"I don't know"

[Jemi]

My DD has generally refused to read any words other than pig (sometimes) when I know she can read more - I can hear her reading bits from books she has not memorised when she should be asleep at night, and if she thinks I am not paying attention she points to words, runs her finger along, and says them in her books. Plus she randomly read a word on the TV the other day too. If I ask her a word though she just says "I don't know!". I probably ask her once a month, if that. I have told everyone (my family) not to test her or ask her because maybe she thinks it is pressure which would be weird because I consciously don't test her or get frustrated if she does not know..........

She has been like this in other areas too.... Like taking off her coat and shoes and getting dressed - she has phases of faking not being able to do it. When we did potty training I knew she could do it but she just refused, which was fine if baffling. When it came to night dryness she one day surprised me by saying "wake up in the morning, do a wee in the nappy, go to mummy" (so she was not wetting during the night, but waking up and deliberately going wetting her nappy, even though we had discussed having dry nights). So I laughed and said "no, wake up in the morning, go in the toilet not the nappy". She has been dry ever since. She just doesn't seem to fancy *doing* certain things she is able to. It was a bit frustrating that there is a gap between can and do with her, but perhaps it is just her personality??? Anyone else find that??? Any tips to overcome, or do I just leave her to it or work around it??? Since I want to homeschool I would like to get past this or at least know what is going on..........

Anyway, back to the reading.... Getting most right in the LR games in the new version might have to triggered something - confidence maybe??? - because today she read a few words I have not heard her read before off her own back. And at bedtime today she offered to "read" a book to me.

The only area she will demonstrate her knowledge with ease is when we do IXL. Once she figured out she would get rewards from the programme. But I want her to like learning and demonstrating her learning for the love of it, not for a gold medal or other reward..... I do not plan to bribe my child all the way through education! Perhaps it is okay to be reward driven at first, and the love comes later.....

(hope this makes sense!)

[Mandabplus3]

It's very common for children to hide what they know it seems to be more common in 4 year olds than any other age. My own son could read and never on showed me o purpose until he got to the point where he could read 2 sentence per page books and needed me to listen and help him with the words he got stuck on! I only knew he could read because he loved watching his " Brillkids friends" on video and used to read the word cards along with the videos. I remember him being amazed that a baby ( 18 months) knew how to read sentences and from then on he could read sentences! Go figure. I don't know if it was the video or if it was just time but it might have been good timing 
I don't think you will have any long term problems home schooling as your child has already shown you they are happy to self learn and practice independently. Many mummy's here would LOVE their kids to do that! They may grow out of the hiding knowledge faze or you may need to pick curricular that allow for independant exploration and self testing along the way.
IXL is very motivation for children. It's easy to get lots of questions done quickly and earn a minor reward. The main point is the practice is getting done! Reading eggs is similarly motivating if you want a phonics program for reading to try. Don't pay retail discounts are everywhere! Over time the rewards will mean less and less but at such a young age they just don't understand doing it for the future    so a few rewards are not likely to set a life time pattern unless you begin warding for everything.

[FomerlyMrsObedih_Now_BatmansMama]

I read somewhere (I think it was John Holt's How Children Learn) that a child that knows how to do something  independently physically or intellectually, may go through periods EMOTIONALLY where they want/need reassurance that they can still depend on their parents to do that thing for them. It's the whole theory about how children (toddlers and preschoolers in particular) develop independence - not in a steady linear fashion, but in peaks and dips. It is (I believe this and practice is myself at home) important to support BOTH peaks and dips of independence in a child. Take swimming (or in your case reading), some days the LO may not want you to be even near and will swim off independently or refuse for you to even touch the book much less read it to them. Other days they may cling to you in the pool and refuse to get in independently when they didn't seem to have a problem last week. You can apply this to dressing, feeding, anything that was previously done by you for them or as a team. Sometimes they will need the emotional reassurance of doing things with you or you babying them for a bit. In my experience it strongly fosters independence to meet the child's peaks and dips. I have so deeply buried this in my heart that I don't even blink at the idea of meeting my son's needs (still breastfeeding and cosleeping at 2yrs for e.g.) and you really could not meet a more independent and resilient child. Let them take independence at their own rate, let it be an adventure they are in control of  and they will embrace it warmly.

I sometimes imagine a child being like a disabled adult, whether because they cannot communicate in words or have full physical dexterity and I feel a respect for their needs and opinions that I might not, if I didn't truly consider the child's personhood, only their youth. Sorry, I wondered off a bit there but hope you find something in this reassuring and helpful.

[Jemi]

Thank you both. I went away and thought about this for a while and what you wrote, Mrs Obedih,rings true. I think it is time to buy that john holt book - i have been meaning to! my daughter does say things to me like 'I am being a baby' / 'i want to be  baby' in the context of wanting me to do something we both know she can do for herself. i've started to listen to this more............

My concern now is that I do not think she is reading phonetically. She will not ever say C-A-T cat. And if I try to get her to it just confuses her (she just looks baffled!).  I am concerned she will hit a ceiling in her ability to learn new words. Saying this, I did not learn to read phontically at all and had a reading age at least 4 years above my age when tested at various points in primary school. My mum started very early with us and I LOVED to read so got loads of practice....

My daughter knew all her basic phonics by 2 or earlier but I did not start with diagrphs (???) or whatever until recently because i just did not know what i was doing. It seems that phonics is championed hard (and i get why) but I am not sure how to teach her all the techniques when she already seems to know a lot of words... It might be necessary tough because she does things like reading 'mummy' when the word says 'mum' which I imagine would not happen if she was sounding M-U-M in her head or aloud first...

I am trialling reading egg but some of it she finds very easy and will do but other bits she won't. maybe I could teach her what SH, CH, OO etc sound like but not get her to use them in words, and just hope her brain makes the connections it needs to. it should......

Also, i might try showing her clips of other children reading sentences... maybe then she won't worry about reading her books to me... perhaps she sees it as something only adults do!

Any thoughts about my ramblings are most welcome!

[Wolfwind]

This is a lot like where my 2 year old is!  We did sight words, she learned some, we started letter sounds, she refused to ever read sight words again, we finished letter sounds, she refused to learn to blend or sound out words.

What we're doing now is a modified version of Spaulding's "The Writing Road to Reading."  I've been meaning to make a thread about how we're doing it; maybe now I'll actually get it done.  You don't actually need to buy the book; everything is online.  You just need to make a bunch of index cards and refridgerator magnets.  Then build words together.

My daughter loves it!  (She does get paid with dried fruit for a certain number of words.)  All day she'll ask, "Can I please spell a word?"  Music to my ears!  She hasn't actually started reading yet, but her phonetic awareness has increased by leaps and bounds, and we're still a couple of weeks short of where Spaulding says she'll start reading.  We'll see if the stubborn thing is still a problem then.

But it completely took the pressure off in learning to read.  Like you, I was worried about her not learning any new words.  Now I know she's learning, even if she's not reading to me yet. 

[lzp11]

I love this forum! Whenever I hit a wall then I can learn something here.

MrsObedih your words have really made me think. I sometimes feel frustrated when my 3.5 year old does not want to stretch herself. She often prefers to do things that she finds easy. But now I'm realising that it is the emotional reassurance that she needs and that this can mean that she needs to progress more slowly than she probably could in terms of knowledge and ability. Looking back, we have clearly made progress in all sorts of areas, but it involves step forwards on days when she feels more confident and then lots of support and reassurance at other times when she did nt feel able to achieve so much. It feels like a backward step but I probably should not view it that way. Sometimes I probably underestimate the effort it takes her to do some things that i think she should find easy. I'm definitely going to read that book.

Btw my DD learned to read sight words and has never been keen on sounding out. We are doing level 1 of all about spelling using an app on the iPad with letter tiles and this has been amazing for both phonetic awareness and spelling. I really recommend this alongside teaching purely reading.  We do very few words at a time and this works well. I must remember to keep our goals tiny and bite-sized! 

[Elu]

My niece also says i don't know Evan though she actually does know.

She will ask someone to read it for her.Sometimes i read to her some parts and ask her to read it for me.She does not have confidence in her to read without someones help.

I think sometimes it may happen due to confidence or sometimes babies just don't want to grow up too soon.They love to have their parents do stuff.


http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a556441/helping-your-child-to-be-confident

kids learn things from the way we communicate with them..they may not read the way we want them to but we can communicate with the way we want...
To make the kid read phonetically try the words the baby doesn't know than the words she knows...it may be of help..

[FomerlyMrsObedih_Now_BatmansMama]

Jemi, we use reading eggs and Douglas is progressing very well on it. I started from Lesson 1, even though he knew letter sounds so he got a good review, and had fun doing lessons he found easy while getting used to the way the lessons are presented. Currently on lesson 28 and he loves hatching those little critters and is starting to roam across to reading express. Anyway, he doesn't do all the parts in one lesson independently himself, I use Vygotsky's ZPD to scaffold some activities:

1. He doesn't have the manual dexterity to drag and drop, so he clicks and I drag.
2. I set up the pointer and explain the activity, I always wait for him to hear the instructions, and the sort of talk through what we're doing. E.g. How can I find out what this sounds like, ok I roll the mouse here and then check here ... sort of talking aloud my internal thinking process, so he can copy it.
3. Some repetitions are just too much and if he's done a few, I take over while talking/reading aloud so he can follow what I am doing, not just watch passively.
4. Sometimes he clicks without looking, so I move the pointer to a centre starting point, so it not already on a word.
5. Over time I have to remember to give him the opportunity to try a little bit more without my assistance. But I try not to let him get too much wrong (can be frustrating), we work together to get more right than wrong, allowing for some errors that we learn from.

Just some tips for how we make reading eggs work for us!

We used Jolly Phonics (which he loved deeply) and preschool prep (although we never really took off with blends an diagraphs dvds), Jolly Phonics introduced some blends and diagraphs and that has been enough to build on with reading eggs. Reading bear was very helpful in showing how blending works (also used some My Montessori House) I had a sharp learning curve with this as well as I had NO IDEA what they were so had to learn along side  . On important thing I learnt with Dougie is to be mindful not to always correct his reading or sounding out - especially if he picked up a book to read for himself or attempted to sound out for himself (even if he gets it wrong I'll say something affirmative like 'that's good, are you trying to sound out the word? Good effort baby' without correcting.) It's important that he doesn't become wary of reading aloud/trying, but sees it as something enjoyable between us. He sounds out with reading bear (mostly, I don't force if he doesn't want to after gentle encouragement), he sometimes sounds out with reading eggs or when we play with letters in the bath, but mostly he just has a go at the word skipping c-a-t and just says cat. Which I'm honest I prefer. If he gets stuck then we use the sounding out technique but I don't want him sounding out every word before saying it as I've sometimes seen. Like Wolfwind just keep trying various things whilst having fun until you hit what your LO enjoys and do lots of that. Thank goodness we're starting early, gives us AND the kiddos time to learn and get comfortable with these new skills 


Lzp11, that's one thing I read and really took from the Engelmann's Give Your Child a Superior Mind - that it DOES take longer to teach a 2 year old to read than it does a 5 year old. It takes longer and more patience to teach younger children than it does older ones, and the younger the more precise you have to be and careful to eliminate errors and misconceptions. The kids are putting in a LOT of work and investing a lot of emotion in learning from us, and just when they have one thing right e.g. A says Ah or cat says CAT, we then change the rules or up the game and want them to know/say cah-ah-teh spells CAT and when they say what they said before (which used to be right and get mommy all proud happy and smiling) it gets a poor reception . It's funny saying it, but it can be quite disappointing from the child's perspective and put some pressure on to make mommy happy, if you imagine it. It's so important they know that this is all just good fun and only worth doing if they're having fun and that we love em anyway, kids can easily forget this. I have to remind myself this all the time because Douglas can be quite sensitive to even a hint of criticism in my tone of voice, or over praise for a thing that's supposed to be not a big deal (like reading). Now, I do try to cultivate an understanding of what is expected of him as per normal, that gets acknowledged when he does well, but I try not to fly too high or too low with praise or criticism - because he should see it as standard. Took us sometime to get here and I'm still learning to manage my emotions/expectations every day.

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