Yea, I’m not worried about parents on this site. And I enjoy watching the little guys…brings back memories!!
Arvi wrote:
"Just one more question. Most of the child prodigies and accelerated learners that I've read about have ended up depressed and being unhappy during adulthood. There are a few exceptions to this list like your son (great indeed). One common thing about the prodigies/accelerated learners who turned out depressed is the fact that they were accelerated in a super fast pace like graduating college at the age of 12 or less. What is your opinion on this? Did you put special efforts to ensure that your son is happy and did you make conscious effort in making him well-rounded or is it because of his personality that he is happy now."
Robert already answered this to a large degree - but I thought I’d pass along the information that was given to me by the Belin Blank Center. It is typical for advanced kids to become depressed. Usually it has little to do with how fast they were accelerated. Since the children have a hard time relating to their peers, they have a difficult time making friends. The children are lonely. They found that acceleration helps this problem - and the problem of developing laziness. Also, when those children whose parents did make a “big” deal out of them when they were little reach their late teens and early twenties, when many of their peers have caught up to them, they aren’t such a big deal anymore. It is a bit of a blow to the ego.
Thanks for sharing, Robert. Sonya, you have provided another perspective to that problem. Do you think that the loneliness and laziness problem can be evaded through other means. Can you recommend any resources or books in that subject.
I haven’t read it yet, but it has been discussed in the forum a bit. Carol Dweck did a study and wrote a book called Mindset. She talks about how it is best to encourage a child’s learning capacity, their patience, their effort etc rather that praising their smarts or the end result. That may help with the lazy attitude.
That way they are encouraged to try rather than be doomed to failure.
I think Po Bronson’s book The Outliers might address some of this too? I have just started the first chapter.
“Carol Dweck did a study and wrote a book called Mindset. She talks about how it is best to encourage a child’s learning capacity, their patience, their effort etc rather that praising their smarts or the end result. That may help with the lazy attitude. That way they are encouraged to try rather than be doomed to failure.”
I’m not saying it’s not possible, but I’m not sure how to encourage learning capacity or patience (there may well be ways, and maybe they’re covered in her book - I just don’t know what they are).
As to praising smarts, I’m with her her there. I praised accomplishment, rather than simply telling him he was smart (as that would get to his head - and he’s able to figure it out fast enough anyone) - obviously I never called him stupid - in general. But if he did something stupid, I sure let him know it - simply because I wanted him to remember and not do it again when I may not have been there to keep him out of trouble (and it happened a lot - his common sense developed at a more normal pace). An example would be when he set up a vacation calendar for his church group. I asked him if it was password protected - he said no, but they didn’t tell any outsiders the website address. I explained that was dumb to do, and that he needed a password - he pushed back a bit and then agreed - but I will call a spade a spade - and if it’s dumb, I’ll let him know it, in a way that he remembers.
As far as the end result, which is really what led me to comment, here’s my take: It depends. If the material is hard and he tries, then definitely praise the effort - and then work with him until he does get it right. But don’t praise the effort if the material is easy, but he gets it wrong. With David, at least, that was the path of laziness - just do it real quick and don’t care about whether it’s right or wrong. If I accepted that, he would have been knocking out Saxon sections every 20 minutes. So it’s a balance, and it’s easy enough for a parent to know whether the kid should have gotten the right answer.
Agreed!! It is about finding the happy medium.
Here is the Po Bronson article about Carol Dweck and praise for those who are interested. And his book is NurtureShock and not Outliers. Sorry.
Interesting. Like I mentioned before, I do remember some things from my early grade school years. One thing was always being told the following, time after time on my report card: “Robert is doing well, but should be doing better”. For years I would read that and try to figure out how the teacher would know what I was capable of, as I felt that I was doing as well as I could. I had no clue where that comment came from - but I learned later that they had access to my standardized tests (some were like IQ tests). I always did well on those tests and they were judging me against them. I’m still angry to this day that they were doing that.
Hi people,
As an FYI, here is a study that was done in Scotland to assess what’s called “Synthetic Phonics” versus “Analytic Phonics”. The form of phonics that I used is what is called “Synthetic Phonics”, although I had never heard of either term at the time. I think the word “Synthetic” means “synthesized”, as in putting together sounds to make words (rather than meaning artificial, as there’s nothing artificial about it). Basically you teach a few sounds, and then start blending them into easy words, and then build up from that (the report explains it well).
Analytic Phonics appears to be an approach in which the kids use words to try to learn sounds. Like for the letter “c”, they would give the kids “car”, “cake”, “candle”, etc. Not as direct, and much slower. They say in the study that the kids are taught one letter per week…which means that they just might get through the alphabet in an entire school year. I remember they were doing that at David’s pre-school (pre-K) and it seemed like a very long, slow, process (obviously it didn’t affect David though). I suspect this approach is used more commonly here than Synthetic Phonic.
In the study, it’s not even close, Synthetic Phonics (the way I taught it) wins hands-down - which is no surprise to me - but somehow these studies don’t make it into our educational system.
Here’s the study:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2005/02/20682/52383
Here’s the easier-to-read PDF version:
http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/933/0044071.pdf
Thanks for this!
You’re welcome. I was just reading up on this stuff and I remembered reading about that study several years ago. I always thought of phonics as monolithic, but it’s not - there are fast ways and slow ways to teach it. In that study, they only spent 16 weeks with the kids (age 5 at the time, I think) and got them reading. Then they left them alone, other than checking up on their progress. Most impressive to me was that boys actually did better than girls…which may be why real phonics is so despised by the establishment.
I’m not sure how this translates when teaching a 2 year old, but when I began teaching my oldest child to read at age 3.5 - he was a motivated reader and I was a horrible teacher. I used too many letters at once. It took a good year to get him reading well. He didn’t make the jump to reading like an adult until middle of first grade. He was still way ahead of his peers but in reading this I can see where I made my mistake. I like to introduce a lot and confuse little kids. 
Synthetic phonics is really, really popular in Scotland and the UK in general. One of the most popular programs, being taught in schools is the Jolly Phonics program. We have many Jolly Phonics materials we have brought back from there (hubby is from there and we make regular trips back to visit family). It is VERY child friendly and is well suited for very young kiddos! We have a fantastic Jolly Phonics storybook reinforcing the letter sounds and other phonemes.
Very informative article. Thanks for sharing.
I think this is a key factor in the phonics vs whole word debate. The type of phonics instruction varies greatly depending on the country you live in and even on the particular school you attend. Many people who are anti-phonics are thinking only of analytic phonics, when clearly the research points to synthetic phonics as the only phonics approach to take. I have been recommending Reading Bear to anyone who will listen to me as it is an excellent example of synthetic phonics.
One aspect of that research I loved is the speed at which children progressed. The fact that they learned to both read & spell one word (‘pat’) in their first lesson was fantastic & must have done so much to boost the children’s reading confidence & their interest in subsequent lessons.
Keri - Jolly Phonics is pretty popular here in Ireland too, although it is not used in every school with many still using analytic phonics unfortunately.
As an aside, I learned to read using the whole word approach (Doman) as a toddler. I am using both synthetic phonics & whole word approaches with my toddler - she is definitely learning far more quickly using phonics than whole word. I think this difference may be partly due to learning style - I am a very visual learner & she is not.
Nice replies. I did a bit more looking around to see what others said about the study.
It seems that the people that were shooting down the Scotland study did so because it wasn’t up to the standards they demanded and also because the kids were only 9 months ahead in comprehension (versus 3.5 years in reading otherwise). It was kind of amusing to read - the implication seemed to be that there was some way kids could be several years ahead in comprehension without being able to read - LOL.
So, regarding the scientific rigor test - it’s real easy to shoot down a study by saying that it didn’t control this or that - but it’s plain-as-day when they don’t bother mentioning their own controlled studies (which probably never existed) to prove their system works.
As to the comprehension aspect, one thing that wasn’t always clearly stated about the Scotland study was these kids were about as disadvantaged as they get in the UK, so getting their comprehension even up to grade level was a major accomplishment - not to mention getting the rest of their reading capability way beyond that (as they got virtually no help from their parents).
I guess the bottom-line for parents is understand that everyone now at least gives lip-service to phonics - it’s just been proven hands-down. Teachers can no longer get away with saying that Whole Language is better, and that phonics doesn’t work and shouldn’t be used. Parents, even the ones that don’t drink this stuff, know that’s a non-starter. But “the establishment” attitudes don’t change, so they tell parents things like “no one-size fits all” and we use the “best of both methods”. Just beware, because those are generally code-words for telling you that they don’t take synthetic phonics seriously, but they may teach a sound or two when the kids are really stuck.
I like what I see of the Jolly Phonics, it seems to be right in line with the way I taught David. Just the sounds, no fluff. I probably would have bought something like that if I knew it existed back then…but it was still common sense to me. If you want a kid to learn to read “cat”, you teach him “ca”, “aa”, “ta”. No need to have him singing songs or doing other stunts.
I see your point, but on the flipside, I taught my kids all of their basic letter sounds (with short vowels) by ages 15 and 13 months old. This was done easily by playing a selection of about 3 youtube videos 2-5 times a day which they ADORED (each about 1-2 minutes long?). It took them each about a month and a half to learn all their basic letter sounds if I remember correctly. During this time, I continued to teach whole words through Little Reader and I also practiced blending CVC words on a regular basis, along with a few other things.
So, I admire your “no fluff” approach (which clearly worked well with David) but when working with very little kids, I think those recommendations can be bent a certain amount. We’re not talking about first graders or even kindergarteners here, but rather babies and toddlers for the most part. They are in such an absorptive state and if music can better engage them and get them reading by 15-18 months as in the case of my kids, then the “fluff” was well purposed. I just don’t want any parents here to draw conclusions from this conversation that may not be as applicable to the youngest BrillKids learners. And whole words/intuitive phonics are an entirely different animal when used to introduce literacy to a baby versus when used as a sole instructional method for 3-6 year olds. Just my 2 cents!
Letter sounds and CVC words seem a lot like synthetic phonics to me. It’s basically readingbear.org - other than the site words, doesn’t sound like you deviated too much TmT.
As for “only” 9 months ahead in comprehension: Advancing in comprehension is far more of a job than simple decoding. It requires, aside from decoding mastery, a lot of background knowledge. That knowledge is often factual or even simple vocabulary. I recommend E.D. Hirsch’s stuff for further reading about on the topic.
For this reason, I plan on adopting a memory strategy for facts and more advanced vocabulary when the time is right. If you build those two things along with the decoding skill, you will wind up with a child that far surpasses a year’s reading placement, IMO. This is maybe the biggest thing (other than math, ha ha) that I plan on doing and cannot wait to implement
My explanation was in reference to the quote below, because we chose to teach through cartoon music youtube videos
"No need to have him singing songs or doing other stunts."
With very young children in particular, I think learning through music can be very effective because it easily captivates a 1 year old, making the process not just painless, but enjoyable. 
PokerDad, you seem to have a great plan. Can you elaborate your plan on facts memory strategy and advanced vocabulary. What tools and resources are you planning to use?