How well can your 4 year old read?

[oftenpurple]

I'm a bit upset as have been told that my 4 year old is 'behind' with her reading and phonics blending and will therefore require learning support. All in note home .

Just as a general idea, how well and what can your 4 year old read? I thought she was doing really well as she can recognise all the tricky words that have been sent home as well as attempting to sound out all of the letters in her reading books. Phonics blending was brand new to her in September but she seems to have the general idea.

I will be asking her teacher tomorrow where the gaps are exactly and what I should be doing to fill those. Don't get me wrong I'm very firmly on the 'she's 4 and is fine' bench and as certain mums in our class have displayed PFB tendencies, I don't want to talk about it with the class mums yet.

Thanks for your insight

Also seems some posters can't read or comprehend the MN talk guidelines.

Don't forget this was the early 1960s. No TV. Reading was something you did a lot of in our house, whether it was cereal packets or books. And yes I did completely understand it. I thought it was the best book I'd ever read. Till I got the Mrs Pepperpot Omnibus.

I'm on a thread at the moment which asks why people dislike the teaching profession, and although I haven't seen the deleted posts, even this one is a perfect example of one of the reasons people lose patience with teachers. A few years'-worth of personal experience is somehow "expert evidence", and if you say your child doesn't fit what the teacher has been told about the normal child, you're wrong and they're the expert.

Go and read about hyperlexia.

4 year old DS could not read at all.

Now he is 6 he is fluent, can read aloud at natural speaking speed, hardly ever finds a word he can't do, and is happily reading chapter books to himself.

Don't stress it.

Oops zombie thread

You should encourage him to sound out his words aloud. He needs to hear sounds before he can blend them. It's critical.

Well not now, he's probably driving by now!

My 4year old son could-not read at all only learned at school when onto be head-boy. I think it's ok as long as your reading to him & he learns to love reading in his own time with no pressure.

Lol, not quite - but as I posted above he has just done his GCSEs!

DD was reading pretty well by the time she entered reception - think it was mainly Rainbow Fairy books and one or two in her class were similar. The rest I don't know about - but DD just likes reading and always has. She hated Phonics though, she had no time for them and just wanted to read. Nobody taught her particularly she just did - mystery.

DS on the other hand didn't really get it until half way through year one and I had similar discussions with his teacher. I eventually bought the Peter and Jane books (now extremely old fashioned) and he picked it up quite quickly after that. He's just about to go into year 6 as good though perhaps unenthusiastic reader now though.

Honestly it all evens out. Don't worry about it.

As a side note, I think phonics are an abomination. They are fine for regular words but as soon as you start on anything more complicated and I think they create all sorts of spelling confusion. I'm a great fan of look and say - but then I'm not a teacher so what would I know?

Maybe you should ask MNHQ to modify the thread title, OP, to add "- Zombie thread, he's aced his GCSEs!"

So you don’t consider 13 years of experience teaching children of this age to be expert opinion? Or the 28 years of experience the adults in my household share between them? Or the five POSTgraduate degrees we share in education between us? Or the thousands of hours of CPD and training, or the thousands of children who we’ve successfully started in their path in the world? You don’t consider any of that to be expert opinion? And you’d rather believe the testimony of a person who says they independently understood the words “contradiction”, “introductions” and “trespassers” at the age of four, and on top of this, understood the inherent humour in the intentional mis-spelling of the phrase “PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD”?? A four year old understood that? I don’t know why I’m wasting my time calling you out on this rubbish.

I don’t know why I’m wasting my time calling you out on this rubbish.

Neither does anyone else tbh, especially as you reopened an old thread to harangue someone on what they said over 11 years ago.
Calling people liars is generally against talk guidelines (troll hunting and/or personal attack) which is why your posts keep getting deleted.

I haven't seen your deleted posts Signed. I only know you unequivocally said that 4 year olds cannot, can never read fluently. And I know for a fact that you are wrong, so your tantrum doesn't bother me. Please also go and look up the meaning of "evidence" — expert evidence is quite different to expert opinion.

Just to fly in under the radar, this is why women always feel undermined. Because it’s other women doing it. You have no respect for each other at all, shi**ing all over each other all the time in an effort to outdo each other. These preposterous emotional reactions are what make you untrustworthy and unreliable. Liars are liars, full stop. Whatever the guidelines of Mumsnet says. Stop trying to convince other parents that their kids are behind because YOU want to feel better about yourself.

Nobody's kid is "behind" because they're not reading at 4 🤣 and nobody has said so either. I'd argue the same applies at 5, or 6. Some kids learn to read at 3, some at 7, and the important thing is having a system that doesn't disadvantage either child.

I don't care that you call me a liar or try to manipulate this into a conversation about sexism(!), Signed — you're only making yourself look a bit crackers TBH, coming into an ancient thread to call people liars when they're relating a phenomenon that's well-documented, then doubling down with a load of posts that end up getting deleted.

Did you read the thread? It was parents being supportive, with examples of kids with all sorts of abilities at age 4 - and that it didn't necessarily mean much in the long term.

Every child is different and no parent should be made to feel bad, they all learn at different speeds.

And you’d rather believe the testimony of a person who says they independently understood the words “contradiction”, “introductions” and “trespassers” at the age of four, and on top of this, understood the inherent humour in the intentional mis-spelling of the phrase “PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD”??

At four, I might not have previously come across the specific words you state because my total number of lifetime words read was fewer back then, but I could've easily read them and looked them up in a dictionary or asked someone, just as you might not know what intraparenchymal means because you haven't read many anatomical textbooks yet, but could look it up. And interpreting that type of humour is an aspect of communication that might or might not be a capability present in any particular four-year-old, but you're stretching it to claim that not getting why something is funny means you can't claim to have read the thing. Of course a three- or four-year-old doesn't bring the same experience and analytical capability to what they read as a nine-year-old, but if they can read, they can bring the same level of understanding to what they read as they could bring to the same text when read out loud to them.

BTW have you worked out the difference between evidence (what you originally claimed you have) and opinion (what you later shifted to claiming) yet Signed?

Oh right, so you hadn’t necessarily come
across the words, but you had it together enough at four to go and grab a dictionary and look them up, yeah? Makes perfect sense.

@SignedOnToSayThis I certainly did not say any kid not reading at 4 was behind. I also have no need to put others down nor to feel better about myself.

I am not unreliable and untrustworthy and definitely not a liar. I am certainly not going to say I couldn't read (and understand) whole books at 4 because I absolutely could.

I didn't grow up with TV, so reading was one of the things you did lots of in our house (academic parents). Books and library visits were always available to us. If we didn't understand something we read we would ask about it! Don't forget I'm a lot older than you (by my calculations nearly 30 years older, almost half your lifetime), and things were very, very different in schools in the early 1960s. I'm not disputing your knowledge, but you are speaking from YOUR experience where children reading before school is perhaps more unusual these days as children now have technology skills instead, and I am speaking from MY experience where at times there was little else to do but read if you could - and with older siblings about, why not read what they've just read?! Some children definitely can read at 4 it's clear you just haven't met one yet.

In my post I pointed out that while I could read very well at 4 (unusual, but I assure you absolutely true), neither my DD1 at 6, nor my youngest brother at 7 nearly 8 could read, and that all children are different and do things at their own speed. Certainly not reading at 7 nearly 8 has not hindered my youngest brother who has recently taken early retirement from a well paid job involving lots of research and report writing.

Read my post's last sentence @SignedOnToSayThis:
Every child is different and no parent should be made to feel bad, they all learn at different speeds.

That's not criticising other parents, and it's very rude of you to say so.

Not at all.

Both my DC could read long before they went to school. Grand daughter didn’t know any phonics when she started school and has just got a good set of GCSEs. Her brother learnt phonics and taught himself to read at 4. All children are different. Do you read with them at home? I would recommend the Oxford Reading Tree if you want to support them.

I mean when you're four there's usually someone there to ask. But you've obviously never come across a hyperlexic kid.

I have actually never asked what I was doing with dictionaries when I was four. I don't have memories before age five, and it's not a very interesting question so I've had no reason to ask about it (and my parents probably wouldn't remember), but I remember being five in school and knowing how to use the children's dictionary. I'd imagine that rather than toddling off to the shelf and pulling out the several-kilo Chambers, my parents modelled dictionary use for me on occasion when I asked what something meant, instead of just directly telling me the meaning of a word. Also, kids often infer a meaning by context and modify their understanding of the word when they come across it subsequently. That's how we learn language in general.