My 22 m old can swim Freestyle but can't read

[Tamsyn]

Actually, when my son did finally learn to read, it was when we temporarily bagged the phonics and switched to the whole-word method.  By the time I did that, we were both a little worn out, and it was Your Baby Can Read that finally got our foot in the door.  I'm using Little Reader now.  But where you have already tried Little Reader, and it hasn't worked for you, perhaps your son would learn best with a phonetic approach.  I don't know.  I tried phonics first because my father-in-law was pretty adamant about how harmful the whole-word method can be for older kids, and I had my own biases against it until my mother told me that's how I learned to read, .  Anyway, I did a lot of research, trying to find a phonic program for very young kids, and the best I could find was Sidney Ledson.  We had moderate success with it.  He knew all of his letters when he was about 18 months, as well as a few sight words, but a year later he was still stuck there.  Sounding words out was hard for him.  But like I said, you have tried what worked for me, and so maybe you need to try something different.  Sidney Ledson is the only one I have found that has successfully taught toddlers to read using phonics, although there certainly may be others.

He really loved the egg game though.  Here's a video of him with his daddy when he barely two.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/t7W6DaYxWIM&rel=1" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/t7W6DaYxWIM&rel=1</a>

We are going to start taking our little ones swimming every week in January when my parents get a swimming pass and can help us a little.  I'm so excited to start!  Thank you for the motivation, and thank you for sharing your story about how you and your husband were competitive swimmers.  It's amazing to think about what little children can be taught. 

[Korrale4kq]

This is so sweet to watch. I love how you all play the game together.

[mybabyian]

Thank you Tamsyn, I thought maybe you didn't find YBCR until you started with your younger kids.  And I agree with Korrale4kq, the video is adorable.  I love that she uses games to teach.  Sometimes I think the reason he hasn't learned is that he just hasn't been engaged enough with the flash cards and LR.  He has had his moments of being really interested but other than that he could usually take it or leave it. 

I think Sydney Ledson's program looks very good for us.  I am going to wait a bit before we start and make sure he is solid on letter sounds and phonological awareness so he doesn't get frustrated.  I think if we have a good start we will be much better off.  Today for possibly the first time he could actually name correctly some initial letter sounds in random words I would give him.  He told me "feet" started with "f" and "silly" started with "s" for example.  He didn't name them all right though so we will keep working.  

[mybabyian]

So, there have been a couple of peculiarities to my son’s progress that have me a bit aw struck.  First, we have been working a lot on phonological awareness.  This we have been doing for awhile now but recently he has been willing to answer questions so I have been asking him what letter random words start with and he has been getting most of the answers right. 

Then, I started a new game with him where I hide two toys under two different bowls, for example a cow and a cat.  I write the name of the toy on each bowl.  I place the bowls so that he shouldn’t know which is which.  Then I ask his monkey (who is learning to read  ) where one of the toys is.  (Thank you Tamsyn, I got the monkey idea from the book you recommended.).  Each time we have played this game Ian has helped his monkey pick the correct word every single time even when he has only seen the word once before.  I find it so bizarre that he can do this and do it so well too.  I am not sure if it is that I am asking the monkey and not him or because having toys under a bowl is just more exciting to him. 

Finally, I have been sounding out words for him without looking at letters.  He was also watching ReadingBear for a few weeks so he has gotten some phonics exposure.  I decided to ask him verbally, “What word is c-a-t?”  He told me cat!  I tried 3 more words and he got all of them right.  Just two days ago I showed him the letters c-a-t and then sounded them out for him and he could not tell me what it said.  I am not sure why seeing the letters interferes with him stringing together the sounds.  Maybe he feels more pressured looking at letters or maybe since he knows the letters it is hard for him to think of them as part of a whole word instead of individual letters.  Often when he sees words on LR he shouts out excitedly the letters that are in the word instead of the actual word

Does this all sound bizarre? I am baffled but hopeful.  I decided I would teach my baby to read 12 years ago.  I thought it was going to be so easy and it just seemed so hard.  So many times I felt like such a failure mostly because I am always so worried that he is going to feel pressured and get turned off to learning.  Of course that is the last thing I want to happen.  I try to concentrate on input and not on seeing results but I also don’t want to keep doing something that is not working.  So that is why I posted here.  Anyway, it is a nice feeling to think maybe I can teach him. 

[lois1]

Hi mybabyian.... Don't be discouraged - I think you are doing extremely well. You know our babies are about the same age & mine is nowhere near as advanced as yours when it comes to reading or phonetic awareness (or swimming for that matter ) . It doesn't sound like you are pressuring him at all. You've obviously put a lot of thought & effort into this, having been aware of it for 12 years -   so....  he's taking a little longer than you had hoped to pick it up. But he thinks it's a great game & even if he's not technically reading he's obviously got a lot stored away there somewhere & it's just taking a while for him to express to you that he knows it.

Keep up the good work, keep playing all these wonderful games with him & very soon, he's going to show you that he gets it. I'm going to get monkey involved in our learning games too.

Take care
Lois

[A_BC]

Hi Mybabyian,

After reading about the progress your son is doing I could see he is almost there! A child may develop a specific learning pattern based on his own preferences. If your son enjoys sounding out letters, do more Reading Bear or morestarfall.com along with the games he likes. Just "follow the child" and you won't be disappointed isA.

Keep up the wonderful work! You are both doing great!

[bella]

mine swam very early also and were very good physically , excellent language skill , early speech , but other than my first child who is brain ijured quadriplegic who did leanr to read the doman way and was speed reader , many languages ... i thought i got it all and it will be easy peaszy for me to teach the next two . i was so wrong , none of them learn to read with whole word method , i still continue exposing them to workd and flashcards and pictures , and BK and power points presentations which i do believe helped them develop their advance speech and comprehension , but they were three and still not reading , with my second i followed doman recommendation and didn't expose her to phonics and teach her letter sounds at all , but at three i knew i need to do somthing else so i used dad dude cards , montessori phonetic learning ( games ) and teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons . lessons took 10 minutes beofre nap , and within few months she was reading everything , i never had to teach her sight words , we never did ealry leveled readers , i got bob books they were not interesting for her . She always loved books but wanted meaty content , she will hod the sam book and knowing she can read s  a m sam   s   a  t sat , she woudn;t make an effort and go on telling her own story inspired by the picture . from 100 easy lessons she just read with me whatver book we were reading , first few lines , than a page , and now she enjoys reading chapter books .
That was a good learnign expeirence for me so with my third one i still flashed words but i exposed him to letter sounds through letter factory , starfall , and he started blending and sounding out very early , but didn't read spontaneously so like his sister we are working now with 100 easy lessons . he is giving me hard time because he is never serious and too playful , so what is suppose ot be 10 minuted session before nap akes longer because he is playing doing cartwheels on the bed  and just acting up silly . i know he knows a lot more than he is willing to show me , he is just playful . when he sees a word like hot , he will look at it smile and than say mama let us read this word in a different way , maybe we can say toh instead , isn't it funny oh let me see maybe if we add an a it will become ...
actually maybe lack of discipline from me , i wonder how much and how you can discipline a 3 years old , i am now bribing him instead . he is just too playful , and his sister too , They are very chatty , anything we do takes for ever because they stop and talk about it , tell other stories . wonder how strict a parent should be with those young learners .
viv

[mybabyian]

Thanks for all your encouragement.  I do feel very encouraged that we're headed in the right direction.  Thanks for your story viv too.  I had read few posts of moms who said their kids never got whole words.  I was always sure there must be more.  I wish there was more research done on teaching babies to read to help guide us a bit.  I think it will be very interesting when the studies done with Your Baby Can Read come out.  Obviously whole words work for lots of babies.  I wonder when I have another baby if we will have a completely different experience or a similar one. 

Well now that summer is ending, our pool has been getting cold and Ian hasn't wanted to swim at all.   It is such a roller coaster ride sometimes!  I haven't pushed him though.  I just signed him back up for swimming lessons.  Their pool is warm.  We go back today and he is excited.  Last time we were there they wanted to graduate him into the class without mommies.  I told them no thanks.  Not to be too sure of myself, but I happen to think I can teach him better than they can.  I am sure now that he swims even better they will try to move him again.  Eventually I suppose I will have to let him.

[lois1]

Your comment on the other thread reminded me & I hope you don't mind me asking publically;
A few months ago you weren't getting on as you had hoped with English so you considered switching to Spanish. Obviously you have mentioned your progress on this thread but I'm curious to know if you did go that route & if so how are things going?

Oh & happy birthday Ian :-) Can you believe they are 2 already?!

[mybabyian]

HI Lois1!

Ian is doing great!  Everyday I can't believe it.  I almost always sound out the words for him but he answers what they are without hesitating even some bigger words that we are trying now.  He can sound them out himself too but he really prefers not to.  But, the other day he read a word that neither of us sounded out (outloud anyway).  I know he was reading it phonetically though.  The word was in all caps  and he has not seen it that way before so it wasn't memorized.  It was the word "set."  He said ssss ssset!   

I did mention more on his progress here.  Not sure if you read it:

http://forum.brillkids.com/teaching-your-child-to-read/an-update-on-our-progress/msg90156/#msg90156

I think you are asking more about if I am still teaching him to read in Spanish.  I must have been traumatized as a kid learning to read because I have really wanted to avoid teaching phonics in English.  I thought it would be so much easier in Spanish since there are so many rules in English and so many exceptions to those rules.  The problem has been that there are just so many more resources in English.  Readingbear is awesome!  I realized that if we follow a program like readingbear it really is not confusing for the kids because it teaches all the phonics rules in such a straight forward systematic way.  I would be thrilled to find something like that in Spanish.

Now that he is doing so well learning to read in English I feel confident that he could easily learn Spanish at the same time.  He already knows most of the letter sounds that are different in Spanish so it would just be a matter of putting together my own presentations and sounding out words for him like we do with readingbear.  I have occasionally shown him a word in Spanish and he has read it with help.  The other day he found the word "base" on a flash card that I had been teaching him in Spanish previously and he looked at it and told me what it was in both languages.  I have told him both ways before so very unlikely that he has any idea about the different phonetic rules.  We haven't gotten into the silent e yet.  It still gave me hope that it won't be as hard as I thought. 

We speak English/Spanish on alternating days so I think it would be easy to teach him to read English/Spanish that way too.  I really do want to teach him to read in Spanish because I think it will help him a lot to learn the language.  His English is starting to get a lot better than his Spanish and since we live in an English speaking country and both my husband and I speak English too I can see him just starting to use English and not Spanish if it gets more comfortable for him.  Right now both his English and his Spanish are good enough that if I speak to him in one language he will answer me in that language.

How about you?  You mentioned he was not reading yet, but it sounds like he can pick out initial letter sounds.  That was the first big step for Ian I think.  Have you tried readingbear?

Oh and happy birthday too!!!!     They are such big boys now aren't they? 

[mybabyian]

Hi everyone, I just wanted to post where we are at now.  We've been steadily using daddude's phonics cards and Ian has been having fun with them and learning. We are going through them systematically now and he has been doing great.  So there has been no reason for me to mess with the formula, BUT I am expecting our second child so this was a good excuse for me to buy the monkisee program. I bought it for the baby, but I couldn't resist showing it to Ian. 

He loves monkisee.  He even loves the flash cards because they are his "monkisee words".  He learned all the words from the first video in two weeks.  He is like a different child.  I really thought whole words just weren't for him, but he is learning them as quickly and effortlessly as other kids I always read about.  We are still doing the phonics cards, but it's nice to see him having fun and learning whole words too. 

As far as swimming goes, he can no longer really do freestyle.  He does it every once in a while, but he is still making progress in general and having a blast.  At one point he started doing sommersaults in the water but lost that skill pretty quickly too.  He has now moved up to the big boy class without the mommies.  I was worried before that he would freak out without me (and I think he would have).  But we talked about it a lot and he seemed to be enthusiastic about being with the big boys.  He had his first lesson and had a great time.  It was so cute. 

So that's how we're doing.

[cokers4life]

Great to hear!  I think that little ones will show us how they can do an amazing skill and then its like it disappears.   I feel that the skill doesn't really disappear but the little one just has a full list of things they are trying to master that they seem to move on to those other things while their newly acquired skill gets put aside and "forgotten."  That's my theory.   

Congrats on the new baby!  That is always exciting especially in an early learning home!

[mybabyian]

Thanks so much.  Yeah, the freestyle thing was pretty amazing to me, but it never meant he was water safe and of course that is the most important.  He loves swimming, but it is his least favorite of all the sports.  So, I just want him to be safe in water.  I have never met a kid so into sports before!

The best part of his progress with reading for me is how much he is enjoying learning.  We do DadDudes flash cards when I put him in his car seat--just a couple so it doesn't take long at all.  One day I forgot and he started crying.  What in the world happened, I wondered.  He was crying for the flash cards.  Then the other day he had a fever and was not doing well at all.  Normally I read him the monkisee flash cards before bed but I thought he would not want to.  Boy was I wrong and he let me know.  Of course he begs for the video everynight too.  It is cute when he watches their Action Words video.  He acts out all the actions.  He even talks to the characters.  "Ha, ha Howie!!! Don't do that!"  So funny. 

It's not that he didn't like it before but he never showed a lot of enthusiasm.  Now he wants to know what words are in books and he points out the words he knows.  I am glad he is so interested.

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