Natural whole word readers

[drjuliadc]

Yes, of my oldest two, now 8 and 9, one is pretty right brained and one is really, really left brained. The right brained one is more of a whole word learner.

I have heard on this board that the whole left brain/right brained thing has been debunked, but I’ve never heard the actual argument against it. I find the concepts extremely useful, particularly in understanding my 2 polar opposite boys. IIRC the guy who did split brain research did win the Nobel Prize for it.

A more right brained person sees the whole before the parts (gestalt) and is more “other aware.” A left brained person sees the parts before the whole and is more “self oriented.” The right brained one is very popular and all the neighborhood boys come to the door asking for him every day.  My left brained one is not particularly well liked and he doesn’t really care. He wants to do his own thing, which involves anything with technology.

I taught all 4 children to read using the whole word method because I did it so young and because the people who have success with that sort of thing told me to do it that way. (Glenn Doman).

The Doman people say everyone can intuit phonics from learning whole words.  They just flash the kids thousands of words. I don’t think schools who utilize some “whole word” methods expose kids to nearly enough words to accomplish what whole word methods could do. Just like “new math” wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, just very poorly implemented by schools.

I taught my children phonics too. Yes, I am type A and am happy to be so.  Haha. I am also a fixer. All 4 of my kids had a very strong chance of being dyslexic based upon genetics. I doubted I would homeschool and I wanted my children to be ahead of their peers for self esteem purposes. I certainly didn’t want them to feel behind in any way. 

It did seem like one of my kids intuited phonics because he was such a fluent reader by age 22 months before I ever got around to teaching phonics.  He watched a variety of letter sounds videos before that, but not very many times, so he could have picked it up from those. In general, I pretty strictly avoided screen time with him before age two, other than Brillkids software, the lazy way to do Doman. But that is only 10 minutes a day of screen time and it covers reading, math and music.

None of my children laboriously sounded out anything. When they could read, they all read “fluently” and with intonation. Two of them before age two, one of them at 2 1/2 because I didn’t get him until he was 22 months old. The other, I don’t know. He didn’t like to be tested. If you asked him what a word was, he wouldn’t tell you but if he wanted to know something he could read it fine. By three he could read well enough to read all the states and capitals from a puzzle and know them all by heart, and by 4 read all the elements on the periodic table and knew almost all of them by heart along with their atomic numbers.

One other child taught himself all the countries in Stack the Countries at barely 4. I had no active role in the countries, states/capitals, or periodic table thing. Those were all self taught. I didn’t even have a copy of the periodic table of elements (his Montessori school did) and I didn’t buy the states puzzle. It was a gift.  I did buy stack the countries, but he found it on my phone himself. I never even suggested he play it.

If I hadn’t taught them how to read early, they wouldn’t have been able to do all those things. There is no way it wasn’t good for them other than making regular school not a good fit.

Considering I only spent 5 minutes twice a day actively teaching them how to read.  I think I totally pushed the easy button on things.

Except spelling. The way I taught them reading definitely doesn’t teach them spelling.

Edited September 30, 2020 by drjuliadc
Misspelling and one critical sentence omitted.

[drjuliadc]

I think I missed saying that a more right brained person is more likely to be a natural whole word reader.

My most right brained kid is my worst speller. He just doesn’t look at the details of things.

Hard to believe I missed saying anything in such a long post.