Did you know that in India, a child can read and write at age four or sooner? I have gotten to know quite a few families from India whose children can read and write by age four. By age three they should be able to write all their uppercase and lowercase letters and numbers 1-30.
They teach them to write with a method similar to the Ball-Stick-Bird method as far as I can tell (since I haven't actually used the product.) First they teach standing lines (vertical), then sleeping lines (horizontal), then leaning lines (diaganal) and circles. Then they put these together to form the letters. For example: D is a standing line and a half circle, L is a standing line and then a sleeping line.
That's right, many of them can read and write both English and their native language by 4 or 5. I tried to look online to find some links to direct you all too but there doesn't seem to be any mention of this online. I suppose it's so normal for them, but you'd think another country would have written something.
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4 comments:
I've never heard this about India before, but I do know that in Italy they used to use a similar method to teach children to write. My husband talks about filling notebooks with lines and circles in the first grade!
My son started reading and writing around age 4. He was in a Montessori preschool run by a Sri Lankan woman. I don't know if the methods she uses are like the ones used in India. Now my daughter is attending her preschool and my son has moved on to first grade.
I had never heard of this or the method, but I was reading and writing by age 4 because I was always wanting to do what my brother (who is six years older) was doing, so he sat down and taught me :)
I've always found it interesting that in Italy they actually learn cursive writing first, but I didn't know that the method was as Joanne described.
i'm glad you posted this to the group email...with homeschooling, teaching our children to read is, of course, what we did, but what i observed was that 2 things happened in our home. we read to the children their whole lives & the girls (the oldest 2) eased from listening into following the pages to reading somewhere around age 4-5. the boys (younger 2) read due to peer pressure~~ they wanted to be like their big sisters. but this is an interesting method you describe
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