Re: 2-year-olds reading?


"Beliavsky" <beliavsky@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:15965a0d-b25c-4ea0-976a-4bd0dbd261ff@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mar 31, 10:24 am, Banty <Banty_mem...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article
<393c53b8-ad44-4456-945a-3876f45e0...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Beliavsky says...







On Mar 31, 6:13=A0am, Chookie <ehreben...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <fsc7l4$iv...@xxxxxxxx>, "toypup" <toy...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Kindergarten started out very difficult. =A0There was loads of
written
homework from day 1. =A0They started writing sentences the second
week o=
f
class, which I remember, because I just couldn't believe it. =A0Of
cours=
e,
there were kids who couldn't even trace the alphabet or knew their
lette=
rs,
so it was ridiculous.

Crazy. =A0How long did it take before they started treating the
children l=
ike
children?

There are different opinions about what this entails. How do you know
that your expectations are the right ones?

I am surprised that 5-year-olds of normal intelligence would not know
the alphabet. What have their parents been doing with them? Both of my
sons have done so long before their 5th birthdays. If schools are
clear about what entering kindergarteners are expected to know, I
think many parents will prepare their children accordingly. Children
who are slow in learning the basics should not hold back everyone
else.

Excuse me as this has been a long thread - but did someone assert that
five year
olds shouldn't know the alphabet?

Banty

Toypup did say that kindergarteners should not be expected to write
sentences, because some of the kids did not "know their letters". I'm
saying their parents should have taught them.


----------

Just because they know their letters doesn't mean that they can write them.
My 3 yr old has known her alphabet since soon after she turned 1, at a level
where she could identify any letter, upper case, or lower case, in a variety
of fonts. However, at 3 she can only write A, i, l, and O legibly-and the A
is really pushing it, but since it's the first letter of her name, she's
motivated (usually it looks more like an H). She can tell you how words are
spelled, but when she "Writes", she'll put a vertical line down for each
letter unless it's one of the ones that she can write. So, right now, she
mostly dictates to me what she wants to write. For the workbooks that she
enjoys doing, we pick ones which don't require a lot of writing, but instead
have more circling or coloring to indicate the answer (and she loves mazes
and dot to dots), and for the math ones she enjoys, I provide sheets of
number stickers and she peels them off and puts them where they go.

And this is a child who is reading at a 2nd grade+ level, and who can easily
compose stories of more than 10 sentences, often continuing from day to
day-both skills that are more typical of older 1st or 2nd graders than
kindergarteners. And it's why, despite her academic skills, she's going into
a pre-K class next year at 3 1/2, even though I suspect that her school
would have allowed me to place her in K had I pushed the issue. Because
while her reading and math skills are above a K level, her little hands are
still only 3 years old, and while I can always send an extra book to read, a
math workbook, and a sheet of number stickers for her to use to do the math
workbook on her own while the class works on learning letters and numbers in
preschool, I can't rationally expect a Kindergarten teacher to be able to
write down everything for her, even if my daughter IS likely to be the
strongest reader in the class.

There's a lot between knowing the alphabet and being able to write
sentences. And there's a big difference between knowing the alphabet song,
which is what most parents consider "knowing the alphabet" and being able to
recognize the g in a typed font as being the same as a g in the ball and
stick font and that a G is the same letter as well. WRITING adds another
physical dimension to it-and writing sentences is harder than writing
letters or words.

Kidwriting is a wonderful way to encourage children to write and read (and I
HOPE that this is what a Kindergarten class which expects children to write
sentences is doing) -but a big part of doing it right is being willing to
"underwrite" for the child as they work through the developmental stages of
writing-and understanding that the developmental stages of reading and
writing, while related, do not always go together.







.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Handwriting Analysis of Clinton, Obama, McCain & Einstein (is Copyrighted)
    ... that those universities are REPRESSING having my Einstein ... I had to add the present post in order to get my letters to ... President Bush 'on-the-record'. ... writing are shaped a certain way it will mean this or that. ...
    (sci.physics)
  • Re: Blagojevich is Dickensian?
    ... as opposed to the characters of other writing ... 23 letters ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ, ... What David is talking about is the *English* alphabet, ... on for other languages using Latin-derived writing. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: Alphabets, origin or
    ... >Not only is the order of its letters completely ... >a numerical code than of an alphabet. ... The same writing method is found ... Irish and Welsh were written in Ogam ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: How did the Semitic Alphabet become the Greek Alphabet so quickly?
    ... Cadmeian version of the alphabet has been found in the recent ... Hebrew alphabet, then the Aramaic alphabet, Greek alphabet, Latin ... Ignoring the question of why there's no Greek writing for 700 years, ... Greek alphabet in which separate letters were used for vowels? ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: How did the Semitic Alphabet become the Greek Alphabet so quickly?
    ... Cadmeian version of the alphabet has been found in the recent ... Hebrew alphabet, then the Aramaic alphabet, Greek alphabet, Latin ... Ignoring the question of why there's no Greek writing for 700 years, ... Greek alphabet in which separate letters were used for vowels? ...
    (sci.lang)