Something my daughter did recently got me thinking about how self-taught readers teach themselves how to read.

We were reading a story, and for various reasons related to T rex fossils, I was calling the main character "she." My daughter (still 3 then, 4 today!) corrected me and told me that the dinosaur was a "he." I realized that she must have been looking at the words as I read them and saw "he" where "she" should have been.

My kids aren't self-taught readers like many of yours are, with the possible exception of my daughter, who started before 3 1/2. She started earlier than the other two and never had to be taught how to read. She could just sound out simple words. The day care place had taught sounds, and she must have figured out how to put them together.

So now I figure that at least some self-taught readers follow along with mom or dad during story time and figure out the letter sounds by hearing the words and working out how the letters sound.

Does anyone else have thoughts about this idea? Pardon my slowness if you all figured this out ages ago....

Val

DS never sat with us when we read or looked at the books while we read. He was too busy bouncing off the walls looking like he didn't care one bit. But then the next night, when you said "now where were we?" he would quote the last sentence we had read to him exactly.

He learned to read from signs as far as I can tell. I am thinking now based on the glasses thread that he was farsighted and the books were too much trouble to look at. Signs were perfect for him. He didn't show interest in reading books to himself until he was 5, then he read chapter books.

Don't know if this answers your question....

I'm just wondering; I like to figure stuff out.
Val

It really is interesting how children learn to read in such a variety of ways. I am sure that many read along and follow the words. Some parents point to the words as they read. I never did that, and was surprised to find that my DS was following along at a really young age. Now he corrects me all the time when I am reading fast or half asleep and say the wrong words, so he still follows along at times. my DS4 completely taught himself to read, but interestingly he seemed to learn from a variety of ways..some from memorization of words, and others phonetically. He seemed to do it simultaneously at a very young age. Whenever he learns a new word, he never forgets it in reading, it's all very interesting. And I work with elementary children in an inner city school and some struggle significantly with reading. It is amazing how reading comes about in all different ways at all different times.

I consider DS6 self-taught, he learned his letters and sounds from preschool, but he figured out how they formed words all on his own. But, he's a whole word reader, so I'm not sure exactly how he made the leap. Just before he turned 5 he just picked up easy readers and started reading them, then a couple of months later he was reading beginner chapter books.

What he does now, and it fascinates me to watch him, when he comes to a word he doesn't know is he compares how it looks to something like a "database" in his head of words he's heard and he works it until he matches them up. I'll hear him sound the first couple of letters to help him decide what word group to start with, he'll say the first few sounds of a couple different possibilities until finally all the blocks fall into place and he knows the word. He never stumbles over it again after that. If the word is just too strange to match up phonetically, he'll come up with some very interesting pronunciations, lol (segue is segoo). I don't know, maybe all kids do this, but it's still pretty cool to watch and I think it might be a part of how he learned to read.

There was a point when DS was three that he suddenly wanted me to read him very very easy books over and over and to hold them where he could see. Then he would spend hours (hours!) studying books he knew pretty much by heart, and picture dictionaries. He always claimed he was "just looking at the pictures" but then he slipped up every so often and let on that he could read... so I'm pretty sure I know what was going on there.

KG's a self-taught reader ... we taught him letters and sounds when he was very small (he loved it -- his dad would push him on the swing and say "A", KG would say "B!" dad would say "C!"), but he turned out to be a whole-word reader.

Yes, I do think he learned by watching us read. We never pointed at words as we read them, but when he got to be 2ish we'd pause in our reading of familiar books and let him fill the word in from memory; at that point, he'd be following words with his eyes as he read. I think he put the whole thing together, letter sounds to help him out, and just solved the reading puzzle that way.

He's a big-time whole word reader, though; he didn't ever have a "sounding out" phase, which saved him a lot of time becoming fluent and expressive. I've never heard him sound out a word; if he comes to a word he doesn't know, he mentally breaks it into groups and just takes a stab at pronouncing it aloud. But he was 4.5 or so before he started that approach; I think his sight-word box was full! He started reading around 3 and was at fourth-grade level before he turned 5.

Like your son, Erica, he read the same books over and over (lots of picture books) when he was learning to read, which I think drilled those sight words into his brain. And he had several favorites that we'd read every other night or so ("Chicka Chicka Boom Boom," "Are You My Mother," "Freight Train," "Goodnight Moon," stuff like that), so he became very familiar with those words and just *knew* them. In fact, I think the very short and simple book "Freight Train" was the one that made reading "click" for him. Very few words in it, but it really held his attention and he loved following along.



That's just exactly what KG does now, at 6. It's fascinating to watch! And like your ds, once he knows the word, he knows it. I find it so interesting how kids learn to read in different ways. Luckily for us, it was pretty much effortless with KG. I think it would be really difficult to have a child who really struggles with reading.

DS learned the sounds from a children's alphabet video when he was two. By the time he was 2 1/2, he had figured out how to sound out simple words like CAT, DIG, etc. It never occurred to me to teach him to read because I wasn't expecting him to read that young!

I taught my kids to read in my native language, it was fairly easy as my language is very phonetic. Then DS picked up BOB BOOKS and started reading. Just like that. Bob Books were followed by Dr. Seus, and then chapter books. Never an issue, never a problem. He is actually a speed reader at this point. With DD it was a process, but fast and absolutely painless.
I have always read to my kids tons, I still do.

I did bedtime reading when they were younger. I started with pointing at the words but stopped because they would brush my hand away as I was blocking them. :P

Ds8 started reading Bob books when he was 2.5yrs old. He went on to read Clifford The big Red Dog and Dr Seuss . His favourite "I can read" series was Amelia Bedelia! We read and re-read them so many times! He moved on to Magic Treehouse series when he was 4yo. Another series he loved was Sideway stories from Wayside school. Hilarious! I have not figured out how he learned to read. It just happened. I remembered when he was in KA, he drew a pic and wrote "Mr. Lewis is in spase". I was told by he teacher that he self-corrected his spelling and canceled out the "s" & replaced with a "c" because "It didn't look right". He was not taught phonics at all but when he was in grade one, he could spell words like "encyclopedia" phonetically.
I should continue to read to them daily....
Somehow the ritual stops as they get older.

I certainly haven't figured out how kids learn to read and I find it quite baffling . My kids never sat in my lap and read along with me, although I did read to them until 2 or 3 with them wandering around and maybe listening or maybe not. By about 3, two of them wouldn't listen and were reading their own stuff instead while I attempted to read to them, so I gave it up!

My theory on my earliest reader? We went on vacation and to amuse the 2yo, we had a Blues Clues video that had words labeled to the cartoon pictures. On the way home from vacation, he was reading signs and within another week or two, he was reading books. I was in denial and blew it off until it became impossible to do so a few weeks later. Another kid read before 3 and I have no idea how it happened, but have a memory of him reading Dr. Seuss fluently to a sibling and I remember thinking, "Oh, DS can read now too!" DD was read to more often, demanded more reading, was more likely to sit in my lap while I read, and even begged for instruction at 4 or so, but still really learned to read in K. She does a more phonics type approach and the others seemed to just figure it out like a code in one big gulp.

My mother-in-law once told me she never believed kids could read early until she saw my kids. I feel the same disbelief at times -- I keep wondering if I was doing teaching I really didn't realize I was doing. But I swear, aside from some Sesame Street and a Blues Clues video, there wasn't any instruction at all and reading simply appeared. Like Cathy, it would *never* have occurred to me to teach it at that age!

DS7 was fascinated with letters very early. Before he was a year old, he was aware of letters and starting to learn them, mostly through his obsessive focus on letter and number puzzles that my dad made for him. Around that same age (12 mos. or a bit more), he would see exit signs (everywhere, of course!) and point at them while shouting "E!" in an excited voice. I remember that it always sounded like he was seeing an old friend. It was that kind of pure joy in his voice.

This letter-identification fascination also came about when speaking was fairly new to him (a few months at most), so there were times when he'd say a letter and I'd wonder if he was trying to say the word and just couldn't. Of course I'd shake my head at how ridiculous that was. But looking back now, I wonder.

He read individual words before he was 3yo, though it's hard for me to say exactly when that started because he would memorize every book he ever looked at. We have a great video of his reciting "The Grinch who Stole Christmas" when he was 2.5yo. Hilarious! So cute!

The first time I know for sure that he read a book he had never seen before was when he was 3.5yo, so by that point, there was no doubt that he was really reading and not just memorizing.

I think he learned whole words at first, but his early fascination with letters and his ongoing skill at sounding out new words makes me think there's something happening phonetically, too. To this day I can't give him those "read aloud a list of words and tell what reading level he's at" tests because he can pronounce even the craziest words correctly. He doesn't know what any of them mean, but he can "read" them.

I don't think that helps you at all, but maybe my observations can be added into everyone else's to make something sensible come out?

DD was the one who memorized books. When she was 3, she wowed my parents by reciting The Night Before Christmas. She didn't learn to read on her own, but when she was three she begged me to teach her. I used Hooked on Phonics and she caught on very quickly. I think we skipped level one, really worked on level two, and then suddenly levels 3-6 were trivially easy. She has had her nose buried in books ever since.

Wow! This is all so fascinating!

We never would have dreamed about teaching our kids to read at a very early age, either. In fact, DH and I used to say "Kids should just be doing play-type stuff before they're five, like stacking blocks and fingerpainting and coloring." Then our three-year-old told us he wanted to learn how to read, our two-year-old wanted to know everything about dinosaurs...and, well, you all know how it goes.

Cheers, Val

Mine learned when she was 3. She asked me to teach her, and I told her she was too young! For the longest time, she thought words were there to describe pictures and that the picture was the real story. So, she'd look at a picture and see some words in the newspaper and ask me if it was this or that word. She'd get very upset if we were reading and the picture didn't have every detail from the words. She was an early entrant to preschool and got exposure to letters and sounds there. Once she knew those, she was better able to guess at the words under the pictures and took off from there.

I learned through my parents reading to me, figuring out phonetics at some point (my dad said that I sounded out words that I didn't know). Whole language did not make any sense to me when I started school, so I continued with the phonetics approach.