Improving the way kids are taught to read

I would bet that if looked the number of books in the kids household you would see a strong correlation.

(I taught my daughter to read, my wife currently working on our son, both with a phonics based curriculum, but more in a Vygotsky style)

One of the motivations we have used is comic books. (Yes, that death of classic reading!) Both of our kids are My Little Pony fans, so we read a lot of those comic books for story time and gave them the books as they were learning to read. Wanting to read is a requirement for learning to read.

Yeah, agreed, there's really no substance to the interview that I can grab a hold of. The main thing that I would be wary of is the idea that there is a single approach or method that will work for every child.

"Phonics" is mentioned a few times in the interview, ie, the connection between (English) spelling of written words and the spoken language they represent. I immediately found myself wondering how this relates to how children learn to read in other languages whose written forms are either far more phoenetically entwined with their spoken forms (eg, Portugese and Finnish, as I understand it), or far less (eg, Mandarin or Arabic). (I'm sure I'm oversimplifying complex relationships and reality in the overbroad sentence I just wrote, but I'm happy to hear how my received CW is wrong about these languages.)

Anecdatally: when my own daughter was about four, we had some friends whose son had learned to read from a Phonics book at four, and when we knew him at five, he could read pretty much anything you put in front of him (how much he understood, who knows, but he could translate the text into spoken language that we could understand). Both her mother and I were also reading at four, and so we expected our daughter would be able to do the same. We were inspired by this kid's example to get our daughter started early, and tried the same Phonics book with her.

Unfortunately, she didn't take to it so well. She seemed to understand what was happening well enough, but it never clicked or became natural, and it was ultimately a frustrating experience for us and our daughter. So we eventually stopped the lessons, and let her learn at her own pace. She happily made it through kindergarten and first grade without really showing any interest in or being able to read with any proficiency. She was clearly smart, and her teachers told us not to worry about it. Then in second grade mid-year, something just clicked, and she started voraciously consuming books, with her reading ability testing well above grade level.

Now at 16, she's still a voracious reader, and a writer who has completed NaNoWriMo three times, reads and writes every second of the day, and has an incredibly sophisticated grasp on storytelling, analyzing the writing behind books and movies and TV shows with a clarity that I personally have never had.

So, how did she learn to read? I have no idea. It wasn't phonics. But I suspect she would have managed it no matter what instruction she received. I also doubt that she is really a meaningful example, other than to say that it's complicated, and humans vary in their learning styles, and we should focus on the goal of reading and comprehending, trying to discover all the ways that individuals can and do learn to read, and having our teachers focus on identifying and encouraging the best methods for each student and not so much on imposing specific mechanics of how the statistically typical student achieves reading proficiency.

I want to share the experience I had with my daughter Greta (now 5 yo). She learned to write and read independently. At 3 she was already able to write simple words (not memorized, you cold say "write "), and at this point at 5 she can fluently write. All this without spending more than, maybe a total of a few days once she were already capable of basic reading/writing. The question is, how she figured out how to write and read independently? I'm not sure, but my wife and I read she books since she was 1 month old, every night before bed time, and often she wanted to look at the books, so I guess she became accustomed to the shape of letters. Later she played a lot in one of these rubber carpets where there are the shapes of the letters (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PCwAAOSwM5JZma4a/s-l500.jpg), and my guess is that this also helped. At some point when she was like, 2, she became obsessed with "A". This is letter "A" she could say during a few weeks. Later she started to compose the "A" with three sticks, and so forth. Basically with this process she learned all the letters and the sound. Btw what I was able to observe was: 1) It is a lot of work for kids to learn to write and read. Greta succeeded in doing so only because without we even noticing much, he basically spent a lot of time thinking about letters, drawing them, reading them. 2) When we tried to teach her better, like sitting together, we almost stopped this process... because it started to be annoying, so we avoided it if not for 10 minutes every month to say like, how groups of letters sounded. 3) I believe that one of the key point was reading a lot of books, because her language skills where very impressive already at 1.5 yo or alike, and I believe this is potentially the result of reading books.

I am also a life-long avid reader. I didn't really understand what makes learning to read so hard.

At least, until I started learning Japanese. After a few years of that, I realized that the pain I was feeling while reading Japanese kids' books is what all kids feel when learning to read initially. It's just been so long ago that I've forgotten it.

In short, reading slowly is very painful. You know that others can read quickly, but you can't. You know that there's a good story there, but it's constantly interrupted by trying to pronounce things, trying to remember what words mean (or worse, looking them up!), or skipping them and trying to figure out what they mean from context.

It's way more painful than you remember.

Something that encouraged me to read with outside motivations would be welcome to me. So that Kindle kids app actually sounds awesome to me as a middle-aged adult right now.