How to teach your two-year-old to read | Hacker News Reader

How to teach your two-year-old to read

theintrinsicperspective.com

16 pointspaulpauper5 comments

This is interesting because it contradicts a pattern I've been keeping my eye on for a while.

I haven't yet run into any very early / "hyperlexic" readers who learned by phonics. I'm not a teacher but I'm involved in a coop school and talk to other parents. The other thing worth knowing, I guess, is that very early reading tends to be "autism adjacent".

My observation has been that kids who learn to read very early usually just straight up sight read whole words. Practically every kid who teaches themselves to read seems to do it this way (which makes sense, phonics is a lot of extra steps and not really something a 2yo or 3yo would come up with on their own). I say "teach themselves" but of course they bootstrap by looking at words while being read to, noticing words in their environment, etc.

Phonics and letter-by-letter processing are more reliable methods for teaching kids to read - it allows for more incremental learning and measurement of progress. It's more steady, but it's also slower. The overall cognitive overhead involved seems higher since they need to segment the word, map to sounds / syllables, then play around with the sounds a bit until they recognise the word.

Generally it seemed to me that adults don't have much agency over "how" kids end up reading, if they're wired for early sight reading they will do that with only a few cues, otherwise phonics is the best way but they will tend to read a bit later, which is normal.

They can be wonderful readers and you can ignore the competitive hype from the article.

Sometimes I secretly wonder if phonics in schools is partly a social trick, though? Is it a delaying tactic, a way to make it look like progress is happening, placate anxious parents, keep kids confident, give the system milestones to measure. To help kids engage with words and get them to stare at them until their brain is actually ready to sight read, which develops later and requires more exposure in most kids? (Fluency at segmenting and sounding out new words is a plus but the early sight readers seem to pick that up on their own by some black magic I don't understand).

DISCLAIMER: I am not an educator, I don't do science in this area (and other people do), this is all anecdotal and you shouldn't take it seriously. I should read more papers.

I certainly learned by sight-reading at a very young age, but was taught phonics in kindergarten and first grade (ages 5-7, roughly). It was a bit of a slog, especially at first, when I was asked to sound out simple words when I already knew them. But it paid off in the end; my mother had also learned to read prior to formal education, but never had formal phonics instruction. She struggled throughout her life with pronouncing more-complex words that she had never heard before (though she was comfortable with their meanings). I largely don't.

Science:

1) Early brains can rewire themselves. It's amazing. If you can detect dyslexia, autism, and similar early, you'll see changes on an MRI as it fixes itself with the right intervention.

2) This process is almost completely opaque. Teaching early math or reading guarantees kids will learn it later, but you see _almost no progress_ at first, and then zoom. You need to be patient. Most of the pieces the child is learning aren't the ones you expect (and we don't quite know what they are).

3) Brains are wired differently, and about 10% of kids cannot and will never learn to read fluently without explicit instruction in phonics. Sight reading / whole word does work for some kids, but not all kids. The "science of reading" is all about being explicit about phonics.[a]

[a] I use "science of reading" in quotes, since it's the name of a specific movement, and should not be confused with the common meaning. "Science" comes up in a lot of contexts from "Christian Science" to "Computer Science" with varied levels of science. "Science of reading," as a movement, is grounded in solid science, but a fairly narrow set of studies.

I'm teaching my 2yo to read, and it's been hard work. The author mentions that his kid started in Jan and in April he could read phrases. Coincidentally I started at the exact same time. It's now end April and my kid can only read syllables. When I show him a word he struggled to break the word in its component syllables first. Work in progress.

I remember how my mom taught me crying..

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