Ok parents - what age did your kids learn to read? Reason I ask is I read an article saying how a mother had taught her 16 motnh old kid to read already. When I told a friend at work they said that was very very young, and that their daughter didn't learn until she was 6.
So - what's the usual then?
I don't have any kids of my own, my step children were different in the ages they could actually 'read', but it was mostly once they started school.
I could read before I started school. I don't know what age I was but I know when I started infants I would read the first and last pages of the ladybird books and give them back to the teacher as I had read them at home already. I remember cos I got in trouble for it in the beginning!
I did not learn to read until I started school. I think I spent the first year playing in a sand-pit and was then given a Janet and John book at the start of my 2nd year - I think I must have been six.
It is one of my earliest childhood memories. I was called over to the teachers desk along with a kid called Joseph Hart and we were each given a book and then we jumped up and down with excitement saying "We got a book!' We got a book".
I thnk all the girls were reading War and Peace by this stage but we were happy.
lol
Both of my kids were reading books by the time they were 5.
They started at age 3 learning letters and some words and at 4 they went on to learn phonetic reading.
This is not the norm in the US as many kids at age 6 still do not read when starting school.
In our area I assume this is not as bad as it used to be since the introduced free kindergaten for all kids.
It very much depends on the child and at what point you determine that their word recognition is "reading". Most kids can recognise familiar words very young -their name, STOP, Lego etc. A 16 month old may be able to recognise letters and words and relate sound to them and even determine novel words from the letter sounds, but are they really reading? Do they have the language skills to comprehend anything but familiar nouns? When you tell them a story, are they actually thinking about the plot or just enjoying the sound of your voice and the familiar words? Not so sure about that.
I would say that 6 is about average -that's certainly the expected age in schools -kindergarten/first grade, but some eight-year-olds still struggle to read aloud and some 4 year olds pick it up in a jiffy and are on Harry Potter by the time they're 5.
Mine all love books and have had the same resources available at home, but one was a fluent reader by 5 and you cannot stop her reading, one is 6 and is up to simple chapter books (which he finds boring) and one is just 4 and I think will get it in no time once he decides he wants to, but right now, he just doesn't want to.
At one time there was a bit of a power trip by teachers who said that teaching kids to read before they come to school can cause more harm than good as parents teach them "the wrong way". I think that stopped a lot of people helping their children to learn to read and so they just leave it to the schools and now Kindergarten teachers are getting frustrated by the number of children who turn up not even knowing the letters by sight never mind by sound.
I seem to remember mine learning their letters at around age 3, and being able to read simple stuff in no time, but then Welsh is a very phonetic language and once you have the letters, the words are not far behind. English is far more complex with it's different sounds and wonderful spellings.
Ok parents - what age did your kids learn to read? Reason I ask is I read an article saying how a mother had taught her 16 motnh old kid to read already. When I told a friend at work they said that was very very young, and that their daughter didn't learn until she was 6.
So - what's the usual then?
Most kids can't string a sentence at that age :roll: