Learning to read…
Kindergarten – which means “garden for children” in German – is not kindergarten anymore. It’s yesterday’s first grade, or even second. Kindergarten’s academic standards are dramatically more rigorous than even a decade ago (“find textual evidence”; “read texts with purpose and understanding”; “distinguish between similarly spelled words by identifying the sounds of the letters that differ”). [I Don’t Want My Son To Read In Kindergarten by Jessica Smock.]
My son certainly wouldn’t have been ready for public kindergarten either. Oh, not because he couldn’t read. But because from the very beginning, my child had a mind of his own. Anything he wanted to learn, couldn’t hide from him.
We provided our son will the things he would need, we took what I like to call a multimedia approach to his education. We used the Hooked on Phonics for about a month, my son liked the cards. He loved any kind of flashcards. So, I punched holes in them and made a ring out of them. He played Reader Rabbit. We kept the closed captions on the television.
I even had an art easel in the garage, I would write one letter each evening. When my son woke up, he head out to see what a had written. Sometimes, he’d copy it, other times, he would leave me a letter. We covered the entire house with post it notes. We would play games with them. We had so much fun.
We didn’t worry about teaching him to read. When he was 18-months, I thought he could read already, because I could take a dozen black VCR tapes and he would match them with the covers. He hardly even looked at them.
He finally decided to learn to read, because he wanted to play a video game and refused to spend more than half an hour playing. It had a lot of reading in the game. When he complained I made a deal with him. We would put it up until he learned to read, but then he would be allowed large blocks of time to play and complete his mission. It took him two weeks. I was amazed, he was 4.5 years old, and he did it himself with the tools we helped him create.
Addition Reading
I Don’t Want My Son To Read In Kindergarten
Tools for the Self-Taught Technology Student
