Nothing wrong with it at all, but I don't think that is why a child reads at a young age - unless you are implying that children who read later do not have parents who are passionate readers ( I don't think this is what you are trying to say, but it is the logical implication of suggesting a causal link between your love of reading and your child's precociousness).

My town just started full day K this year. In the board of ed meetings leading up to the decision they emphasized the need for full day so that the K students would actually have time for recess, art, music and play activities. The half day was so filled with academics that all that normal K stuff was pushed out. Sad, but that's the reality. The parents were for the move to full day by a huge margin. Best free daycare around! K cutoff here is Jan.1, so the age range in K is crazy. You have kids that are 4 for half the year and kids that are 6 at the start of the year. Redshirting has made for a ridiculous age gap.

Really interesting article about children's play in The Atlantic last month. As far as the building blocks for reading, from what I understand from all my reading about this (I am not a scientist, so maybe the resident scientists here can correct me if I am wrong), the process is very, very complex. Unlike walking, which humans have been doing for millions of years, and which is "hard-wired" in the human brain (meaning that barring brain injury there are clearly developed parts of the human brain utilized in learning to walk that are shared across all humans), reading is a very new phenomenon (from a evolutionary perspective). When researchers look at the brains of kids while they are reading there is activity in a number of different places depending on which child you are looking at. In other words, our brains are not all functioning the same way when we are learning to read, as they are when we are learning to walk or talk. Reading is such a new phenomenon that it is not hardwired in the human brain. For almost all children reading must be taught. It might take very little teaching, simple exposure and a few quick lessons, or it might take very careful teaching. Brain imaging technology has really opened up this field, and we have lots to learn about how to best teach reading to all people.

When you have children involved in time consuming activities outside of school, the scheduling does get tricky. And, it only gets worse as they get older. My oldest is entering high school next year, and I have finally had to accept that it will likely take her 5 years to finish. She spends 36 hours a week at her ballet school (not counting drive time), so there is no way to take 6 academic classes and still maintain any sanity. She cannot school year round because summer ballet programs run for 8 weeks and are full day. I think if your children develop a passion and you want to nurture that passion then you have to think creatively about how to integrate schoolwork. The beauty of homeschooling is that we do not all have to have the same school experience. Unless your state mandates a certain amount of time spent on schoolwork, then I think you can streamline their subjects based on your academic goals. It just helps to be clear in your own mind about what those goals are (which is hard to do when they are so young). I guess I don't have a great suggestion, but I do sympathize!!

I think it is a somewhat lazy American tendency to conflate giftedness/intelligence with precociousness. In a similar vein, extroversion is often conflated with intelligence. My two older children are introverts, and you really have to develop a trusting relationship with them to get much of a glimpse into the workings of their minds. My youngest, on the other hand, is a totally sweet little extrovert - and everyone thinks he is so smart because he is very verbal (not actually more verbal than his sisters, but he talks to anyone anywhere about everything that is on his mind). I think these differences moderate over time, but at the early ages we are all awed by the "baby:" The baby reader, the baby mathematician, the baby musician, the 2 yo riding a bike, the 3 yo singing in church, the 5yo hiking big mountains etc….. There is just some weird thing in our culture that glorifies or is fascinated by achievement at a very young age, even though we know these early results are not stable in the long run.

Wish I could "like" this post 100x!! And, it's not only true within the range of normal. Really late readers or dyslexics often have high IQs. You can frequently find these kids moving along with their classmates, looking like "average" students (even when they cannot really read) because their intelligence enables them to compensate. I absolutely hate the assumption that there are "gifted", "normal" and "ld" kids and they exist on some sort of linear spectrum or bell curve. Learning just doesn't work like that!

Sadly, the reverse is also true. And the expectation that all 4-5 year olds should be reading is unfair and demoralizing. Late readers are not dumber, or slower. Their brains just work differently. I also read to my dd all the time, everyday, from the time she was a newborn. She, too, knew all her letter and sounds by age three. But, moving from single sounds to blending and reading fluency was so difficult for her. She did not learn to read with anything approaching minimal fluency until age 81/2, and only after a tremendous amount of work. Five to ten minutes a day would never have been enough for her. The sense of accomplishment in learning to read should not be diminished because it happens at age 6 or 7 or 8 or 10, rather than at age 4. And, yet, that is exactly what we are doing to kids who don't learn to read before K. IMO, it's flat out wrong.

This is such a small list of schools. I wonder if the same is true for the thousands of other colleges and universities out there? The vast, vast majority of college students are not going to attend a highly selective institution. I am looking at the 2006 list linked above, and there are tons of good schools with acceptance rates of 70%+. Have acceptance rates at these schools dropped comparatively??

I am in the same boat. While trying to do 8th and 5th grade, my K is lucky if he gets an hour of one-on-one time 3 days a week. Other than art, he did no K stuff before age 5. This trend must be more prevalent among parents without too many older kids at home. It's crazy - you must be reading by K, but most high school students are reading material at a 5th grade level??? I totally agree with pp about the lost middle years.

We also dropped AAS and moved to "How to Teach Spelling." Neither of my older two children has great visual memory, and my middle child was especially frustrated because she would remember all the rules, but just didn't have the visual memory to remember which digraph to use when. I think I still have a couple upper levels of AAS unopened on my shelf. I now just have them work through the HTS workbooks. They have been exposed to the rules, and the rest is just practice. Honestly, it took my oldest dd until about age 11-12 to start to remember how most common words are spelled. I think that was mainly a function of repeated exposure over many years, and not any particular program. At that point she was typing most of her assignments (she is dyslexic) and the highlighting of misspelled words in the text really helped her (I have to admit, texting her friends also helped). I just decided that I did not have enough time in the day to spend too much time on spelling. My 10 year old works on spelling for about 15 minutes a day, and we correct her mistakes in writing, and that's it. That said, I may use AAS level one with my 6yo next year. He likes the tiles and it is a good intro to constructing words for young kids. But, once he is reading well, we will probably move to HTTS with him also. It's just easier.

We use a ton of audio books, at home and in the car. I get most of mine either at the library, or free online. Librivox has a great selection, but sometimes the multiple readers drive me a bit batty. Lit2Go is another good source for free books.

While super early readers get talked about a lot around here, the more votes you get in the poll the more homeschoolers look pretty much like the general populous when it comes to reading. Will be interesting to see if that trend holds.

The article in the OP reminds me of an interesting discussion I had with a student. I was teaching at a state university in SC, and one of my students was accepted to law school at Michigan (which is a perennially top ranked program). The student had opted to attend The University of South Carolina instead. I didn't understand his choice but it turns out he understood the market better than I. As he explained, "if you want to practice law in SC, you go to USC." Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the programs ranked in that article are in the South. Just goes to show that it helps to know what you want to do when you are making these decisions.

It airs Sunday night, so we just watch through the cable co.'s on demand menu the next day.

This made me smile. I felt the same way. My 6yo on the other hand said "why does he just keep talking so much?" I want to see the imagination spaceship" I guess it's hard to strike the right balance for a TV audience. It's just right for a 12 year old. Perhaps that's a sad commentary on the science education of the general populous.

We are really enjoying it too! Science has really taken a back seat here as my dd is spending so much time on her Latin class. Cosmos has been just the thing to get us through to the end of the semester. All four of us watch it "on demand" Monday morning! It's great!

What a fascinating discussion. We will be in a similar pickle with three kids and one (teacher's) income. It is a much different calculus than what my parents went through 25 years ago with four children and basically the same annual income. I just finished reading College Unbound, which is a fascinating (and somewhat depressing) discussion of the unsustainable economic structure of the whole college system. One point he makes is that graduation rates within a reasonable time period, and employment rates also really matter. Sometimes students choose the less expensive option (more grants or scholarships at a lesser known school) but then end up at a school with dismal 4 year graduation rates (for a variety of reasons). They might have been better taking on a bit more debt, but actually finishing more or less on time and finding a paying job. It just adds one more confusing factor to an already complicated decision.

My dd will be in 9th grade next year. She is currently taking Latin 1 through Lukeion. She has an A in the class but it is taking her about 10-12 hours a week to maintain. This is the kid who spends the equivalent of a full time job at a pre-professional ballet school (about 35-40 hours/week next year). So I don't think continuing with Lukeion for Latin II is realistic, especially since her teacher says Latin II is a good jump in difficulty from Latin I. So, we are looking for either an online class or a DVD type class for Latin II. Something self-paced would be best. It would be great to continue with Wheelock, since she has done the first half of the book. Just wondering if there is anything out there that might fit.

You can buy pre-printed flashcards here. My dyslexic dd uses them because making the cards herself was taking too much time each week, and her spelling errors rendered them less useful anyway. There are also plenty of Wheelock vocab lists (by chapter) already entered in Quizlet. She finds these much more useful than the flashcards.

Yes, this is why I think it makes sense. There is serious attention to and value placed on other types of professions. This would be so much more useful for many students than a mid level college degree and a load of debt and few practical skills. We can't fix our educational system overnight, but we could take vocational education much more seriously than we currently do.

Of course part of the problem here is that we don't really have a "US education system." Federalism and local control mean that you have seriously rigorous school systems right next door to extremely inadequate systems. Without national funding or a national curriculum it's hard to generalize.

Thanks. I think Finland does something similar to this as well. Students are not really tracked in elementary school (the expectation is that all will succeed up to a certain point), but by 10th grade or so there are numerous "vocational" options. Seems to make a lot more sense. Sometimes I feel like everyone is so desperately trying to figure out what the world will be like in 20 or 30 or 50 years that we forget that we have a role in determining what that world will look like.

I'm not sure what the meaning of a "rigorous" education is. It's one thing to say plumbers need trig, and quite another to say that all students should take calculus, be fluent in multiple languages, take 4 years of rigorous science, read all the great books, learn coding, take multiple AP courses etc.... For students who are academically gifted this kind of education may be an exciting challenge, but it would destroy other kids. In countries that require this of all college bound students, what percentage of students attend college? I am genuinely curious about this. What is considered "college bound?" Are students in other professional programs required to maintain the same level of academic rigor? There are so many skills outside the narrow academic skills required to succeed at traditional school. What about musicians and artists who help us to see the world? What about the farmer who has nerves of steel and can pull a breech calf out in the middle of a storm. What about therapists and counselors who can really listen and connect with others. None of these skills are required of our "top" students. Yet, the students who have these skills, must struggle desperately to do calculus, or write pithy 30 minute essays, or learn multiple languages.

Practical reality does matter, and this is so true. How do the Chinese and Germans speak to each other - English. It's a difficult trend for native English speakers to combat.

No, I did not miss this. It was a part of the curriculum - English and Russian. I don't think they just drew the names of those languages out of a hat to choose what to teach. I did not mean to offend. My point was simply that these languages were not being learned just for the sake of brain development. There was a reason they were chosen. They were the same languages learned in other Soviet block countries.