Reply #9: Seven? Yow!

[Posteritatis]

I understand the reasoning behind not dropping five-year-olds into a wholly academic program from day one - that's just crazy talk - but I took it for granted that by hitting something in the 5-7 range the kids would have at least some basic reading skills.

I'm clueless on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of starting that late, but it's alien and surprising to me in equal measure. Wow.

Tangent time!

I don't remember much along those lines from kindergarten, which in my own experience was a lot of that unstructured-or-is-it? play, but we had quite a few reading assignments and exercises and the like in Primary and grade one. They were a set of boxes and filing-folder type things off at the back of the classroom, and when time came to work on reading we were allowed to basically pick the ones we wanted to work with based on difficulty levels and broad topics, with comprehension, reading-out-loud, etc exercises attached. I and a few of my classmates were reading way ahead of grade level and basically devoured the most advanced ones from each box before doing our own things, but out of curiosity I looked through most of them to see what the rest were like. Even at the time I was fascinated by them; it looked like they did a pretty good job of running the full gamut from "barely able to recognize what letters are" to what certainly were for six-year-olds pretty complex, multiple-paragraph sorts of things.

A lot of us at the time loved the things; it wasn't necessarily that they were fun/interesting or the like as much as the fact that even then we could recognize that we were given a little bit of choice in what we were going to do there. Someone could work on the sheets they were comfortable working on, if they started working on the next level up in difficulty they could see Tangible Accomplishment right in front of their eyes, and people who blew through the top-level ones were allowed to do more independent reading by the teachers.

I dunno; those boxes of color-coded cards and sheets stuck with me more than pretty much anything else academic from that whole time in school. This thread just reminded me of them.