Hacker News Reader

> The trick (as with almost any other field)? > Practice, practice, practice. That's it. There is no magic sauce there.

Practice isn't the only ingredient to the magic sauce. The learning input also has to be in a form which the learner can understand. If i tell you to practice a backflip until you can do it you'll likely injure yourself - or walk away, frustrated - before you can do it. If i would analyze the and split up the movement and teach it to you in little steps you will most likely learn it faster. If we could use a trampolin you'd learn even faster.

How to break things down into little steps is one of the most important parts of teaching. The other one - you're correct there - is how to foster motivation.

> It's sad that so few kids read at their grade level but it's not because of sub-optimal teaching methods that much is for sure.

My observation as a teacher is, that some are frustrated. Maybe they hit a wall (a steep learning curve) with their learning and weren't motivated enough to push through. More motivation could help, but so could a learning design that doesn't have walls/steep learning curves.

For most children it's practice. A few are so intelligent that they teach themselves and a few are left behind.

But to most people and to any extent we can talk about education, in general, I think my point stands but i agree there are of course also other things.

I would bet that if looked the number of books in the kids household you would see a strong correlation.

Maybe, I read a lot of books and used to have a lot of books around but these days we mostly use kindle.

We found multiple tricks, not obvious to us immediately, that made learning to read easier. We found them through psychologists and teachers we know. And elementary school also gave us set of instructions meant to avoid common problems.

There seemed to be a set of knowledge that makes things easier. And separate category of knowledge around choosing the book the kid has a chance to like to read.

But hardly the reason why only 1/3 reads at grade level (the article also say it's not the only reason)

What do you mean?

Could you let me know the kids app that you are speaking about.

Kindle free time is what we use on our kids. It's built into the Kindle and you can upgrade it to a 3$ per month Kindle unlimited for kids books.

Kindle Freetime

> One thing that we found that actually increased his lust for reading (he definitely would rather play soccer, Minecraft or Rayman) is to give him a Kindle which has a kids app with achievements and daily reading goals.

That sounds so strange to me. I was an avid reader for as long as I can remember - and my motivator were interesting stories. I also had parents and grandparents who themselves loved to read. Of course, I didn't have the alternative of computers until I was almost an adult, and the web only was developed while I was at university already. So I am not putting too much of an emphasize on my own experience.

I could even imagine that setting a motivator that lies outside the task itself may have long-term negative consequences. It should be the task itself. I know a lot of people think things like work are counter examples - we work because we want something else, but I think that too is wrong. I always loved work, even mundane routine jobs, from early on I worked in factory settings (e.g. during longer school breaks, I grew up in East Germany) and even boring things like working on a machine the production line of a brewery (doing the same simple things over and over all day long) were fun, knowing that my job had a purpose. Only when people treated me like I had to be "motivated" (by pressure), for example when some supervisor in a chocolate factory saw me doing nothing (I had just carefully prepared a machine and was now observing its progress - it was the opposite of "doing nothing") my job motivation went from 100% to 0 in a heartbeat. I think when motivation is not there it probably is a pull issue, not a push issue. When I see purpose (incl. the one of serving society) at the far end I like doing even boring tasks, was my experience since childhood. Okay, that last comment leaves the topic at head behind, there only is what I said in my first sentence.

He is talking about five years old. Kids who learn to read, read slowly at first. Very very slowly and with a lot of effort. And by the time they finished long sentence, they have no idea how that sentence started. This period is notfun, because they cant do it yet. This period also takes a lot of time, it is long enough with 6-7 years old and even longer with five years old.

The interesting stories as motivator works for kids that already know how to read and need just some more practice. And when the books the child is inclined to read are already collected and available - when the kid is starting, it takes multiple attempts to figure out what it is that child will like.

I get that - I too was a five year old at some point :-) Not sure I started actually reading at five though, I think those were books heavy on images with little text, if any.

The age to start is a very different subject, I'm not convinced that rushing this is useful (nor that it hurts). Of course it depends on the overall situation, I don't want to lean out very far on anything I'm saying here. I might look at what else the kid does. If the child is active I probably wold not care if it starts reading at 5 or at 7. I think - and I also base that on a basic (but not more) knowledge of neuroscience - that moving is much more important in the early years.

That's not how I experienced it I remember reading suddenly clicking I think in my first year as I can remember the Victorian era school room in my villages primary.

Oddly enough I am a dyslexic but had zero problems with reading- writing, spelling and grammar not so much - chiz

I am also a life-long avid reader. I didn't really understand what makes learning to read so hard.

At least, until I started learning Japanese. After a few years of that, I realized that the pain I was feeling while reading Japanese kids' books is what all kids feel when learning to read initially. It's just been so long ago that I've forgotten it.

In short, reading slowly is very painful. You know that others can read quickly, but you can't. You know that there's a good story there, but it's constantly interrupted by trying to pronounce things, trying to remember what words mean (or worse, looking them up!), or skipping them and trying to figure out what they mean from context.

It's way more painful than you remember.

Something that encouraged me to read with outside motivations would be welcome to me. So that Kindle kids app actually sounds awesome to me as a middle-aged adult right now.

Does it matter? Even if I don't remember the feeling, it must have been as hard for me as for everybody else. So with that variable being about equal we are back to the discussion. Why would some people need "tricks" and/or pressure when others do it all on their own?

Also, I learned one other language - English - (I'm a German speaker) when I already was an adult, and pretty late too. I didn't have enough proficiency for daily life until I was almost 20, and even from there I had a decade of learning (example: no problems reading Stephen King - then I started The Lord of the Rings and for the first fifty pages had to consult the dictionary at least a few times per page; same with the jump from a newspaper like the SF Chronicle to The Economist, the same thing happened, again). But I never needed - or got - external motivation.

I'm not trying to make the (useless) point that everybody should have that kind of intrinsic motivation, I'm just saying this in response to what I think is your misunderstanding of the direction I took in my original comment. Remember my original reply was specifically about the use of "gaming" style of learning, make everything a goal and award points and use an app for that (which has become a popular topic in a much wider context over the last decade, it's even suggested for corporations).

We don't need to do more than put a book in front of anyone for them to learn things. But it's hardly the best way to do it.

If gamification helps a kid learn to read faster and happier, why not do it?

> why not do it?

I just watched a Twitch stream, two gamers casting Starcraft 2 games. Each time they got a donation - the main source of income of many streamers on Twitch - they were very very nice to the person making the donation.

I sure see the need and that that is what they have to do, but the whole thing is cringeworthy. There are two scenarios here for someone being nice to other people:

- They are nice because they feel like being nice

- They get a reward - they get paid

At least to me which one feels natural and nice and which one feels like an abomination and awkward and unnatural is quite clear.

The whole concept of "reward", of getting "paid" (does not have to be money), sure has taken off. There have even be suggestions to pay kids to go to school.

But mostly, I already made my points so I refer back to my original comment in response, have we come full circle?

If you rely on outside rewards it is not the same result at all. If you are nice because you are paid instead of because you are a nice person and like the other person, or if you read because you get a reward instead of because you want to read, I claim that this is not the same outcome by a long shot.

Kids don't learn if they start early enough they absorb (just like with your mother language) the problem is that the later we start the harder it becomes.