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Patricia from Alabama asks.....
Phonics, Everyone?
"We have a 5-year-old in kindergarten who canread over 100 wcpm , but has no phonemic awareness skills. She can read whatever you place in front of her. I don't understand how she is reading the words correctly. Thanks for your help and where do we start with her?" You have a special little girl, Patricia! Children who read early tend to have one trait in common - they have very strong visual and auditory memories. They are able to remember words after seeing or hearing them only once or twice. Most children require many more exposures to a word before they can recognize it immediately. For precocious early readers, however, they can exhibit almost photographic memories for words. And when paired with their strong memories for what they've heard, they are able to use the sentence context and word shape to help them figure out almost everything! My guess is that you've provided a language-rich
environment for your child by reading and talking to her since she was very small, and she's "recorded" everything! Keep doing both of those with your daughter, and be sure to ask her questions about what she's read to check her comprehension.
If your child is attending a kindergarten class, their curriculum will nclude phonics instruction, which I suspect your daughter will pick up quickly. If you are home schooling, I'd make sure that she learned the letter names and sounds, but after that I wouldn't spend too much time
on phonics since your little girl doesn't appear to need them for reading. For children with strong visual memories, spelling also tends to be a snap since they've "recorded" the appearance of the word mentally and recalling it for spelling is usually very easy. So, no
need to worry about your child's lack of phonemic analysis. She's part of about 10% of children who learn to read and spell without it!
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