Do really bright early readers always stay ahead of the game?

[imaginaryfriend]

I suddenly got curious as there seem to be quite a number of mums on MN who describe their children as reading chapter books before the age of 5.

Equally there seem to be a lot of people who say their child (often boys) are verys low readers in Reception but by Y1 / Y2 are reading anything / everything.

So ... do the early readers stay ahead of the others who are catching up? Does everyone end up on roughly the same level? Or do the early readers 'burn out' and start to slow down at some point?

cat64, great idea, and one that hadn't occurred to me

I tried it out with dd last night when she read her book and I realised she understood very little of what she was actually reading. It was quite eye-opening. so we spent ages looking at the pictures and only read 4 pages in the end but I think she enjoyed it a lot more.

and also, if this is a book set in the past, how different the experiences of the characters are, compared to our lives today.
We had a very interesting talk about Emil being allowed to travel all over Berlin unaccompanied at such a young age, and also the wonderfully free lives lived by the children in The Pirates of the Deep Green Sea.
Singersgirl, what goes onto the page is coherent all right, but minimalist and might as well have been written in blood

Last night, for instance, dd read the word 'blame' as in the children were 'blamed' for something in the story. Normally I'd just have moved on but I stopped and asked her what 'blame' means and she didn't have a clue! So we chatted about that and discussed examples when it's happened in her life.

I, rather short-sightedly, without this thread wouldn't have thought of that. So thanks everyone!

Bink -- have been trying to sharpen up ds's act on comprehensions, since his answers tend to the more monosyllabic end of the spectrum.

We've had some success with:

How do you know that Joe was scared/disgusted/surprised?
Which words tell you that?
What kind of feeling does this word/sentence/ passage give you?
Which bits of the writing make you feel that way?
Why do you think the author chose that word/phrase?
Can you think of any other words/phrases he/she could have used?
Can you think of any other words that mean the same as XYZ?
Can you think of some words that mean the opposite?
What difference would it have made if the author had used long sentences/ long words/ no alliteration etc etc?

And so on.

Yawn. But it does the job. Slowly. The thing with ds is that he reads like a demon, but isn't fundamentally analytical like dd1, so he has to be nudged into taking the trouble to think about these things. And of course the school won't bother him with this level of detail, because he's still basically a high achiever.

Are we still going to Carnevale on Friday?

Carnevale - I don't know - seems to have gone quiet? (And as always it's looking uncertain for me ...)

The great thing about the comprehension idea is that if the questions are varied enough in approach you get a whole new sense of where the pleasures (or not so!) are in reading for that individual child. Ds got so excited about the "word roots" (and scoring his guesses out of 100,000 ++++ (natch)) that he had to have an etymological dictionary for his b'day, wildly lucky creature that he is.

On the other hand, "find how the author makes the disaster seem like a firework display" got very left-field off-beam answers. So - she analyses - he is great at denotation, & not very great at connotation.

ImaginaryFriend, I find it surprising what my children don't know and what they do. Sometimes they can not understand a very ordinary, everyday word. DS2 this morning appeared not to know what 'ridges' were (discussion on socks).

Re comprehension, our Puffin Classic edition of 'Treasure Island' has some quite interesting questions at the end ("Why do the squire and the doctor think they have more right to the treasure than Long John Silver? Do you agree?"), as well as a tremendously useful nautical glossary, which DS1 was actually quite engaged by.

Oh, interesting. Ds has just been given a Puffin Classic Hound of the Baskervilles, so I will have a nose.

(Perverselywise, I now feel entitled to let off some pedantic steam about the Book Club Discussion Suggestions at the end of We Need to Talk about Kevin - which I think is an egregious monstrosity of a book anyway - discussion questions just inflating further its already dreadful humourless self-importance.)

I've noticed loads of American books have those Book Club questions at the end, including, in some oddly self-referential way, "The Jane Austen Book Club" (which is dreadful, incidentally).

Also if I remember correctly 'The five people you meet in heaven' or whatever the title was. There were many comments I could have made about it. None of them very constructive . Why can't book clubs think of their own questions? Isn't it terribly patronising, not to mention presumptive.

And - Issy - if dd1 is anything like my dd - not only is there some extreme vocal expressiveness, there is also a special (ballet-inflected, I think) stance with the arms lifted embracingly wide & the head tilted just-so. (I think it's lovely. I was never so graceful.)

German rezeptionsaesthetik [I made up that spelling] terms? It's Gregor (aka Frogs) you need (oh how funny, I typed [girn] there, which was fitting)

PS - Clever Polly - Catherine Storr is a genius.

I was thinking of Cold Comfort Farm rather than Kafka when I namechanged, Bink. But actually metamorphosis works quite well too since I have a large metal and velcro exoskeleton on my leg atm.

Makes me wonder whether Germans actually have the meaning part of the brains engaged when they write stuff like this, or whether Gm computers have a switch that just produces stuff like this by the paragraph.

I gave up on Terry EAgleton's critical theory classes after a coupe of weeks as I figured I lacked the crucial gene that would enable my brain to process the material.

Bink -- do you think I should reserve Gregor as a MN name? And are you coming to lunch on Friday?

oh dh - in whom rather powerfully survives something of his mittel-European forebears - believes that you can in fact only do philosophy in German (& therefore presumably only via a Germanly-formed brain? hmm) because only in German can abstract semantics be fused like that to make new chemical-compound concepts ( perhaps that should be abstraktzemantiks).

Am not a TE fan. Not at all.

Nor me, bink. But it was terribly fashionable at the time, so felt I had to turn up and see what it was all about. Never did work it out...

Am feeling severely embarrassed by this thread. My book discussions with the DSs tend to revolve around "Which are your three favourite characters in the Septimus Heap books?" and "Did you know that Horrid Henry's favourite food is escargot?" (and these are questions posed to me by them, not the other way round )