[antirez]

I want to share the experience I had with my daughter Greta (now 5 yo). She learned to write and read independently. At 3 she was already able to write simple words (not memorized, you cold say "write <any-4-or-5-letters-word>"), and at this point at 5 she can fluently write. All this without spending more than, maybe a total of a few days once she were already capable of basic reading/writing. The question is, how she figured out how to write and read independently? I'm not sure, but my wife and I read she books since she was 1 month old, every night before bed time, and often she wanted to look at the books, so I guess she became accustomed to the shape of letters. Later she played a lot in one of these rubber carpets where there are the shapes of the letters (https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/PCwAAOSwM5JZma4a/s-l500.jpg), and my guess is that this also helped. At some point when she was like, 2, she became obsessed with "A". This is letter "A" she could say during a few weeks. Later she started to compose the "A" with three sticks, and so forth. Basically with this process she learned all the letters and the sound. Btw what I was able to observe was: 1) It is a lot of work for kids to learn to write and read. Greta succeeded in doing so only because without we even noticing much, he basically spent a lot of time thinking about letters, drawing them, reading them. 2) When we tried to teach her better, like sitting together, we almost stopped this process... because it started to be annoying, so we avoided it if not for 10 minutes every month to say like, how groups of letters sounded. 3) I believe that one of the key point was reading a lot of books, because her language skills where very impressive already at 1.5 yo or alike, and I believe this is potentially the result of reading books.

[balls187]

My son, not quite aged 2, exhibits similar traits. We've been reading to him since he was in the womb, and every chance we'd get we'd talk about letters. We have nearly a dozen alphabet related "toys", and lately I've been using alphabet magnet to spell out words, sounding out the letters, and putting them together.

Who knows if this will make him a stellar reader or not, I just enjoy spending that time learning with my son. Eventually I suppose he'll hate my guts and just want the passphrase to the autonomous vehicle shared service account.

[zwieback]

Do you have more than one kid? One of mine learned reading super easily, the other struggled. Both of them do very well in high school now.

I don't think one approach fits all and I'm certain teachers are sick of being told they are doing this or that wrong. My advice: leave the kids and teachers alone, they'll figure it out.

[antirez]

Yep, I've a son which is 17, similar experience. However the fact he was so gifted in almost everything made him extremely lazy and non interested in anything as a teenager... I hope this will change.

[balls187]

Which child performs better, the first born or second?

When I was a child, my parents worked on phonetics with me, and encouraged me to work with my sister on hers. She didn't perform as well academically as I did, but now that we're in our mid/late thirties, that discrepancy is nothing but a footnote.

[zwieback]

First one had a harder time reading. Once she discovered the "Warriors" series there was no stopping her, though.

[HorizonXP]

antirez, I'm curious, did you decide to teach English instead of Italian, or in addition to it? I'm wondering how this book helps or hinders your children's progress in other languages. There is the obvious advantage that they share the same written alphabet.

[antirez]

My son learned English as a teenager, instead my daughter has an english mother tongue teachers at his school, mixed with regular teachers, so she have definitely a very good pronounce, but she is not able yet to talk, just knows certain words, a few sentences and so forth. I've the feeling that all the books we read she in Italian have only a marginal advantage on her english skills...