Early Childhood Reading

Older children learn things faster than younger children, why would reading be an exception?

My parents tried to teach me to read at an early age, and it was a disaster. When I was about five the skill pretty much emerged, full formed and unprompted. I jumped from not reading at all to reading full novels in a few months.This pattern of me being incapable of learning pretty much anything from my parents continued for the rest of their lives. :-/

I don't see how learning to read makes kids suddenly "not kids"

I learned to read by being read to: typically on a relative's lap with the book in my lap. They were not trying to teach me how to read, but my language centers took care of the job, just like they did for spoken language, long before schools could muck it up. Reading has always been fast and effortless for me, requiring no conscious attention - again, just like spoken language. Much later I studied the linguistics of language, grammar, spelling systems, etc. which revealed the wonders of

I spent some time with a 6 year old, who was my girlfriend's nephew. I noticed that he spoke well and was very sharp, but wasn't able to read. I suggested that we should read some things and he should learn to read, but no - his mother said that he was going to learn to read in 1st grade, with the other kids. Starting him earlier than that, she said, would stunt his social performance because he would be so far ahead of his peers.

I had a kid that could read at 3 or so. When she reached the age to learn reading at school, she was forced to do the sounding out bit. She frankly found it all an amusing, though a bit ridiculous, charade. Kids will put up with a lot though.

That’s crazy. I haven’t heard of this. My son was reading like an adult by 4. I didn’t do anything structured but just did what made sense. He enjoyed the learning process and so did I, so I’m not sure why anyone would tell you not to do it. Where’s the harm?

For my daughter it was phonics at school (which seems to be quite common nowadays) combined with reading stories to her daily (about 20 minutes or so). Also took her to library and let her read/select her own books. Seems to be reading fine.

I don't have much respect for the school system's standards for what age is appropriate to start teaching different subjects. Children in my family start reading around 3. I consider reading a power tool that bootstraps further learning. If I had waited until school to start learning, I would have been held back in my development for years.

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