Make sure your child is learning to read.

I imagine two of my younger children would have been in a lot of trouble if they knew much more when they started school. Lol

I was trained in a method called Reading Recovery (unfairly trashed by the Bush admin.). It’s out of New Zealand. It’s not perfect but pretty good. What a lot of important research shows is that families that are involved in their child’s education, read to them, have conversations with them, are good listeners for their children, use more complex sentence structures and larger more varied vocabularies have children that usually do better vs those that are plopped in front of the boob tube. There are lots and lots of methods to teach reading - some better than others and most will do the job. My personal belief is that a combination approach works well. For me a straight phonetic approach at first is too narrow a focus for beginning readers - your mileage may vary. There are high frequency word lists (some variations) that are lists of words that are in most beginning readers. They are often small words like me, we, this, am, it, is, to, see, go. They are a good place to start. Most of us use a cuing system that involves three things - meaning, structure and visual information when we read. Books for beginning readers usually have controlled vocabularies, more space between words and sentences and good picture support. Believe it or not a child’s accuracy when reading needs to be between 94 - 96% correct - especially at the start. That’s like getting no more than one word or less on a page incorrect. That’s because meaning will be lost and we don’t want the child having to do too much “word work” at first. Most children use meaning and the structure of our language to cue themselves with visual information being somewhat neglected (visual refers to the phonetic information that letters give us). The phonetic information is best taught in context - that way it’s learned in “littles” as the child develops confidence and as it is needed. Some memorization is present in all reading methods but this way the child is learning to read by reading and their vocabulary develops. It’s interesting that at some point the child will almost flip flop in their use of strategies. Instead of using meaning and structure they grow to notice the phonetic information more and more until this flip occurs. Then, (it seems all of a sudden) they will be so focused on “words” that they will forget to listen to themselves to “hear” if what they are reading makes sense. Eventually, and usually fairly quickly, they will learn to incorporate this 3rd strategy and then will be on their way to greater success. You want the child to be aware of these strategies, to own them, and be able to call them up at will or be so ingrained as to be good habits. They should be asking themselves… did that sound right, did that look right (or does that look like the word I just read), can I say it that way (structure of our language)? Reading at the early levels is very fluid and the child’s ability changes from day to day. It is a very rewarding experience teaching a child to read or to be able to give them the “piece” or the strategy that they missed. Heavy phonetics is good for middle to late 1st grade or 1st semester 2nd grade (in my opinion). Another unfortunate thing is that good leveled readers - those with the controlled vocal., small incremental changes in difficulty and good picture support are not always easy to find. There are some good site specific locations. You usually can’t just buy one copy (sold in sets of 6 or more as they’re usually selling to schools and - reading groups are set up for 6 students on average) and are kind of expensive. There is a pretty good site called Reading A - Z (www.readinga-z.com/) that has a subscription service that lets you print out little books and has other important resources. It’s not perfect but pretty good. Writing little sentence (possibly something from the book the child just read) is good practice. Writing is reading slowed down and is often the better place to do phonetic work. Start with what the child hears and then work in the vowels and their location.

In the end I believe it was her mothers constant and I mean constant talking about anything and everything in her early years that made the difference.

You are absolutely right about this. Being spoken to as an infant is highly correlated with academic success and normal mental development. Also, observational studies have shown a huge discrepancy between the number of words spoken to infants between low and high socioeconomic groups in the US.

Another thing. You have said a lot of false things about Examiner.com, things that never made any sense. I couldn’t imagine how to respond. But now I suspect you are confusing it with Enquirer.com or some other website.

Examiner.com is a completely huge and fairly prestigious site created by Philip Anschutz, a conservative Christian billionaire, according to this Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Examiner.com

But now I suspect you are confusing it with Enquirer.com or some other website.

You suspect incorrectly.

Examiner blog is a filth pit of malware, adware, popups and viruses populated by liars, pimps and plagiarists.