Reading - who taught your kid to read?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I did. I read to them all the time and it was a natural progression for them to learn the sounds and letters and words.

I’ve read to my kids from birth and it did not naturally teach them to read. It did not make them enjoy reading when they finally did learn, although they do still like being read to.

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Evidence shows that almost all kids need direct phonic instruction in order to learn to read. Why all schools do not do this is ridiculous.

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And many of the kids who learned to read by “osmosis” will hit a wall in 4th grade when the reading gets much harder and hey need to decide and understand word origins for unfamiliar words.

No, they don't. Parent of 11th grader.

I am one of these kids, and my parents didn’t realize I had developed my own theory of phonics/ rules for figuring out words without explicit instruction. And I can say my rules were pretty good since I was a NMS and National Spelling Bee state finalist.

Now as I watch my kids learn to read in a school with proper phonics instruction as part of their reading curriculum it is really interesting. One of my kids is breezing through and reading at a high school level in 3rd grade. He will note when he learns a spelling pattern how that matches or doesn’t his hypothesis about how those sounds should have been spelled. It is like reliving my own thinking about words.

My other child is dyslexic and she gets additional multi-sensory instruction with the same structured phonics/ word study content and as a 7th grader she is also above grade level now in reading, and she is on grade level in spelling. Her comprehension has always been advanced and is now in college ranges.

I have realized phonics provides minor benefits for some, major benefits for others, but harms nobody. So I wish we could all support universal design for reading. Imagine how many mildly dyslexic kids could thrive with sound instruction!

I'm with you 100%. If we wait for students to be diagnosed with dyslexia before they are taught phonics, they're already behind the other students. This hurts them academically, but also harms their self-image as learners. Students who fall through the cracks and aren't diagnosed will always struggle. Even students who eventually learn to read without phonics may be struggling unnecessarily? Why would we ever want to make it harder for kids to learn?

This topic is especially close to my heart. My mother is an extremely intelligent woman. Both her older sister and her much younger sister were taught with phonics. When my mother's class was in school they were using a whole language, look-say approach. While she eventually learned to read it was such a struggle that she and her family just concluded that she just wasn't that smart. She never went to college (since her older, "smarter" sister flunked out, there wasn't any sense in sending her), but when my father went for his accounting degree she tutored him through statistics. To this day she still insists that Dad and I are the "smart ones" and she's just "not smart like us".
Meanwhile, her best friend in school went on to become an elementary school teacher, but hates reading so much that she doesn't read for pleasure. Yes, they both learned to read, but if they had been taught with phonics, I think it would have significantly improved the quality of their lives.

[Anonymous]

LOL. The number of kids who taught themselves to read all by themselves, like the number of women who regularly get mistaken for 20 years younger, is way higher on the internet than IRL.

[Anonymous]

I taught myself to read, I also taught my kids to read. None of us are geniuses but we all do like to read a lot as adults.