Reading from memory

[finleysmaid]

Ok ...I have a young girl who is reading. However I can't work out if it is photographic memory or not. I've tried a variety of methods but still can't work it out...any ideas?

Pterodactyl was interesting the other day! 🤣

[louby loo]

We had a child like that - we worked out he could read when he started picking up staff notebooks and reading them out! 😳

[sunnyday]

Oooh I had a little boy like that in my last year of working - he was absolutely fascinating - he would label his own drawings, everything spelled accurately

[Cait]

Yes!  I’ve had them too, but also had the ones that Mum said could read but were in fact memorising text from over-reading the same book at home until they were word perfect.   
 

I found that photocopying the text without the illustrations and giving them randomly, out of sequence sorted the reader from the memoriser.  
 

There was that one child once that’s just come to my memory who was watching me write up an observation report who remarked, looking at my writing “Aiden struggled to sort the shapes into the sorter, we need to work on this…..  I can do that with him if you like, Mrs F..”.   I was amazed.  She was 4.  She went through her school life determined to be a teacher.  

[louby loo]

On 05/04/2022 at 09:51, Cait said:

There was that one child once that’s just come to my memory who was watching me write up an observation report who remarked, looking at my writing “Aiden struggled to sort the shapes into the sorter, we need to work on this…..  I can do that with him if you like, Mrs F..”.   I was amazed.  She was 4.  She went through her school life determined to be a teacher.  

This is exactly what our little lad did!  Fascinating, and we had to be careful what we comments wrote on the whiteboard after that 🤣 

[pasmith]

We have had children who can read quite complex words by sight and often identify letters by name rather than sound. We were advised to support the reading but also ensure that their phonic knowledge is also developed.

[finleysmaid]

On 20/04/2022 at 14:17, pasmith said:

We have had children who can read quite complex words by sight and often identify letters by name rather than sound. We were advised to support the reading but also ensure that their phonic knowledge is also developed.

Thanks...she's definitely got her phonics! digraphs and some tri. Can use letter names and sounds...but doesn't seem to decode (verbally) when she reads. So she will look at a word hesitate for a moment and then tell you what she thinks it is. (which was why i wondered if she had a photographic memory) but she has also started to spell words phonetically  so i now just think she is actually reading, as she will make phonically plausible attempts rather than be 100% correct.