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Learning To Read & Early Childhood Reading

I don‘t remember actually learning to read.

Do you remember being told to point to each word as you read it, even though you'd already skim-read the whole page and knew what was coming? :chuckle:

I can't remember ever pointing and was always being told off for not doing it until the teachers understood that I could read silently.
Then I'd be punished for 'reading too fast'. As if I were doing it on purpose to look clever.
 
Do you remember being told to point to each word as you read it, even though you'd already skim-read the whole page and knew what was coming? :chuckle:

I can't remember ever pointing and was always being told off for not doing it until the teachers understood that I could read silently.
Then I'd be punished for 'reading too fast'. As if I were doing it on purpose to look clever.


I do remember initially pointing, but there comes a time when you don’t need to, yes. :D

Yes, that’s a point, I wonder when we begin to read silently? I don’t remember that, either.
 
My mother was made to leave school at 14 but always harboured a dream of becoming a primary school teacher. Once my sister was at school and reading, Mum decided that she would teach me to read too. I have a vague recollection of sitting on the sofa with her reading words off flashcards; I was probably about 3. Hence I was pretty fluent by the time I went to school, and reading schemes that had pictures of Kenneth Arnold's 1947 encounter on the front by the time I was 6. I was reading Mum's copy of Dr Spock when I was 7, and my dad's Wilbur Smith books by the age of 10.

Mum did go to college and train as a teacher once I went to school - hooray for realising your dreams.

Funnily enough, although I read frequently and fervently to my kids from an early age, none of them picked it up that quickly, whereas they were all really good at counting when very young. I blame their accountant godmother for that...
 
I've occasionally read anecdotes or more mere comments by people who said they "taught themselves to read" which is almost always at an extremely early age: pre-school. I think I may have read it in biographical context too but presume the author is simply repeating what the subject has already said about themselves.

Surely this is impossible? I'm one account was a woman, I forget whom, who said she had taught herself to read at age 3-4 with the newspapers lying around the house? The arcane symbols are meaningless to even the most precocious young mind? You would need hep with the sounds and the many exceptions and changes within English and no doubt other languages, you wouldn't know what punctuation marks were.

Also most people have few memories from that young any way, I suspect that where this is not self-mythologising it is people with no memory of learning to read filling in the gap themselves.
 
The arcane symbols are meaningless to even the most precocious young mind

I'm fairly sure that is right. Precocious readers - I was one - do not always retain much memory of their teachers: the text was the exciting thing!

Having discussed the matter with my brother, we tend to think it was our Grandmother who took the trouble to teach us, though we have no clear memory of the process. :nods:
 
So, two things - can anyone else remember reading very early

I was not a particularly early reader. However, I missed much of my first and all of my second year at primary school due to illness. My mother home-schooled me. My primary teacher did not expect me to return to school with good reading skills. However, my mother's work with me ensured that I did. From then on I did read books older than my age to the extent that when one of my teachers suggested, when i was around 14, to read a certain author, I was surprised because I had already read all of her books when I was about 11. (Can't remember her name - she wrote books such as The Moonspinners.) In addition, I read books that I didn't understand e.g. The Glass Bead Game at too early an age, because my older sibling had read them.

My mother ensured all of her children read regularly. Every 2 weeks or so we were taken to the library to choose new books. We always had to have a book on the go. The habit is ingrained - well, almost - because I still sometimes feel guilty if I do not have a book on the go. It is a habit I am trying to drop, however - with the exception of language books. Now I read when there is something I want to read, not out of habit.
 
Careful with teaching yourself to read - it can cause you to spontaneously combust.

'Bleak' indeed
 
Surely this is impossible? I'm one account was a woman, I forget whom, who said she had taught herself to read at age 3-4 with the newspapers lying around the house? The arcane symbols are meaningless to even the most precocious young mind? You would need hep with the sounds and the many exceptions and changes within English and no doubt other languages, you wouldn't know what punctuation marks were.

When I go to Greece or Ukraine I can't read signs and so on - but within days I'm able to read restaurant, loo, car park and so on.

Constructivist learning theory has you learning out from things you know - I think that all you need is to see how one item repeats and then you're away!
 
When I go to Greece or Ukraine I can't read signs and so on - but within days I'm able to read restaurant, loo, car park and so on.

Constructivist learning theory has you learning out from things you know - I think that all you need is to see how one item repeats and then you're away!

Like driving through Wales. We all ended up shouting "Araf!" on the sharp bends.
 
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