From: elg@elgamy.sccsi.com (Eric Lee Green)
Date: 14 Aug 92 17:21:26 CDT
Newsgroups: misc.kids
Subject: Re: Question about Encyclopedias
Distribution: world
Organization: Eric's Amiga 2000 @ Home

From article <1992Aug14.174817.25882@pony.Ingres.COM>, by dan@Ingres.COM (Daniel J. Dick):
> Do any of you have suggestions on this (something that mommy and daddy could
> read through from volume to volume to a very young child)?  Our thoughts are
> that since children learn very quickly at a very early stage, we would like
> to make sure that we provide our child with the best beginning.  Not that we
> consider education to be *everything*, but we do consider it important and
> want it to be fun and interesting from the start.

If you want "fun" and "interesting", don't talk encyclopedias -- they are
reference work, and aren't intended to be particularly stimulating reading.

Your local public library has tons and tons of books aimed at children.
There are many which explore "how things work", history, geography,
science, etc. There are many others which are just plain entertainment,
which in itself isn't a bad goal either. There are "read-along" books which
have pictures for the child and prose for the parent, which are intended to
be read by the parent while the child is sitting on lap (with book in
child's lap), there are "board books" and "pop-up" books which are
generally just pictures for the young pre-reader (hopefully the two of you
will look at the pictures and talk about them, a language experience which
is very useful for a child), there are "beginning reading" picture books
with very simple words and interesting pictures, there are tons of
award-winning books aimed at ages from 6 months to 60 years, there are ....
well, you get the picture.

I'd personally recommend holding off on buying an encyclopedia until the
kid can read for him/herself and wants something for reference purposes.
Unless, of course, you need one for YOUR reference, to answer all the
questions this kid is going to be asking you five or six years from now!

One last thing: Don't worry about your child's academic progress at an
early age. As far as we can tell from the research, it doesn't matter
whether your kid learns how to read at 7 months or at 7 years, the end
result is pretty much the same. One mistake that many parents make is
getting all upset because three-year-old Juniorette doesn't know her
alphabet yet. I can personally attest that this doesn't really matter... I
didn't learn the alphabet until kindegarten (age 5), didn't learn how to
read until first grade, and my reading rate is currently somewhere around,
hmm, 500 words per minute? It's much better to concentrate on a young
child's verbal and social skills and background knowledge. For example,
there is a very definite correlation between you taking your child with you
to various mundane places, and the child's future performance in reading --
the child has that much more background to make the words on the page make
sense.

In other words, a very young child should be mastering language, social
skills, and the basic background knowledge of how our world works, rather
than readin', writin', and 'rithmetic. Once that background is in place,
reading and writing are rather trivial skills -- reading becomes a simple
act of decoding, writing becomes a simple act of decoding, because the
child now knows what is being encoded and decoded and doesn't have to
expend furious energy figuring out "what are words, anyhow? What is a
book? What is a squirrel? Huh?". A child to whom the concept of a
"sentence" does not make sense, who speaks in incomplete
sentence-fragments, will have problems reading sentences on the written
page -- something that's not surprising, in the end. A child who has been
around books, who has been around language, who has a conception of what
they are and how they are used, is a teacher's delight -- because it will
be extremely easy to teach that child how to read, and read well. Every
year, there are kids who hit the schools who didn't wait for teachers and
parents -- they taught themselves. Once the basic concepts are down, the
actual implementation is pretty much trivial, and can be unlocked easily
via ordinary methods of teaching reading.

--
 Eric Lee Green  elg@elgamy.sccsi.com         Dodson Elementary
 (713) 437-6908  uunet!nuchat!elgamy!elg      Houston, TX
                "Kids are kids, no matter what"