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You are a sight reader. I am too. When I was a freshman in college, I was in an Eng comp class for kids that scored over 650 on the Eng Achievement and SAT. We were the only class that had spelling because they told us that studies showed the the best, fastest sight readers were notoriously poor spellers. Are you a poor speller?

Anyway, there is no one right way to learn to read because there is no single way people learn. There are visual learners and there are auditory learners and all sorts of combinations in between. I get tired of hearing people say that teaching sight reading is wrong, phonics is the only way to teach. It would have bored me to death if I had to sound out every word that I read.

Sight reading is simply a natural way to learn to read. The student actually teaches himself and that is the way many pre-schoolers pick up reading on their own. My two year old grandson can read, but he doesn’t know the alphabet.

You are a sight reader. I am too. When I was a freshman in college, I was in an Eng comp class for kids that scored over 650 on the Eng Achievement and SAT. We were the only class that had spelling because they told us that studies showed the the best, fastest sight readers were notoriously poor spellers. Are you a poor speller?

Yes. Speaking for myself, I'm a visual reader and until college I was a notoriously poor speller. In this day of spellcheck, I'd probably still be a poor speller. I had to buckle down my freshman year and spend a couple of hours a night, every night for my first semester, forcing myself to learn to spell. A couple hundred hours later, I could still read better than my classmates, and I equaled or surpassed most them in spelling as well.

No problem reading. I had that solved in the first couple of weeks of first grade. My father learned to read spontaneously at the age of 3.

I am a perfect speller ~ if I make a mistake it's simply because I usually type over 100 wpm. Modern keyboards are too weak for my speed.

Ever read the Oxford English Dictionary? I have ~ lots of words in there ~ incredible words ~ long words. I usually pick them up as fast as I see them.

NOTE: I have an unfair advantage here. I wrote vast quantities of postal regulations over a 10 year period AND several major handbooks (of hundreds of pages) explaining the intricate details of all sorts of processes and gadgets.

Later on, as my vision began deteriorating, I turned to simply reviewing monetary disputes and resolving them. They owed the money. It was my job to get it. There is actually a lot of very specialized writing in that sort of thing.

Then, they invented the internet and I never looked back.

We had a secretary who was a close runner up in the National Spelling Bee contest. She'd been born abroad, but when she came here they put her in a COLD IMMERSION CLASS where English was the only language. She quickly went to work learning all the English words and the way they were spelled.

She later entered and won beauty contests.

We hired her 'cause she was a good speller Fur Shur.