Learning to read books- 4yo

[LilaGrace]

My DD (who'll be 4 in May) is showing great interest in learning to read. Can anyone recommend a great series of books which have simple words for her to read herself (with my help) along with a story? Ideally ones where the books in the series gradually get harder. I remember the Peter and Jane ladybird books from when I was a child and was hoping for something like those (but more modern!)

I'm assuming she could only read words she'd seen before yes. She knew enough that she was able to read yellow books fluently from the beginning of reception but I don't know if that would be classed as basic or not.

She has got a very good memory and no autism traits. I honestly didn't know it was that unusual for children to learn to read this way before school without actively being taught phonics.

My sister has almost photographic memory and she is not autistic.

Can she remember over a million words as wholes?

The thing with children like my son is that they don't need to have seen the word previously to read it so it's not memory.

Don't know mrz. My native language is totally different from English, and rely hugely on memory. There are many words I can read but cannot write from memory. I assume she can.

It's estimated that highly educated individuals can memorise a few thousand words ...

Surely most adults have memorised more than a few thousand? The average vocabulary is 20,000+. We might also have the phonics skills to decode words we've not encountered before but generally you just know words when you see them, you don't blend them like a 5yo.

So at what point do children who are learning to read primarily through phonics stop decoding and just automatically recall the words?

No research into the brain shows that most adults (fluent readers ) still decode even though they don't do it consciously and are able to do it automatically in fractions of a second

"As adults we have forgotten how we learnt to read, and we imagine we read whole words/shapes without attention to individual letters. But if we look at what is going on in the brain, the brain is still processing every letter. Dehaene says, "Whole word reading is a myth…the brain does not use the whole word shape". Skilled readers are processing letters simultaneously, whereas children need to work slowly, one letter at a time, till they gradually get faster and more automatic."

Can you read this?

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt-davis/cmabridge/

Thanks sirfred.
It says;
"To my knowledge, there's no-one in Cambridge UK who is currently doing research on this topic. There may be people in Cambridge, MA, USA who are responsible for this research, but I don't know of them"

So who is doing this research?

It may just be a meme rather than real research but the fact remains that it can be read without decoding surely?

No, the evidence presented there is that the reader is decoding, they're just first correcting the spelling first so as to make it meaningful.

Yes, I can read it but it makes my reading very slow and painful. I wouldn't want to read that regularly.
If you ask mrz, she would provide you with proper link to research which she refers to, I'm sure.
Why do you want to convince stranger with something so unreliable?

But, I do also believe there's aspect of memory in reading, not sure about English but at least for my language. Same sound can be written 10+ different way, or same letter can be read several different way according to the usage of letter. Memory is definitely needed. If you don't know the letter, you can not read(sound out) it, it's not decodable.

I don't want to convince anybody of anything unreliable - I just think it's unhelpful to rigidly suggest that phonics are the ONLY way to learn how to read. Especially when you're talking about a 3yo, unless you're an expert with all the materials and can do it as well as the school can. I believe that sharing good quality books at that age is key (not Biff and Chip before school!) and if a bright child picks some up themselves using whatever method, fantastic.

Perhaps my DD is an absolute anomaly (especially as she's not autistic and apparently only children with autism read this way ) but seeings as she was reading yellow band books fluently before she'd even done satpin then clearly whole word recognition does exist. Why pretend it doesn't?

I don't think anybody says it doesn't exist, at least I don't.
I am not sure about my ds' reading ability either, and mine was even more advanced reader than your dd.

I think people are concerned about parents with fluent reader recommending the methods that worked with their dcs. It was great for your child, but potentially damaging for someone else's child's learning if the parent who read the comment thought it's a good idea, and tried with their own child, who may have totally different ability.

Forgot to add, I have a doubt ds may have asd. He was definitely hyperlexic.

Whole word reading does exist as a strategy for beginning readers. But, it isn't sustainable once you reach a certain point (which I don't know if the top of my head) and the child then needs to switch to a phonics based strategy. Or you can just skip the whole word stage altogether and use phonics from the beginning and get significantly better results in the long term.

Brasseye- I could read that paragraph with no problems. It didn't take longer than if the letters had all been in the correct place.

If anyone is really interested in the phases of reading development, this chapter is a good place to start.

www.pitt.edu/~perfetti/PDF/Ehri.pdf

That passage relates to skilled reading. It doesn't tell us anything about how beginner readers learn to read. Also, I think it only works if you're careful about how you transpose the letters so the letter order is still important and therefore there must be some deciding involved. Compare - dcuk nwsa.

*decoding

I agree the letter order is important, as that forms the basis of it being whole word recognition. When the first and last letters are right our brain is able to recognise that it's a word we already know and we then instinctively correct the spelling to fit with what we remember. If we read through phonetically decoding, even if that only took a fraction of a second, it wouldn't be possible to read the passage fluently. Context is also important, eg an adult reader can predict that university will follow Cambridge - there's so much more to reading than phonics.