Photo: Tony Lanz
Jenna Levinson* was reading fluently by the age of four.
?I remember I was wearing an Earth Day T-shirt with a picture of a globe on it,? recalls her mom, Stephanie. ?And she said to me, ?Why does your shirt say, ?Love your mother"?? I was pretty surprised. We hadn?t ever tried to teach her to read.?
Jenna?s younger sister, Sadie, has taken a decidedly different route toward literacy. Well into second grade, the seven-year-old ?is just starting to be able to read a simple book out loud to me,? says Levinson, who lives in Winnipeg. ?She?s progressing, but she still guesses a lot, struggles with vowel sounds, mixes up her Ds and Bs?things like that.?
Levinson says she?s read constantly to both kids since babyhood. ?Jenna would listen to as many books as you wanted to read to her, and Sadie would grab the book and throw it across the room.? Watching her daughters? radically different approaches to literacy has left her, like many parents, wondering if there?s something innate that helps some kids pick up the ability to read easily and if there?s a ?right? age to learn how to read. Experts say no. ?The brain isn?t naturally hard-wired to read in the way that it?s wired to speak or listen,? explains Bev Brenna, an education professor at the University of Saskatchewan who specializes in literacy education. There simply isn?t one age where kids can or should be reading?despite the deeply ingrained North American ideal that children learn to read in f...