My two sons, who didn’t go to school, learned to read around roughly 8 and maybe 10-11. “Late” readers, in other words. With the first, I tried to teach him when he was little but it became clear he was just struggling through sounds because I asked him to, so I let it go. That was the last “teaching” I ever did.
He loved to read Calvin and Hobbes, but what really launched his reading was Minecraft server play. I wasn’t able to read the chat to him, get his response, and enter it, fast enough to keep up with the pace of play. That frustrated him and so he was motivated to learn.
My younger child also loved Calvin and Hobbes, but then he REALLY loved Harry Potter, and he wanted to read more competently because he was annoyed at how long it took him to progress through the story.
So my very small sample size is that efforts to teach were totally futile, but once there was a *reason,* it was very, very fast.
Sarah, your stories are like many others I've heard. Kids learn to read when they have a real reason to want to read. I've heard quite a few stories of kids learning to read through video games.
Thanks for the wonderful article. This "resonates" so much with me (will explain why I have the word in quotes). A lot of it boils down to not understanding how we learn, and neuroscience, for the most part, failing to show us the way. I run a microschool and was fortunate enough to get my PhD in neuroscience in what's called computational neuroscience. This was with pretty much the only researcher in the world trying to understand biological learning from a systems perspective. I didn't really appreciate that perspective until about two decades after I graduated and wrote a book about it. (Peter, you might know my co-author as your former student Dr. Ogas!)
A systems perspective shows us why the reading wars are fundamentally misguided. We are always switching between the whole and the parts, the patterns and the particulars. We learn in two ways: learning from experience and learning from error. When we are learning from experience, which is what we are doing with the whole word method, there is no goal, which means there is no error to be corrected. We soak it all in. And we match that flood of data with our past experiences and a synchrony, a match, a neural resonance that allows us to retain some of that and make it our present experience. This is what's happening when someone is exposed to the written word being spoken, without it being broken down and deconstructed.
Then there is learning from error. This is when we do have a goal in mind, and that allows for us to know when we are making a mistake and course correct. We can do this too. But the important thing here is we cannot do this well without motivation. And here's where the phonics approach fails or is painstakingly slow, because kids' minds and bodies are rebelling. This is a fundamental failure in understanding learning. And all the tens of thousands of dollars spent per child are not going to fix it. Classrooms are an economic necessity where kids need daycare. Within those constraints, it is still possible to do justice to learning from both experience and error. We've tried to do that with an app we built a while back (Giffie, for anyone interested) and then set aside as setting up school and related systems took over our lives. But everything we see at school points to this being the right approach. Allow them to experience reading and what it brings, which is joy, meaning, and wonder. And guide and nudge them with help. English is tricky with its irregular phoneme grapheme mappings. This becomes even harder for kids where schooling is in English but their spoken language is different (we are in India, but this is true for most ESL learners in the US). The key is not to rely entirely on the whole word, or burrow down into phonics and leach words of all meaning and give in to elementitis. Combine both. This should be so much easier with tech now, but I continue to be amazed to see no one really doing this well.
Thank you, Sai. What you say here and in your substack post make a lot of sense to me. I think something educators should understand is that children self-correct when they make errors. We don't have to correct them, we only shame them when we do that. When they have a clear goal, they can see where they have fallen short and they then correct that the next time. -- and say hi to "Ogi" Ogas!
This is a really interesting take on the reading wars which I haven’t seen elsewhere. It makes intuitive sense to me. We tried hard not to teach our twins to read because we thought they would be bored when they started school. But they were read to a lot and saw us reading a lot. And my Mum pointed out that the best way for them to get our attention from very young was to plonk themselves on our lap with a book - an invitation that was never refused. One kid learned to read by age 3ish. I remember us going past a supermarket and she pointed at the sign and said ’that says ASDA’. To me this suggested she’d grasped phonetics - it wasn’t a shop we used and it’s not a ‘real’ word. The other kid was helped by phonetics at school but found reading tough going even though he loved books & being read to. I think he just wasn’t ready. Once it clicked he was off. He still prefers audiobooks and we now know that he gets some visual stuff sometimes with words on a page, probably ASD related. We don’t know everything that’s going on for a kid. I’m very glad that their teacher never compared them or expressed any concern. She was, as far as possible within the constraints of a formal classroom, happy to let them go at their own pace.
I love the thoughtful way this article speaks to how acquistion of the skill of reading has been like a pendulum going back and forth from phonics instruction to whole word reading for meaning. In my practice as a reading teacher (for the most part) it is two sides of the same coin. Even as Peter explained about precocious readers, they figured out that sounds are represented by different letters and different combinations of letters. The fact that some kids can seemingly and unexplainably be able to figure it out for themselves doesn't negate their learning it. If you focus on only phonics, it can become boring. Kids (ones that I have taught and interacted with) are more interested in the phonics when there is meaning to the words that they sound out. A quick anecdote, almost 20 years ago I had a little guy, 5 years old that I was teaching to read and he was there with little to no emotion sounding out the words I was pointing to and then he sounded out r- i -m. He perked up with a bright light in his eyes and shouted "RIM, my dad works there." From that moment on, reading was so much more interesting to him. (You may know that RIM is Research in Motion the company that makes (made?) blackberries. FYI). I believe that natural ways of learning will always win over forced classroom learning with groups of kids at very different levels. I also believe that phonics can be incorporated in a very natural way to young learners who need that extra breakdown and practice. Because so many kids are in classrooms with teachers who are just doing their best, it's probably good to follow the data and opt for a method that is going to be the best for the highest number of kids. Until the education system can be transformed into something that resembles more natural life environments, it is the best we can do.
Thank you for sharing your experience as a reading teacher. I agree that it is a blend of both. I was an early reader and I wasn't specifically taught phonics, but I did still understand the connection between sounds and letters. I have been seeing comments reacting as if the article is arguing against phonics, but it isn’t. As you said, it can be incorporated in a very natural way while explaining meaning at the same time.
I love the story of the child who realized the connection between the word and the place where his dad works. You understand and remember so much better when you make the connection between what you’re learning and something that has meaning to you. In foreign languages, I have struggled to learn lists of vocabulary words by rote memorization, but had it “click” when I saw words in stories that I found interesting and was able to read. Seeing the words in context, as part of something that had meaning to me, made it easier to go back to the learning exercises as well.
You can learn the technical aspect without meaning, and forget it because it has no purpose; you can learn the meaning without the technical aspect, and forget it because you don’t know how it’s made. It is a blend of both, and it can be taught together.
I was a precocious reader. I taught myself to read at age 3 by memorizing all the books my parents read to me and then matching the words on the page to my memory of them. The PBS show The Electric Company, which began when I was 4, helped reinforce what I learned.
I agree that interest is crucial for becoming an early reader, but I think aptitude plays a role too. I don’t mean that early readers are necessarily more intelligent overall than other kids, but I do think we share a particular talent for words and language, a talent that is observable for the rest of our lives. I went on to become an English teacher, editor, and writer, for example, and my husband—who taught himself to read at age 3 as I did—has an extraordinary facility for learning foreign languages.
Because early readers are by definition unusual, what worked for us is unlikely to work for kids who lack that particular talent. This is why phonics has been a more effective approach than whole language for most kids.
And by all means, let kids choose books that interest them! Interest matters much more for getting all kids reading than having them drill boring exercises.
My son was a precocious reader, he was reading The Magic Faraway Tree at 3 years old, It took me awhile to appreciate he could read, at first I thought it was memory recall. He would take groceries out of the trolly and read the ingredients, he would read street sign "mummy that sign said slow down, you didn't". The difficulty was that people didn't believe he could read, his kindergarten teacher just nodded her head , giving me condescending look. Even on teacher forums, I was told by a reading recovery teacher "that no one learns to reads without being taught" telling me it was BS. School was challenging when you're 6 and you tell the teacher they have spelt a word wrong on the blackboard, they don't like it . When I think about it now their reaction was ridiculous . School was trial finding teachers that were willing to engage with him.
Loved that explanation of early reading. My Granny read after lunch each day to me, she didn't have the means for many books at that time, she bought me a well-known UK [we were in Ireland] comic with stories of girl's in school and elsewhere. At this time I was just 3, after a couple of months she came in to read as usual, she started on one story and I said not that one please, I read it already. so great excitement in the evening when all the family were there and she sat up up and asked me to read aloud, I was about 3.5yo. I could read anything very quickly, at 4 I found H. Rider Haggard's 'She and Allan' and I was hooked totally, I vividly remember struggling with the African chieftain's name! I studied effective reading much later, and realsied the things that held a lot of people back was that school based approach, especially running fingers under words, I had learnt to read in a whole-way, if my granny had sat me down and worked on phonics I'd not have grasped it.
NB A year after learning, I had a bad leg accident and was laid up [pre-tv times] for 6 months, reading was my saviour!
For me, I wanted to learn in kindergarten (1989) but was incredibly frustrated and put off by the slow phonics approach. I wanted to READ! My mom labeled everything in our house with a handwritten card. That helped a lot. My mom is now an elementary public school reading specialist and I am an unschooling mother of two. We don’t exactly see eye to eye on these things.
I would say my eldest was just a precocious reader. He could read at 4/5. I read aloud to him constantly as we didn’t have screens available, and he saw me reading a great deal, or my husband reading aloud to me as I did handcrafts or cooked meals. He also spent one night a week at my parents house, though, and I KNOW my mom was working on him, pointing out letters and that sort of thing. Saying things like “S T O P spells stop” while pointing at a stop sign… So he’s a bit of a mixed bag I suppose.
My youngest (now 9) has had no interest in reading up until recently (though she’s also tried with him). I know he actually can figure out quite a lot of words, but just isn’t confident. But because of Minecraft chat, has asked to be helped to learn. So I am interested in the best way to accommodate his desire both “unschool” and just particularly in just his style.
I was a precocious reader, and I'd credit most of my early reading ability to the GameCube game Animal Crossing. It was a rather text-heavy game full of cute animals who were often instructing you to do things via speech bubbles.
I'd been read to, and despite not really seeing my parents reading books independently, watching my mother play games like Animal Crossing was sufficient motivation for me. It was also a relatively innocuous game that my mother would happily leave me to play while she did the dishes. I don't remember learning, or being unable, to read, but I do remember asking my mother, "What is this word?" while she washed dishes and being told to figure it out, as she was busy.
My father did teach me some phonics, but that was largely after I was able to read age-appropriate books and was often asking about long or unusual words. I enjoyed doing the phonics workbooks immensely because it was easy and earned me a lot of praise.
Regardless, reading remained my favorite activity throughout school, and I now work as an editor for a living. I'm not exceptional at math or anything else, maybe a tad above average (because reading comprehension meant I could always understand the material from my textbooks).
So I suppose it worked for me -- though it made elementary school a little boring.
Well, Peter, you offered a comprehensive review of a complex topic. As the head of a school for 19 years, I have some experience with this.
The argument is nonsense. Printed language is both the meaning implicit in the symbols and the symbols representing the meaning. Good teaching toggles back and forth. Some children find one avenue more helpful than the other, but they eventually merge into one understanding.
As to the overall conclusion; that "progressive" approaches don't work well in classroom settings. This is an indictment of classroom settings, not of natural learning approaches. Structuring schools with large classes of kids on different developmental timelines, and different ways of apprehending the world, is just illogical.
My son (12) currently reads A LOT. But I cultivated this habit very deliberately. We did a ton of read-alouds when he was younger. And then I always have books available for him to read in genres that he enjoys. My son is fairly bright with a logical and engineering type of mind. He would be doing the large technic motorized lego builds on his own at 5/6 yrs old.
HOWEVER, he didn't learn to read "naturally" on his own. Unlocking the reading "code" for him did not come naturally. I started teaching phonics when he was about 4 or 5. It wasn't clicking, so I dropped it. I didn't want him to hate reading.
After his 7th birthday, when I felt his brain was ready, I started a systemic phonics reading program. Just 30 min a day. He hated it at first - nothing was clicking, which was very frustrating to him b/c typically, he catches on to things very easily. But within a year, he was reading on his own, grade level books. By the 2nd year, he was reading very quickly 200-400 page books. Sometimes, I couldn't get books fast enough.
A BEAUTIFUL FUN rapport is soooOOOooooo essential in facilitating learning experiences. I was an early reader and ASSUMED my child would be just like me. HA! No, so many lessons there...Teaching anything at all is an art. It is a privilege and learning is constant regardless of context. The world is a university and giant parkour course, I repeat myself for sure! For any of us neurospicy families, following one's own beat motivation is particularly essential. I find that this theme repeats endlessly in every way in every dimension of my life.....aka capitalism is anti-body and anti-community not a humane system whatsoever, is feudalism only, as thrives upon our miseries and divisions. On y va! We look where we want to go. Kindness is not a sometimes thing. Also how can us kinaesthetic learners absorb a thing if we are not allowed to move in school? Just ridiculous, the whole set up. Although learning is blabbed about, it is not the aim of school, no no no., conformity and breaking the spirit to serve the economy is the point. Thank you Peter Gray for your fab offerings! Listening to one of your books to skill up as am a freelancer single parent now homeschooler! WeeEEeeEeeee what an adventure!
I really don't remember learning to read, so I can't say for myself. But I'm pretty sure it didn't involve phonics; I'm just not sure of the timing.
Our self-directred home educated experiences are similar to these here, but with some variation.
My eldest was reading at 4 - and it was indeed a hyperfocused interest. She would ask to be read to for sometimes up to four hours a day. But she didn't obviously decode phonics as a result. There is dyslexia in the mix. We broke done words into subwords rather than using sounds. The biggest impact of her learning difficulty was on spelling (which developed in her early teens), not reading.
The variation with my youngest was that she read at nine. But whether interest was a factor is debatable. She really didn't want to be able to read but found that she could read anyway.
I've had some experiences similar to yours. I am the oldest of three sisters. I learned to read naturally before kindergarten. My sisters learned at school. During my early childhood, my father was finishing his dissertation. Both of my parents read daily for a couple of hours, and I was read to a lot when my mother was pregnant with my first sister.
When I had my first child, he did what your son did! He started asking “Eh-zat?” (What’s that?), and developed an enormous spoken vocabulary, saying full sentences before age 2. At some point, he noticed the alphabet on the side of the play structure at the park. He would point to the letters randomly and ask, “What’s that?” so I told him the letter name. He loved to be read to, including the big Dr Seuss books like The Lorax. He asked for the same books over and over. One day, I asked him if he knew the words on a page with only three words. He did!
My second child learned in the first couple months of school. There was some phonics, but not the structured, systematic type. I think he learned mainly at home and just wasn't quite ready to put it all together.
In teaching, I have used phonics with students with learning challenges. It seems like they need it, but I also include reading to them about high-interest topics. That way they see the value of reading and are more exited to learn. It's hard to know if they really need the phonics. It is probably making up for what was missing at home.
What do you make of the recent dramatic improvement in reading ability in Mississippi?
“In California, only 28% of Black students can read at a 'basic' level or above on the fourth-grade NAEP. In Mississippi, it's 52%. It's inexcusable, and it's a policy choice.”
My two sons, who didn’t go to school, learned to read around roughly 8 and maybe 10-11. “Late” readers, in other words. With the first, I tried to teach him when he was little but it became clear he was just struggling through sounds because I asked him to, so I let it go. That was the last “teaching” I ever did.
He loved to read Calvin and Hobbes, but what really launched his reading was Minecraft server play. I wasn’t able to read the chat to him, get his response, and enter it, fast enough to keep up with the pace of play. That frustrated him and so he was motivated to learn.
My younger child also loved Calvin and Hobbes, but then he REALLY loved Harry Potter, and he wanted to read more competently because he was annoyed at how long it took him to progress through the story.
So my very small sample size is that efforts to teach were totally futile, but once there was a *reason,* it was very, very fast.
Sarah, your stories are like many others I've heard. Kids learn to read when they have a real reason to want to read. I've heard quite a few stories of kids learning to read through video games.
Thanks for the wonderful article. This "resonates" so much with me (will explain why I have the word in quotes). A lot of it boils down to not understanding how we learn, and neuroscience, for the most part, failing to show us the way. I run a microschool and was fortunate enough to get my PhD in neuroscience in what's called computational neuroscience. This was with pretty much the only researcher in the world trying to understand biological learning from a systems perspective. I didn't really appreciate that perspective until about two decades after I graduated and wrote a book about it. (Peter, you might know my co-author as your former student Dr. Ogas!)
A systems perspective shows us why the reading wars are fundamentally misguided. We are always switching between the whole and the parts, the patterns and the particulars. We learn in two ways: learning from experience and learning from error. When we are learning from experience, which is what we are doing with the whole word method, there is no goal, which means there is no error to be corrected. We soak it all in. And we match that flood of data with our past experiences and a synchrony, a match, a neural resonance that allows us to retain some of that and make it our present experience. This is what's happening when someone is exposed to the written word being spoken, without it being broken down and deconstructed.
Then there is learning from error. This is when we do have a goal in mind, and that allows for us to know when we are making a mistake and course correct. We can do this too. But the important thing here is we cannot do this well without motivation. And here's where the phonics approach fails or is painstakingly slow, because kids' minds and bodies are rebelling. This is a fundamental failure in understanding learning. And all the tens of thousands of dollars spent per child are not going to fix it. Classrooms are an economic necessity where kids need daycare. Within those constraints, it is still possible to do justice to learning from both experience and error. We've tried to do that with an app we built a while back (Giffie, for anyone interested) and then set aside as setting up school and related systems took over our lives. But everything we see at school points to this being the right approach. Allow them to experience reading and what it brings, which is joy, meaning, and wonder. And guide and nudge them with help. English is tricky with its irregular phoneme grapheme mappings. This becomes even harder for kids where schooling is in English but their spoken language is different (we are in India, but this is true for most ESL learners in the US). The key is not to rely entirely on the whole word, or burrow down into phonics and leach words of all meaning and give in to elementitis. Combine both. This should be so much easier with tech now, but I continue to be amazed to see no one really doing this well.
I've written about learning from experience and error over here: https://blog.comini.in/p/play-purpose-perspective-how-to-make
Thank you, Sai. What you say here and in your substack post make a lot of sense to me. I think something educators should understand is that children self-correct when they make errors. We don't have to correct them, we only shame them when we do that. When they have a clear goal, they can see where they have fallen short and they then correct that the next time. -- and say hi to "Ogi" Ogas!
This is a really interesting take on the reading wars which I haven’t seen elsewhere. It makes intuitive sense to me. We tried hard not to teach our twins to read because we thought they would be bored when they started school. But they were read to a lot and saw us reading a lot. And my Mum pointed out that the best way for them to get our attention from very young was to plonk themselves on our lap with a book - an invitation that was never refused. One kid learned to read by age 3ish. I remember us going past a supermarket and she pointed at the sign and said ’that says ASDA’. To me this suggested she’d grasped phonetics - it wasn’t a shop we used and it’s not a ‘real’ word. The other kid was helped by phonetics at school but found reading tough going even though he loved books & being read to. I think he just wasn’t ready. Once it clicked he was off. He still prefers audiobooks and we now know that he gets some visual stuff sometimes with words on a page, probably ASD related. We don’t know everything that’s going on for a kid. I’m very glad that their teacher never compared them or expressed any concern. She was, as far as possible within the constraints of a formal classroom, happy to let them go at their own pace.
I love the thoughtful way this article speaks to how acquistion of the skill of reading has been like a pendulum going back and forth from phonics instruction to whole word reading for meaning. In my practice as a reading teacher (for the most part) it is two sides of the same coin. Even as Peter explained about precocious readers, they figured out that sounds are represented by different letters and different combinations of letters. The fact that some kids can seemingly and unexplainably be able to figure it out for themselves doesn't negate their learning it. If you focus on only phonics, it can become boring. Kids (ones that I have taught and interacted with) are more interested in the phonics when there is meaning to the words that they sound out. A quick anecdote, almost 20 years ago I had a little guy, 5 years old that I was teaching to read and he was there with little to no emotion sounding out the words I was pointing to and then he sounded out r- i -m. He perked up with a bright light in his eyes and shouted "RIM, my dad works there." From that moment on, reading was so much more interesting to him. (You may know that RIM is Research in Motion the company that makes (made?) blackberries. FYI). I believe that natural ways of learning will always win over forced classroom learning with groups of kids at very different levels. I also believe that phonics can be incorporated in a very natural way to young learners who need that extra breakdown and practice. Because so many kids are in classrooms with teachers who are just doing their best, it's probably good to follow the data and opt for a method that is going to be the best for the highest number of kids. Until the education system can be transformed into something that resembles more natural life environments, it is the best we can do.
Thank you for sharing your experience as a reading teacher. I agree that it is a blend of both. I was an early reader and I wasn't specifically taught phonics, but I did still understand the connection between sounds and letters. I have been seeing comments reacting as if the article is arguing against phonics, but it isn’t. As you said, it can be incorporated in a very natural way while explaining meaning at the same time.
I love the story of the child who realized the connection between the word and the place where his dad works. You understand and remember so much better when you make the connection between what you’re learning and something that has meaning to you. In foreign languages, I have struggled to learn lists of vocabulary words by rote memorization, but had it “click” when I saw words in stories that I found interesting and was able to read. Seeing the words in context, as part of something that had meaning to me, made it easier to go back to the learning exercises as well.
You can learn the technical aspect without meaning, and forget it because it has no purpose; you can learn the meaning without the technical aspect, and forget it because you don’t know how it’s made. It is a blend of both, and it can be taught together.
I was a precocious reader. I taught myself to read at age 3 by memorizing all the books my parents read to me and then matching the words on the page to my memory of them. The PBS show The Electric Company, which began when I was 4, helped reinforce what I learned.
I agree that interest is crucial for becoming an early reader, but I think aptitude plays a role too. I don’t mean that early readers are necessarily more intelligent overall than other kids, but I do think we share a particular talent for words and language, a talent that is observable for the rest of our lives. I went on to become an English teacher, editor, and writer, for example, and my husband—who taught himself to read at age 3 as I did—has an extraordinary facility for learning foreign languages.
Because early readers are by definition unusual, what worked for us is unlikely to work for kids who lack that particular talent. This is why phonics has been a more effective approach than whole language for most kids.
And by all means, let kids choose books that interest them! Interest matters much more for getting all kids reading than having them drill boring exercises.
My son was a precocious reader, he was reading The Magic Faraway Tree at 3 years old, It took me awhile to appreciate he could read, at first I thought it was memory recall. He would take groceries out of the trolly and read the ingredients, he would read street sign "mummy that sign said slow down, you didn't". The difficulty was that people didn't believe he could read, his kindergarten teacher just nodded her head , giving me condescending look. Even on teacher forums, I was told by a reading recovery teacher "that no one learns to reads without being taught" telling me it was BS. School was challenging when you're 6 and you tell the teacher they have spelt a word wrong on the blackboard, they don't like it . When I think about it now their reaction was ridiculous . School was trial finding teachers that were willing to engage with him.
My son had the same experience. Teachers didn't know how to deal with a kid who was a good reader before starting kindergarten.
Loved that explanation of early reading. My Granny read after lunch each day to me, she didn't have the means for many books at that time, she bought me a well-known UK [we were in Ireland] comic with stories of girl's in school and elsewhere. At this time I was just 3, after a couple of months she came in to read as usual, she started on one story and I said not that one please, I read it already. so great excitement in the evening when all the family were there and she sat up up and asked me to read aloud, I was about 3.5yo. I could read anything very quickly, at 4 I found H. Rider Haggard's 'She and Allan' and I was hooked totally, I vividly remember struggling with the African chieftain's name! I studied effective reading much later, and realsied the things that held a lot of people back was that school based approach, especially running fingers under words, I had learnt to read in a whole-way, if my granny had sat me down and worked on phonics I'd not have grasped it.
NB A year after learning, I had a bad leg accident and was laid up [pre-tv times] for 6 months, reading was my saviour!
For me, I wanted to learn in kindergarten (1989) but was incredibly frustrated and put off by the slow phonics approach. I wanted to READ! My mom labeled everything in our house with a handwritten card. That helped a lot. My mom is now an elementary public school reading specialist and I am an unschooling mother of two. We don’t exactly see eye to eye on these things.
I would say my eldest was just a precocious reader. He could read at 4/5. I read aloud to him constantly as we didn’t have screens available, and he saw me reading a great deal, or my husband reading aloud to me as I did handcrafts or cooked meals. He also spent one night a week at my parents house, though, and I KNOW my mom was working on him, pointing out letters and that sort of thing. Saying things like “S T O P spells stop” while pointing at a stop sign… So he’s a bit of a mixed bag I suppose.
My youngest (now 9) has had no interest in reading up until recently (though she’s also tried with him). I know he actually can figure out quite a lot of words, but just isn’t confident. But because of Minecraft chat, has asked to be helped to learn. So I am interested in the best way to accommodate his desire both “unschool” and just particularly in just his style.
I was a precocious reader, and I'd credit most of my early reading ability to the GameCube game Animal Crossing. It was a rather text-heavy game full of cute animals who were often instructing you to do things via speech bubbles.
I'd been read to, and despite not really seeing my parents reading books independently, watching my mother play games like Animal Crossing was sufficient motivation for me. It was also a relatively innocuous game that my mother would happily leave me to play while she did the dishes. I don't remember learning, or being unable, to read, but I do remember asking my mother, "What is this word?" while she washed dishes and being told to figure it out, as she was busy.
My father did teach me some phonics, but that was largely after I was able to read age-appropriate books and was often asking about long or unusual words. I enjoyed doing the phonics workbooks immensely because it was easy and earned me a lot of praise.
Regardless, reading remained my favorite activity throughout school, and I now work as an editor for a living. I'm not exceptional at math or anything else, maybe a tad above average (because reading comprehension meant I could always understand the material from my textbooks).
So I suppose it worked for me -- though it made elementary school a little boring.
Well, Peter, you offered a comprehensive review of a complex topic. As the head of a school for 19 years, I have some experience with this.
The argument is nonsense. Printed language is both the meaning implicit in the symbols and the symbols representing the meaning. Good teaching toggles back and forth. Some children find one avenue more helpful than the other, but they eventually merge into one understanding.
As to the overall conclusion; that "progressive" approaches don't work well in classroom settings. This is an indictment of classroom settings, not of natural learning approaches. Structuring schools with large classes of kids on different developmental timelines, and different ways of apprehending the world, is just illogical.
My son (12) currently reads A LOT. But I cultivated this habit very deliberately. We did a ton of read-alouds when he was younger. And then I always have books available for him to read in genres that he enjoys. My son is fairly bright with a logical and engineering type of mind. He would be doing the large technic motorized lego builds on his own at 5/6 yrs old.
HOWEVER, he didn't learn to read "naturally" on his own. Unlocking the reading "code" for him did not come naturally. I started teaching phonics when he was about 4 or 5. It wasn't clicking, so I dropped it. I didn't want him to hate reading.
After his 7th birthday, when I felt his brain was ready, I started a systemic phonics reading program. Just 30 min a day. He hated it at first - nothing was clicking, which was very frustrating to him b/c typically, he catches on to things very easily. But within a year, he was reading on his own, grade level books. By the 2nd year, he was reading very quickly 200-400 page books. Sometimes, I couldn't get books fast enough.
A BEAUTIFUL FUN rapport is soooOOOooooo essential in facilitating learning experiences. I was an early reader and ASSUMED my child would be just like me. HA! No, so many lessons there...Teaching anything at all is an art. It is a privilege and learning is constant regardless of context. The world is a university and giant parkour course, I repeat myself for sure! For any of us neurospicy families, following one's own beat motivation is particularly essential. I find that this theme repeats endlessly in every way in every dimension of my life.....aka capitalism is anti-body and anti-community not a humane system whatsoever, is feudalism only, as thrives upon our miseries and divisions. On y va! We look where we want to go. Kindness is not a sometimes thing. Also how can us kinaesthetic learners absorb a thing if we are not allowed to move in school? Just ridiculous, the whole set up. Although learning is blabbed about, it is not the aim of school, no no no., conformity and breaking the spirit to serve the economy is the point. Thank you Peter Gray for your fab offerings! Listening to one of your books to skill up as am a freelancer single parent now homeschooler! WeeEEeeEeeee what an adventure!
I really don't remember learning to read, so I can't say for myself. But I'm pretty sure it didn't involve phonics; I'm just not sure of the timing.
Our self-directred home educated experiences are similar to these here, but with some variation.
My eldest was reading at 4 - and it was indeed a hyperfocused interest. She would ask to be read to for sometimes up to four hours a day. But she didn't obviously decode phonics as a result. There is dyslexia in the mix. We broke done words into subwords rather than using sounds. The biggest impact of her learning difficulty was on spelling (which developed in her early teens), not reading.
The variation with my youngest was that she read at nine. But whether interest was a factor is debatable. She really didn't want to be able to read but found that she could read anyway.
I've had some experiences similar to yours. I am the oldest of three sisters. I learned to read naturally before kindergarten. My sisters learned at school. During my early childhood, my father was finishing his dissertation. Both of my parents read daily for a couple of hours, and I was read to a lot when my mother was pregnant with my first sister.
When I had my first child, he did what your son did! He started asking “Eh-zat?” (What’s that?), and developed an enormous spoken vocabulary, saying full sentences before age 2. At some point, he noticed the alphabet on the side of the play structure at the park. He would point to the letters randomly and ask, “What’s that?” so I told him the letter name. He loved to be read to, including the big Dr Seuss books like The Lorax. He asked for the same books over and over. One day, I asked him if he knew the words on a page with only three words. He did!
My second child learned in the first couple months of school. There was some phonics, but not the structured, systematic type. I think he learned mainly at home and just wasn't quite ready to put it all together.
In teaching, I have used phonics with students with learning challenges. It seems like they need it, but I also include reading to them about high-interest topics. That way they see the value of reading and are more exited to learn. It's hard to know if they really need the phonics. It is probably making up for what was missing at home.
This explanation does fit with my understanding and experiences, thank you.
What do you make of the recent dramatic improvement in reading ability in Mississippi?
“In California, only 28% of Black students can read at a 'basic' level or above on the fourth-grade NAEP. In Mississippi, it's 52%. It's inexcusable, and it's a policy choice.”
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/illiteracy-is-a-policy-choice