Little Reader

[beetiger]

projectmothra is sight-reading some phenomenal number of words these days. He's just randomly walking around places, trying to read signs, and getting them kind of right more often than not. (It say "Please Flush"! This store is "Closed on Sunday"! "Men"! That the bathroom of going with Daddy!" That lady's shirt saying "Soccer"!) It's kind of boggling. He'd been "playing" our Apples to Apples set by trying to read the cards, so we just bought him Apples to Apples Junior so he'd be able to get more choices like "Hot Wheels Cars" and "Cowboys" and fewer like "Henry Mancini" and "Adolf Hitler".

In any case, as I mentioned, his sight reading vocabulary is huge, but he doesn't have any interest in phonetics/sounding out words. He knows all his letters and the primary sounds they make, but he's somewhere between uninterested and incapable of "sounding out" a word even if I guide him heavily through it. He'd rather I tell him the word so he remembers it next time he comes across it.

My friends who know more about Early Education than I do: should I be fussing about trying to help him get the sounding out concept, or should I just let him build an arsenal of sight-read words and not fuss about it?

Comments

[sydb42.livejournal.com]

My MIL is a K-1 teacher. She taught my husband to read by showing him words on road signs and other sight reading. I'm assuming at some point that he worked up to sounding out words and reading that way, but he was reading by the time he was 3. My older daughter has known her alphabet (including sounds) since before she was two, but I dropped the ball on teaching her stuff when my younger daughter was born, so she's still mainly sight-reading the words she already knew (and her vocabulary isn't nearly as vast). However, she is now sounding out words (when she's in the mood), which I thought she'd never be interested in (she was the same about words, just wanted me to tell her what they were). So, I wouldn't worry about the sounding out concept, I bet he'll start doing it when he's good and ready for it. In the meantime, keep showing him more words. :)