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

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

There's two schools of thought on this one.

One says that the alphabet is the building material for all language, and that all reading should be taught phonetically. The other emphasizes sight words as being every bit as important, because let's face it, most readers don't stop and sound out the words they read - their sight vocabulary is vast enough that they don't have to. The only time adults sound things out is when they come across a word that they don't know how to pronounce, and the sounding-out is an attempt to come up with a pronunciation that will give a clue to word origin and thence to meaning.

I subscribe to the second theory. Phonetics is not without its value, and when learning to spell it is extremely important; but if your son is approaching reading successfully from the sight-word direction, there's no reason to get him to stop. He's already discovering the learning method that works best for him, and I'm always in favour of encouraging individual learning styles. At some point in the future, he'll look back and say, "Oh, that's why that word is written that way! The letters go together to make those sounds!" He has skipped that step for the moment, but if he doesn't need it, then more power to him. He's still learning to read.

From a psychological standpoint, the idea that one must build up using the building blocks doesn't hold water. Adult brains work that way, sometimes, because we train them to; but kids' brains usually don't work on a building-block model. They're much more likely to be intuitive learners. One concept doesn't necessarily flow logically from a previous concept in a child's mind. One of the primary functions of school is to train kids to think in what we see as logical patterns - a habit of thought more suited to older children than very young ones. There's no reason to circumvent his intuition in that way. He doesn't need the building blocks to figure out written language, so don't worry about it. When he's ready to make those connections, he will, and in the meantime he's linguistically way ahead of the game.