Thanks for the recommendation. If this comment piqued anyone else's interest, as it did mine, there is an updated version of Bloomfield's Let’s Read: https://www.amazon.com/Lets-Read-Linguistic-Clarence-Barnhar...
There is some discussion of the differences in the two editions in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466 as well as the reviews on Amazon. I am going to give the updated version a try.
Jim Keller (cpu designer): "I joke, like, I read books. And people think, 'Oh, you read books'. Well, no, I've read a couple of books a week, for [50] years."[1] Thought you might like.
Re:Eric Carle has died
by croutonwagon on Thursday May 27, 2021 @07:39PM
(#27309983)
That’s interesting. I had some credits on Amazon so I got the book. I’ll check it out and see about working with my 5yo this summer.
And that’s pretty amazing for your kid. That’s waaaaay above normal. We read every night to the kids, but we aren’t a huge reading family (if that makes sense)
But I have personally found these books with extreme limited vocabulary to be much better read-aloud books for 2-year-olds than books for independent reading by 4–5 year-olds. More generally, many other graded readers are excellent read-aloud books. At age 2–3, my kids particularly enjoyed the Henry and Mudge books https://www.amazon.com/dp/1534427139, and everything by Arnold Lobel.
If you are trying to teach kids to read, let me highly recommend Bloomfield’s workbook Let’s Read from the early 60s, which I heard about from a 2012 comment here on HN by Tokenadult. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0814311156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4665466
Bloomfield was one of the leading linguists of his era, and his book is very carefully structured to introduce only one new spelling–sound association per lesson, with the first half consisting of only regularly spelled words, so there is no possible confusion, with the full mishmash of irregular words only introduced after the reader is already fluent with regular spellings.
My son & I started working through it together for about 10–15 minutes per day when he was 3.5 years old, and it took about 8 months to get to the end, after which he could fluently read pretty much any material he could comprehend. As a not-quite-5 year-old he now happily independently reads books intended for 3rd–4th graders. (I’m not trying to suggest every kid should start on such a project at that age; every kid is different, and interests and attention span vary.)