Pre-K Holy Mackerel Follow Up!

A few days ago I blogged about how two students in our Pre-Kindergarten class can read shockingly well.

I returned to their classroom today to investigate further.  Their teacher (Ms. Preakness) and I took the two boys (Charlie, aged 3, and Chuck, who just turned 4) to a separate room and worked with them some more.

First, I put out the color-coded Word Charts again and watched them point to individual words and read them aloud.  When I could, I took a pointer and strung some of their words together to make sentences.  For example, when they both discovered the word fifty and kept touching and saying it, I took the pointer and tapped out “I slept on fifty beds,” which they thought was hilarious.

Next, I opened up a page of black-and-white text and asked if they could read it.  No, they said, because the text was too small.  OK!  So I enlarged it on a photocopier, then each boy read the entire page aloud.  I’ll copy the page here.  Note that in this book, which is part of our pedagogical materials for beginning readers, there’s no capitalization or punctuation.  We tell students to begin at each dash on the left side of the page, then move their eyes to the right and say what they see.

Also, I hope you realize by now that neither Ms. Preakness nor I pronounce any of these words ourselves.  We never model anything or say something the correct way if a student makes a mistake.

Here’s the text:

 – at sunset pat and pam went in with sam
– tim and tom were still on the sand
– sam sat on a step and pam on a mat
– pat was upset because she lost ten stamps
– the sand was full of wet lumps but tim and tom sat on them
– mom and dad told them to run in as it was dinner time 

Charlie read the entire page fluently and effortlessly.  Chuck struggled on a few words (for example, upset and lumps) but when we told him to look again he usually corrected himself.  Charlie was keen to tell him the words, too.

Now it gets interesting:

I pointed to the tiny print at the bottom of the Word Charts, regarding the publisher’s information which Charlie had read the previous day.  Could he read it again?  No, he said, because it was too tiny.  Then he looked around the room and saw on top of a file cabinet an unopened pack of paper towels.  It was upside down (see photo), but Charlie quickly and easily read aloud, “Plenty.  15 Regular Rolls.”

Ms. Preakness and I were suitably shocked.

I started pointing to more difficult words on the Word Charts, and both Charlie and Chuck read them aloud correctly:  independent, assistant.  I tapped out the sentence “I am Mom’s independent assistant” and they read it.

Charlie looked once more at the tiny print at the bottom of the Word Charts and read aloud a different part of it:  “Charts 3 and 4.  Words in Color.  American English.”

Well, Ms. Preakness and I have a lot of work to do.