Reply to Kumon for early reading?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Kumon for early reading?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Gosh you guys are really stuck on the 3 year old thing.  She'll be 4 in a couple weeks, and her verbal/language/comprehension is very advanced compared to her peers.[/quote]

You are looking at this as if you learn verbal/language/composition and then you move on to reading.  That somehow because she's "ahead" of her peers, which I don't doubt is true from the anecdotes you provide above, she no longer needs to focus on preschool things.

The reality is that, across the course of her life, her verbal/language/comprehension skills are what will set her apart from her peers.  For the vast majority of adults from literate families, decoding is a given.  All of us can sound out whatever words we need to be able to sound out in the course of our daily lives.  I can't remember the last time I encountered an educated adult whose decoding was weak enough to slow them down or inconvenience them.  However, I notice all the time when other adults don't express things well, either in writing or in spoken words, or when they read something and fail to understand them at sufficient depth.  In addition, I see the opposite, people who are amazing speakers or writers, or who can read and synthesize and retain information in impressive ways that I envy.  For many of these people, these skills are what make or break their careers.

So, if your daughter has strong verbal/language/comprehension skills that's fantastic, keep strengthening them.  Keep talking to her, and reading to her, and asking and answering questions, and telling stories, and engaging in dramatic play.  Give her chances to talk about math concepts while you build with blocks or cook, or science concepts while you explore the world or watch her baby sibling develop.  Know that at this moment in your daughter's life she is in the perfect place for this kind of language growth.

Now, it might well be that if you do all of that, your child will figure out reading "on her own" (which doesn't mean really on her own, it means that she'll figure it out in the context of all the wonderful language rich activities your doing), when she's 4 or 5 but not yet in K, and that's great.  It happens pretty frequently to bright verbal kids.  Independently figuring out reading is one possible sign that a child is bright and well supported at home, so it's cause for celebration, but it can also have its downside as kids who read early can be a little bored in Kindergarten, and can learn to zone out or skate by in the classroom.

Equally likely, your child will enter Kindergarten right on the verge of a breakthrough.  She'll have a rich vocabulary, and lots of knowledge about sounds and how print works.  The first few lessons on reading will be enough for reading to "click", and she'll be like a ball rolling down a hill, picking up momentum along the way.  Unlike a child with weaker language skills, she won't hit a lot of roadblocks and will soon be above grade level.   By the time the curriculum shifts from "learning to read" to "reading to learn" in 2nd or 3rd, she'll have caught up with the kids in the category above (that is, the kids with equally strong language skills who happened to decode early), and in the meantime she'll have learned that school is a fun place where you learn important things.

There is also a slight chance that she'll encounter trouble learning to read.  Now you might think "see, I can eliminate that chance" but it just doesn't work that way.  If, in fact, she's wired for dyslexia (which she isn't, dyslexic kids don't generally have all their letter names at 3), or a language disability that impacts reading (again, you'd see it now), or has low intelligence (again, you'd see it now) then reading instruction at 4 would simply be a lesson in frustration. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics