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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5159 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 26, 2023

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My almost four year daughter has expressed an interest in learning to read. I am lazy, and don't particularly want to teach her to read, but also can't afford preschool any time soon, so probably should.

Recommendations for methods/curriculum/concrete actions would be appreciated. Preferably that doesn't include a lot of small pieces -- my mother is really into teaching reading, but tends to give us a bunch of matching letter toys that are instantly scattered throughout the house.

Hooked on Phonics is how I learned to read. Now they have a subscription/app model with most instruction taking place on the app, and supplemental books being sent to you. You get weekly progress reports asking you to target certain lessons/games. I have the app on the adult profile of our tablet because it's something I need to direct and observe.

Before this I tried All About Reading, but it wasn't clicking with her. It got to the point where she wouldn't even look at the words. There were also a lot of pieces and crafts. Hooked on Phonics app at least has some novelty/fun to it and is better at building confidence.

Duolingo also has a reading program now. I don't like it as much because it lets the kid brute force their way through each lesson. But it's free and I can leave it on the kids profile for practice.

I stumbled upon an old HN comment advocating for Bloomfield and Barnhart's Let's Read, a Linguistic Approach (Amazon), which seems pretty promising.

A previous thread (which I can no longer find) recommended Dolly Parton's Imagination Library as a way to get age-appropriate books delivered each month for your child. But most of their books are published by Penguin, and we all know what Penguin just did to Roald Dahl, so I'd vet the book list carefully before signing up.

Thanks -- it looks like both daughters might be eligible for the Dolly Parton Imagination Library (quite the mouthful). I only recognize a few of the books here https://imaginationlibrary.com/usa/book-list/ and am wondering why The Snowy Day, a book about a black boy, is tagged "Hispanic." Or why there needs to be a special tag for "Hispanic" at all. It's odd that the procedure is to print and mail an application or deliver it in person, but maybe it signifies a certain level of commitment that suggests the person will actually read the books?

Friend of mine swears by the book "teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons" by Siegfried Engelmann. It's from 1986 or something and I think there are free pdfs floating around online.

I tried that when my son was 4 and I just could not get him to pay attention through any of the lessons. He ended up learning to read at school in Kindergarten and is the top reader in his class now. If OP's daughter is actually driving the effort though, it should work well!

That looks interesting, thanks. I find it appealing that it's one book instead of a set of 50 books or something.

My parents are book hoarders, and while I do own children's books, I mostly prefer to check books out from the library, and still have trouble managing even the ones we have, and those my parents have given us.

Read books to her at night, find her books that she wants to read on her own.

(The old) Letterland books and videos had even a retard like me reading newspapers before kindergarten, at the low cost of my parents' sanity. Although now I think about it my mom was pretty engaged with reinforcing the lessons.

At that age, edutainment is where it's at. Sesame Street has been the gold standard for decades. LeapFrog's Letter Factory and Word Factory are also solid choices (though their more recent stuff is reportedly hit-or-miss). If your daughter can use a mouse, you should also let her play these games at Starfall.com, especially the alphabet and learn-to-read games and "books." (If she can't use a mouse, teach her--if she has a PC with a keyboard and mouse, she's got all the tools she needs to learn whatever she wants, provided sufficient motivation!) Once she knows the basics, the Scribblenauts games can help with her vocabulary and spelling. If she has siblings, friends, or cousins who will play multiplayer games with her (like Minecraft or Roblox, where much communication is done via text messages), that can also present an opportunity and motivation to learn to read, spell, and type better.

Also make sure there are many books in her bedroom. A deep Dr. Seuss collection is a timeless choice, but there are lots of other options, too. Read a book to her every night--not to teach, just to read, hopefully your laziness will permit at least that much! Kids that age will pick up a fair bit just by osmosis.

Toys like alphabet puzzles and alphabet blocks presumably help in some way, I suppose--I know a lot of educators are really into making learning "tactile" for young children. But I feel like I've seen far better results from simply curating opportunities with books and screens.

At that age, edutainment is where it's at. Sesame Street has been the gold standard for decades. LeapFrog's Letter Factory and Word Factory are also solid choices (though their more recent stuff is reportedly hit-or-miss). If your daughter can use a mouse, you should also let her play these games at Starfall.com, especially the alphabet and learn-to-read games and "books." (If she can't use a mouse, teach her--if she has a PC with a keyboard and mouse, she's got all the tools she needs to learn whatever she wants, provided sufficient motivation!) Once she knows the basics, the Scribblenauts games can help with her vocabulary and spelling. If she has siblings, friends, or cousins who will play multiplayer games with her (like Minecraft or Roblox, where much communication is done via text messages), that can also present an opportunity and motivation to learn to read, spell, and type better.

This is interesting. She's at home with my husband all day, and this is much more his style than the kind of thing my mother did with me. She currently has a tablet, and likes to play games where she's supposed to trace letters, but then gets frustrated because it's actually kind of hard and not very useful to trace letters with fingers (it doesn't let me pass about half the time). Lately she's been binge watching Octonaughts. Husband has lots of opinions on computers, games, and Internet stuff broadly, and I'm sure can set her up when she's ready. (I probably shouldn't... he makes fun of me and my rose gold Macbook with only trackpad and no mouse). She watches him play computer games a fair bit, and he has way more opinions than me, especially about "fremium" sorts of things.

I have a mild lingering feeling that TV watching and video game playing are vices compared to reading books, but am not sure exactly where that comes from, or to what extent it's true. Other moms I know also seem to feel that way, but it seems implicit, perhaps aesthetic and related to class in some way.

She currently has a tablet, and likes to play games where she's supposed to trace letters, but then gets frustrated because it's actually kind of hard and not very useful to trace letters with fingers (it doesn't let me pass about half the time).

Yeah, that sounds minimally helpful to me--especially in an era when handwriting seems to be on its way out entirely. Making letters is totally unnecessary to the task of reading, except insofar as your daughter may want to do things like write her own name and then read it back to you.

I have a mild lingering feeling that TV watching and video game playing are vices compared to reading books, but am not sure exactly where that comes from, or to what extent it's true. Other moms I know also seem to feel that way, but it seems implicit, perhaps aesthetic and related to class in some way.

There are definitely times when the heuristic "if it's fun it's bad (or at least not good) for you" applies! And I would certainly say that poorly-curated media is like that. Educational shows like Sesame Street were specifically created in response to large numbers of young, lower-class children being left in front of television sets all day. The internet poses a similar problem, but in a way that is harder to fix. Plenty of games and television shows are rubbish--but the same was always true of books. That's why curating opportunities is so important. Fortunately, curating opportunities is a lot easier with the internet at hand. It doesn't take a lot of work, but it does take some. Just as parents should sit and read books to their children, they should also, I think, sit and play educational games with their children. Children learn best through imitation, so doing activities with them is very important, at least initially.

Also, there will almost certainly come a time when your daughter will have to work at something dull for her own good--it's just not at all clear to me that this is an important lesson for four-year-olds. Many countries don't worry about formal education at all before a child is 7 or 8 years old. I have known children as young as two years old who could read pretty fluently, but their understanding of what they are reading is limited by their experiences. It's actually surprisingly difficult to find good reading material for a six-year-old child who reads at a high school level, because the books written for that level of reading are also written with plots and problems aimed at appealing to teenagers. Precociousness is often a good problem to have, but it does come with some unique challenges!

Everyone seems to think electronic entertainment is somewhat of a vice compared to reading books. They just do them anyways, sort of like how even people who know donuts are less healthy than salad still tend to pick donuts over salad.

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