What Can a 5 Year Old Read?
Before reading on, please have a look at the video below:
There's no trickery or gimmicks or memorization involved, but real phonetic reading. Watching the video, you'll notice that Raine comes across various longer and more complicated words where she must slow down to "decode" and "sound out" the words. A good example is at the 4:31 mark where she had to really sound out the word "subsequent" before being able to read it. This is what phonetic readers are made of. Give unfamiliar or never seen words to a child that learned through the whole language method, and they wouldn't know where to begin.
The question many undoubtedly will ask is: does she understand what she is reading? My answer to that is that as long as the words she read are within her vocabulary, then she easily understands what she's reading. However, this does not necessarily mean that she knows what resistance or support levels are, or what up/down trends are, or what ascending triangles are. In fact, she probably doesn't know what a stock is either. She will eventually. =)
But reading is the window to an entire world of knowledge and experience, and the first step towards learning new things is through reading. You can be sure that for her current age, Raine has a very advanced vocabulary and superb reading comprehension.
A Trip Down Memory Lane (of videos)
Many years ago, I set out to teach my first child (Raine) to read. I had documented that process with various videos, and I have done the same with my second child Ethan. My 3rd child Joy is almost 18 months old, and I'll certainly provide video updates for her when we start with her in the near future.
A short while ago, I had sent a newsletter discussing reading tests and results, and had posted the following Burt reading test results for my 2 older children:
Raine
Chronological Age |
Reading Age |
Grade Level |
3 years 9 months |
7 years 6 months |
Gr. 2 (80th percentile) |
4 years 7 months |
10 years 1 month |
Gr. 4 (80th percentile) |
5 years 1 months |
11 years 9 months |
Gr. 5 (85th percentile) |
5 years 9 months |
13.0 years |
Gr. 7 (75th percentile) |
Ethan
Chronological Age |
Reading Age |
Grade Level |
3.0 years |
6 years 3 months |
Gr. 1 (75th percentile) |
3 years 4 months |
7 years 2 months |
Gr. 2 (65th percentile) |
3 years 9 months |
9 years 1 month |
Gr. 3 (75th percentile) |
This is a video update for Raine, so I'll just post her videos here. Let's take a look at her reading over the years:
Aside from teaching my own children to read, I've also taught many other children to read as well. I typically work with children between ages of 4 to 7, but I've had quite a few 3 year olds that have learned to read using my methods. Parents that bring their children (especially younger children) to me are almost always flabbergasted by what can be accomplished by their children - if just given the opportunity using the proper teaching methods and techniques. Aside from this, I've had thousands of parents from around the world use my methods to successfully teach their children to read.
