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

[alcinoe.livejournal.com]

How old is he now? I think that you should never push a child into learning things they aren't interested in. Of course, that will only last until he gets into school, where they force feed education into children rather than letting them learn things that they are interested in. Eventually, he will want to sound out words because there will be a book he is interested in. I personally would sound out the words that he wants you to read. That will help him get into the idea that words are made up of sounds and each letter contributes to the word as a whole.
Of course, I am not an education major, this is just my own opinion based on reasearch that I did when I wanted to homeschool a while back.