My child is the best reader his teacher has ever seen, what next?

I got this question from a parent of a Mentava reader today:

“My child is the best reader his teacher has ever seen, how do I prevent the next two years being more or less an academic waste?”

I suspect we'll be getting this question more and more, so I here’s what I wrote back:

If your kid has finished a basic reading program like Mentava, they’ll be able to read easy reader books like Green Eggs and Ham or the Elephant and Piggie series, but it still takes effort. When it comes to reading, they’re at the “conscious competence” level of skill mastery. To move from conscious competence to unconscious competence, all they need is frequent practice (15-30 mins a day).

When they’re building the skill of decoding, it doesn’t really matter what they’re reading, so just pick books they enjoy. I love the Elephant and Piggie series and the You Read to Me, I'll Read to You series. Other great series for beginning readers are Fly Guy, Splat the Cat, Pete the Cat, and Henry and Mudge. I like series books because if your kid likes one of the books it’s easy to encourage them to keep reading the rest. It’s important to read these books together so you can correct their mistakes and help them if they get stuck.

Some slightly more challenging series to transition into next are Frog and Toad, Nate the Great, Owl Diaries, Princess in Black, and Amelia Bedelia. I’m personally not a fan of graphic novels because the pictures become a crutch for struggling readers. This is good if what you care about is “building a love for books”, but it’s bad if what you care about is actually improving reading skills.

After a year or two of children’s books, your child will be ready to tackle their first chapter books. Some of my favorites here are Fantastic Mr Fox, the Boxcar Children series, and the Magic Treehouse series.

By this time they’ll likely be turning into independent readers who are reading for fun, but it can still be helpful to read together occasionally. Especially as they get into books like Harry Potter, they’ll run into more complex sentence structures with multiple subordinate clauses like: “When Neville Longbottom, the boy who kept losing his toad, was called, he fell over on his way to the stool.” Even if a child can read every word in that sentence, they may still struggle to make sense of it because they’re having trouble figuring out which parts of the sentence relate to each other.

So that’s reading. What about school?

Unfortunately, the fact of the matter (and the main reason I started Mentava) is that there are vanishingly few schools willing and/or able to support smart kids who want to learn much faster than their peers. In the old days, schools would try to match the pace of learning to students’ abilities, so kids who mastered material quickly would be allowed to progress more quickly. Unfortunately, this practice is now opposed by most teacher and education advocacy groups. (Fortunately, there are a few schools like Alpha School that are trying to change this.)

Skipping grades isn’t really a solution either because it doesn’t solve the problem of a child who wants to learn and progress twice as fast as their classmates.

I started Mentava because I believe that independent (self-paced) learning is the best available option (besides homeschooling or private tutoring) for a child who wants to learn faster.

The goal of Mentava Reading is to lay that foundation and give kids the experience, resilience, and reading skills necessary to teach themselves anything they want.

Once a child has a solid foundation of reading skills, I like to introduce math. If you have a super early reader (like age 2) you may find that they don’t yet have the cognitive development necessary to understand even basic concepts like “more” or “less”, in which case just wait a while. But if your 4-year-old is reading well, then I would recommend introducing math software like Dreambox to continue building their independent learning skills. Keep in mind that most of this software isn’t purpose-built for this independent study use case, so you’ll occasionally need to step in and give your kid some guidance.

I use Dreambox with my own kids, but Synthesis School and Math Academy are the “next-gen” math software options that I haven’t personally tried yet. Beast Academy has excellent curriculum but needs more parent guidance, and so I chose not to use it because what I cared about most was seeing my kids turn into independent learners.

Once your child can do basic addition and subtraction, they can also begin learning the fundamentals of computer programming. For this, I really like code.org’s computer science fundamental courses (labeled “Course A” through “Course F”). They’re fun and gamified and well-suited for young independent learners.

Sometimes schools are willing to give kids permission to do independent work in the classroom. For example, math teachers will often give students a pre-test before introducing a new topic. You may be able to ask your child’s math teacher, “If my child passes the pre-test, can they use the time to continue working in Dreambox instead? They’ve already been using Dreambox on their own at home so I know they can do it.”

The end goal here is to make sure your child has options when they’re confronted with an education system that refuses to support them. Sometimes this can be as explicit as “no middle school algebra”, or it can be phrased more insidiously, like “we believe in enrichment rather than acceleration”. But the nice thing about having a child that can teach themselves is that they’re no longer limited by what other people are willing to allow them to learn.