What To Do With a Three Year Old

[learnandsay]

Hi Folks,

I've been teaching my three year old daughter to recognise words, sentences and phrases. So for those of you who know the Usborne phonics readers will know Big Pig on a Dig and Ted's Shed. She can read those two and also the first two stories (for those of you with long memories!) Elsie Holmelund Minarik/ Maurice Sendak Little Bear short stories.

The reason I say recognise phrases rather than read is because my daughter still can't decipher new words. So, if you show her short she'll tell you it says short. But if you show her shot, she'll say "I don't know that word."

We're working on decoding unfamiliar words. But it's a long process!

Anyway, she loves simple addition which we call add one (or add any number up to ten) using lego blocks and the like. We do the same for subtraction. And for multiplication we do repeated addition. Which she finds very enjoyable. She can also divide by two, because division by two is very easy and she understands the idea of having one left over. In fact she can divide by three too. But that's another story.

Anyway, here comes my question.

My daughter will start in Reception next September. And there I've seen children learning to recognise their own names and to count to five. I don't believe that the concepts of division and multiplication are even introduced until the children are at least a couple of years older. And I haven't seen Reception children reading entire books. In fact I've seen Year One children still reading made up words like foo, goo and boo on an interactive white board.

So, my question is this........

How do I prevent my daughter's education from declining rapidly when she starts school? I can't help feeling that Reception classes are going to facilitate the unlearning of everything that I've taught her. She's still got almost a year to go till then. So she'll have acquired a lot more to forget by the time she reaches school.

What do you think I should do?

PS, my question assumes that she is sent to the catchment area primary. We have some out of catchment primaries which are avowedly academic in focus. But they are predictably oversubscribed. Our catchment school is proud of its parental involvement. But I can't imagine how sixty children's education is to be undertaken if a teacher needs to spend lots of time teaching my daughter things none of her classmates have any clue about! It just doesn't make sense! So, with the best will in the world my daughter can only expect to get taught what everybody else is being taught, (I think.) Hence her education must inevitably regress. (And I'm very much against home schooling children for social reasons. Although I think that in many case the academic results speak for themselves.)

If she's not yet able to break up words into their sound components, it's because she's still too young - and I don't mean too young in the "she needs to be outside playing in the mud!" sense, just that her brain isn't ready yet.

Let her do what she likes - bar pulling the curtains down - but don't worry that she can't sound out yet. If you gradually start playing the little phonics preparation games which help them to think about the sounds in a word, you'll know when she's ready.

also, thinking about it, it was only quite some time after DD started to have that sort of phonological awareness that she was ready or able to sound out. It's a long process.

Most 3 year olds will run riot given half a chance. They need the opportunity to experience a lot of different activities and most importantly, to play as freely and as often as possible. If you doubt the important of play, this is pretty inspiring reading,
www.theimaginationtree.com/p/about.html

I am pretty about the small amount of subjects that you feel are appropriate to be taught at Primary School. PS is about a broad based education. It is also where children need to learn to work independently, get on with other kids etc. If you want to give her a head start then work on these social skills rather than worrying about pushing her to be reading Harry Potter by the start of Reception.

As parents, the greatest gift we can give our kids is a passion for knowledge. A visit to the park where you can look at plants/ minibeasts/ animals, talk about the weather and interact with other kids and adults will do more for developing a lust for learning that rote learning words will.

Eeek, link not worked. Here it is again,

www.theimaginationtree.com/p/about.html

I love Anna's site indyandlara and agree it has some wonderful ideas.

If you don't keep her focussed she runs about the house pulling on the curtains throwing everything she can get hold of and climbing on your back and stomach.

Um, that's what 3yos should be doing IMO.
I don't think my DCs have suffered from turning the sofa and daddy into a climbing frame.

Your child can't work out new words using phonics, yet you think she'll be able to read a Julia Donaldson book in a couple of months????- well you're in for a shock and I don't think you are fully are of what reading is.

You categorically CANNOT read without phonics! Even if you do not explicitly teach phonics your child will need it to decode new words, now, in the future and all throughout her adult life. People who have learnt to read without being taught phonics, have just worked out the phonetic code for themselves, in a top down way.

Fully aware