that includes children. Some kids can advance in some areas faster than others. But to measure them all by the same ruler (by way of assumed potential) is dehumanizing. Love and raise your kid where they are.

It's a spectrum. The OP's approach, with the wrong kid, could very quickly turn home into another (worse) school and wreck the kid for a long time. "Raise kids where they are," taken to the extreme, will teach a lot of kids to accept mediocrity. "Dehumanizing" is extreme. Having goals and benchmarks is important, probably even required, to help everyone grow to their full potential.

> Having goals and benchmarks is important, probably even required

OTOH following on the benchmarks is ill-advised. Progress is not monotonous. For example you want to cut down a tree. What do you do, you start sharpening your axe, even that in the meantime the tree only grows, gets bigger and girthier .

Re: I taught my 3-year-old to read like a 9-year-old

#104

Post by danbender » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 8:40 AM UTC

yoko888 wrote: post #66

randunel wrote: post #2

I 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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I loved reading that. 100% this. Accompanying our little ones and appreciating their perspective.