Note: Might not work for everybody’s children. He is a physicist himself and there is very likely a genetic component.
I tried something like this with my ~3-year-olds: Learning letters with a self-made variant of the Concentration/Memory game (which is basically flash-cards of letters). They quickly learned to associate the letter forms with the sounds, but it didn’t extend to words. Maybe the indirection from the game was too complicated.
You also need to strictly control the environment and often exclude other children and other activities, much like László Polgár did. He maybe tried not to be a Tiger dad, but the results of such procedures are likely non-standard. Some of the gifted children I have known or heard of rebelled earlier or later, even if they objectively (e.g., economically) benefitted from the procedure.
I offered a lot of such engagements and my kids had to at least try many interventions, but those that they clearly didn’t like were dropped quickly—or tried again at a much later age. And so it was with the reading too. One of the games that was really successful in this regard was Boggle. At times I said that my kids learned to read thru Boggle when they were ~5 years old.
Note: Might not work for everybody’s children. He is a physicist himself and there is very likely a genetic component.
I tried something like this with my ~3-year-olds: Learning letters with a self-made variant of the Concentration/Memory game (which is basically flash-cards of letters). They quickly learned to associate the letter forms with the sounds, but it didn’t extend to words. Maybe the indirection from the game was too complicated.
You also need to strictly control the environment and often exclude other children and other activities, much like László Polgár did. He maybe tried not to be a Tiger dad, but the results of such procedures are likely non-standard. Some of the gifted children I have known or heard of rebelled earlier or later, even if they objectively (e.g., economically) benefitted from the procedure.
I offered a lot of such engagements and my kids had to at least try many interventions, but those that they clearly didn’t like were dropped quickly—or tried again at a much later age. And so it was with the reading too. One of the games that was really successful in this regard was Boggle. At times I said that my kids learned to read thru Boggle when they were ~5 years old.