When I learned to read, I was not taught individual letters. I was not expected to pretend interest in insipid little "stories" with neither plot nor character development. No "See **** run. Run, ****, run" for me. My Dad made a trilingual edition of The Little Prince. The English and French looked much as they look in the link; the Punjabi was in his precise Gurmukhi printing. He started reading a sentence in each of the three languages, then held my hand and pointed to each word, sounding it letter by letter in all three languages. Amidst much giggling, I learned to read simultaneously in three languages with two different alphabets from a book totally unintelligible to a child my age. Within a few pages, I was getting able to read sentences back to him, not perfectly, but enough to make sense. I was very young, I think 3 or 4. The book had nice illustrations - the same ones as in the link above - and a fascinating story, which strangely enough I comprehended pretty well.
I have been told by those who know, the professors, that a child could not learn to read that way and anyway there are far too many different words in that book for a child. I guess "age appropriate" didn't penetrate Dad's consciousness, so I got to start reading an interesting book with a character I really cared about.
This article seems to suggest that Dad's method wasn't totally insane. The worst of it came when I actually started school and I was years ahead of everybody else.
Dad: :singhsippingcoffee: Me: :sippingcoffee:
Learning can be and should be fun.
