03 November 2007

A sigh of relief from Unstructured Play Central

As someone who is too cheap to fork over the cash for a LeapPad and incurably nonplussed whenever someone tells me how well their three-year-old reads/figures/parses/welds/etc., I find this vindicating.

2 comments:

Reb. Mary said...

A relief indeed, to hear this from you. I figured that the children of genuises would already be working on their dissertations :P

Was reading Leonard Sax's somewhat scary "Boys Adrift" book recently (will try to post more on this later) and also felt vindicated to hear an expert declare, based on studies of the brain, that it's developmentally "totally inappropriate" to expect most five-year-old boys to learn to read.

That said, I can't wait for one kid to hurry up and learn to read already, so he can read to the others (hah!).

Rebekah said...

Ha, indeed! The main thing they're working on is getting me to tell them what and when the next meal is going to be (do I know? No).

Do put up a review of that book when you get a chance; I've seen it a few places and was interested. I read as much of the article mentioned in the JWR column as the Globe would let me without registering and it also said that (precocious oldest Gauntlets notwithstanding ;) ), 6 or 7 is the ideal age to learn reading. Having spent some exploratory sessions with my almost 5 yr old, I'm not in any rush. We could sit drilling what sound "ch" makes for hours while she cries and I sit on the edge of my temper, or wait until her brain can hold onto two concepts at once.