Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
baby einstein and little genius seems to be pushed at parents today ease up on the kids. if they are inclined to be a voracious reader they will be one throughout their lives.
This is very interesting and parallels other accounts I heard about how a typical K day happens. Now...I remain confused as to whether this method remains at more advanced grades. I sure hope not.
While this sounds very appropriate for K children (who are still essentially just playing), it would no longer sound appropriate for older students.
It sounds very chaotic to me. Some draw, others write, others play with pebbles, others listen to stories on headphones ...quite the Play House!
Will there there be an actual curriculum in 1st grade? A lesson plan the entire class will follow? An actual textbook? Notebooks students will be expected to write in daily, fill out, tend to, take care of, and revisit for revisions? Homework assigned to the entire class? Discipline expected in a collective fashion? (as in "right now, nobody moves, right now all eyes are on me - the teacher!")
When will these things start to happen? Do they ever? I am just asking.
First grade is what I knew; but then again, looks like there is nothing left alive of "what I knew".
I think your educational philosophy is quite consistent and clear. I really hope that you find an accelerated school program (probably private) in your city. The public schools, at least through middle school, will never be in line with what you want them to be.
Personally I think people gravitate towards what they like to read regardless of their age. Just present some different options for books and let him decide.
FWIW, when my oldest son was about your child's age, we had a reading specialist tell us that unless boys showed interest in reading on their own, they shouldn't be taught reading until about 2nd grade. Now, of course, she encouraged continued exposure by us reading to him, but said that forced reading practice could actually be harmful - especially for boys. Obviously, this delayed timeline doesn't mesh well with curriculum these days (at least not where we live), but it was heartening for us and helped us lay off our son a bit in the beginning.
Our oldest didn't show much interest in reading (much less in writing!) until about 2nd grade, so her comment was interesting with regard to his development. Our youngest son loved books from an early age and seemed to use his competitive drive to catch up to his older brother. Both boys are enrolled in a fiercely competitive private school and my oldest struggled for a few years because his reading was behind his peers. He caught up right around 3rd grade (which is where research often says early reading differences even out when there isn't a learning disability), but about half of his pre-K class was reading and writing at 4 before entering pre-K . I remember thinking "how in the hell did we get in here" when I first met the kids in his class. Now, whether the reading/writing ability was due to the IQ/ability of the kids or the insanely driven/educated/competitive nature of the parents is impossible to tell. Regardless, our oldest struggled for a few years with peers making fun of his reading level, but since he was one of the youngest kids in the grade, we always told him to tell his friends they had a year head start on him and one day, he'd catch up. He did and we haven't looked back since. Personally, I think it taught him grit and perseverance to not be the "best" reader early on - you can see it now that he's older and early advantages are starting to even out. The kids that were always the fastest learners are starting to get frustrated that they don't always have the advantage anymore, while the kids that had to work hard to catch up, know the value of hard work and how to do it. Obviously, you don't want a kid's distress to be so high that it impacts self-esteem/self-confidence, but with our oldest, he had an abundance of self-worth from the get go, so this experience really humbled him and taught him the value of working hard early in life (FWIW, his brother STILL hasn't had to learn to work hard, as school still comes super easily to him - I fear it will hit him like a ton of bricks in high school or college when study habits tend to be already established.)
As a side note, my father HATED reading as a kid and according to him, didn't really read a book on his own until 5th or 6th grade. The man is the most voracious reader I know to this day and has multiple graduate degrees. For every birthday, he asks for books, but he has so many it is nearly impossible to find one he hasn't already read, lol. The light just clicked on later in life for him with regard to reading.
Absolutely! This was great information, thank you so much for the time you took to write it.
I may sound like an idiot but you will not believe how different what you described is compared to what I experienced growing up.
One part that worries me is what you wrote here:
No textbook that the child would bring home?
Then how are parents supposed to monitor the child's progress in school if they so choose to do (not that they absolutely SHOULD)?.
For example, on any given day, I would need to know what lessons were covered in class that day. The child may or may not have gotten the teacher's explanations in class, but if I have the textbook and the lesson plan - he sure will get it with me, at home, even if I am to reinforce/repeat 100 times everything the teacher did in class. I just need to be able to test him on whether or not he got today's lesson.
A textbook provides coherence, sequence, verifiability, reliability, chance to revise and recap - both for the students and for the parent.
Why no textbooks? I had heard about this before from my sister who was an au pair for a couple of elementary school girls. She was astonished at the lack of...pretty much everything, when the girls got home. At best, they would bring some random pages on which they had scribbled something at school. But nobody knew what had been done in class that day, what lesson was covered, what were the learning objectives, what extra work the student could do relevant to that lesson to excell at the topic covered, etc. It seemed like a major flying, reference-free mess to her.
When we entered 1st grade, we were all handed an ABC textbook for reading and writing and a Math textbook - all with corresponding notebooks to be kept. The class proceeded by covering a lesson every day or every few days. The bottom line is that at the end of any given module, students could go back and revise their work based on the textbook and their carefully kept notebooks - which indicated clear progress from lesson A to lesson Z.
I am highly uncomfortable with the apparent lack of textbooks in elementary school and I think I am going to have to ask the teacher for her lesson plans/curriculum then. Would that be OK?
Because otherwise, how in the world am I going to know what my son did and will do in school every day?
I am also worried that he will not be able to keep track of assigned homework, given his attention problems. He does well in one-on-one teaching situations (yes, I wish I had been born at Buckingham Palace to get him a private tutor for every subject) but I can easily see his mind flying all over the walls while the teacher explains what have you.
I would need to make sure, at the end of the day, that he mastered whatever the teacher wants him to master. A textbook would have been tremendously helpful.
I cannot imagine what it is like being a kid these days. My mother taught me to read when I was 3. At least that is what she said. I don't remember. I recall reading Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer when I was 4, but I do not recall any other titles until I was 9. The phrase "Dick and Jane see Spot run" is stuck in my mind along with "Who cares?" LOL
There were 5 black and white TV channels back then but not there are 50+ color ones, not to mention the Internet and video games. What do 10 year olds do with BS overload?
Ever heard of Librivox? I don't know what the audiobooks for children are like but that might help.
For the future sanity of your child and his teachers, you need to calm down and try to be less judgmental about the American system. Whether you teach him how to read or not will not have any effect on whether he enjoys reading in the future or whether he will be a bad/good student. He is only 5, let him be.
I was also educated in another country. I went to high school, college and law school in the U.S. I had my son in my home country while working for the U.S State Department. We came back to U.S. when my son was a year old. I didn't teach him any English because I wanted him to learn the language of his home country. He never went to pre-K or child care center. By the time he started in K - he knew his a,b,c...colors and shapes in English. He understood some English, having lived in US for the last 4 years but I did not teach him how to read or write. I did read to him every night religiously until he was 9 years old, first in my native language, later in English. At K, he was given an ESL test to see if he can be placed in general class or needed additional help with English. He passed and they placed him in a general class. I am sure he was grouped with kids who did not read yet. So what? It is a simple tool for teachers to give individualized lessons.
In any case, my son is 12 now going into 7th grade and a straight A student in school's gifted program. Guess what? It made no difference whether he knew how to read or not or even speak English in K. I think I e-mailed his teachers only twice in his 6 years as a student. Please don't be one those parents who drive teachers crazy with their constant e-mails and questions unless your child has a legitimate educational issues. I understand we have different views of education which is fine but I do think you need to relax a little. My personal opinion regarding education of kids is that your child will either love or hate school. If he loves it, he will be a good student; if he hates it, no matter what you do, he will be bad at it. Same goes for the reading issue. My son loves reading, especially after he turned 10. He loves thrillers and Harry Potter books. You can't force this, no matter how much you want him to be certain way.
Old thread - but for parents concerned about their children's physical difficulty with reading (squirming, holding books oddly, etc.) - don't forget to get their vision checked. Glasses might make all the difference.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
. I remember thinking "how in the hell did we get in here" when I first met the kids in his class. Now, whether the reading/writing ability was due to the IQ/ability of the kids or the insanely driven/educated/competitive nature of the parents is impossible to tell. Regardless, our oldest struggled for a few years with peers making fun of his reading level, but since he was one of the youngest kids in the grade, we always told him to tell his friends they had a year head start on him and one day, he'd catch up. He did and we haven't looked back since. Personally, I think it taught him grit and perseverance to not be the "best" reader early on - you can see it now that he's older and early advantages are starting to even out. The kids that were always the fastest learners are starting to get frustrated that they don't always have the advantage anymore, while the kids that had to work hard to catch up, know the value of hard work and how to do it. Obviously, you don't want a kid's distress to be so high that it impacts self-esteem/self-confidence, but with our oldest, he had an abundance of self-worth from the get go, so this experience really humbled him and taught him the value of working hard early in life (FWIW, his brother STILL hasn't had to learn to work hard, as school still comes super easily to him - I fear it will hit him like a ton of bricks in high school or college when study habits tend to be already established.)
