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 A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
| Of Grandkids and Stuff It occurred to me today that I ought to ask Google about my step grandson. He is currently aged four and the smartest kid I’ve ever known. I considered asking you good folks about the lad’s incredible reading ability but then realised that I could just ask Google. And that fount of all knowledge informs me that it is possible for a child to learn to read at the age of three. Which I can vouch for since my step grandson could read by the time he turned that age. So it seems I’m not hallucinating and he is not some freak of nature. The thing is, however, he taught himself. Totally without our help. In fact, we were not even aware of the possibility until he started to read words on the television. Unasked for and often without any way for the word to occur to him unless he understood the principles and knew how the concept worked. We checked carefully by asking him to read things that he’d never seen on the TV. No problem - he could read words he didn’t even know the meaning of. Occasionally he’d get them slightly wrong in those early days, but it was clear that he was divining the word from the letters as well as its shape. Perhaps the weirdest thing is that he makes no big deal of this. To him it’s obviously normal and nothing to get excited about. He reads when he wants to know what is written and doesn’t bother otherwise. Buy him a new toy and he will read the package and tell you what the thing is before he’s opened it. At other times he might give no indication of reading things until you ask him. And then he answers with such immediacy that it’s clear he’s already read it but didn’t think it was worth commenting on. It’s the television, of course. The kind of kids’ shows he watches spend a lot of time saying words and displaying them on screen. And the little feller just has the kind of mind that automatically sees the connection and stores it. Both abilities are apparent in his facility with jigsaw puzzles and his putting jumbled things into groups and collections. So I was going to ask you whether you’d ever heard or had experience of a kid learning to read at such an early age. But Google has put my curiosity out of its misery. The kid really did teach himself to read at a ridiculously young age. I’m not a self-deluding old fool imagining impossible events in the real world. Kinda cool to watch the little guy too. Word count: 442 |
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