Your baby can recognize words, but can he read?

On this rainy day, I admit to vegging in front of TV! I channel surfed across a guy explaining that you can teach your kid to read as early as 3 or 4 months. It reminded of the MANY discussions, ok fights, I had with parents and teachers during the 10 years I taught first grade. What does it mean to be able to read? If you can recognize words, you can  read them, I agree. And even a tiny baby can learn to say "boat" when he sees that arrangement of lines if he sees them a zillion times. But does that mean he can read? Learning this way, he'd have to memorize the shape of every word he'd ever need! And if he's learning it all word by word, he'll have to learn "boating", "boathouse", and "sailboat" as brand new words instead of words from the same word family.  Sadly, it's also the way many kids are being taught to read in their classrooms, too. Kids who are taught to read by memorizing words often do fine until about 4th grade. By then, the child needs to be able to read in science and social studies and math  encountering new words in every text he reads. The ability to memorize that many words is way outside the grasp of many of us! So your child needs to be taught to READ. That is, he needs to be able to take the symbols on a page that represent sound and decode them into words, any words, in any subject whether he's seen them before or not. And don't forget that if he learns to read this way, he's also learning to spell words that he hears into words he can write and analyze their spelling to help understand their meaning! So I turned the vegging into ranting...again :).