Great books and the spoken word are the foundation, and this starts when the children are still very small. I am one of those nuts who reads to babies in the womb, and I have been known to read Plutarch and Shakespeare to infants too small to defend themselves.
. . .
We do not read dumbed down retellings of great classics- Those horrible Great Illustrated Classics are not for us- except as an object lesson in a talk I've given a couple of times on how bad they are.We do not read twaddle. I am not interested in Sesame Street or Dora the Explorer or other books that tie in to television shows or theme parks (no Disney books. Ew.). Yes, I am a snob about this, if it's being a snob to prefer to feed my children bread instead of stones.
Over and over again, the teaching of reading is a mystery to me, and I wish I did it as schematically as the DHM does, mostly because her schemes are creative and fun. For my own part, I've seen three (so far) of my progeny learn to read by processes largely independent of my efforts.
Epiphany went to school at five and six, in a system where everyone else had started at four, so that she was behind before she even got going properly. I still remember that transition: one day you're in preschool learning to make good choices and stay out of the bad-choice chair, and the next day you're on the other side of the Atlantic studying for a spelling test, despite the fact that you neither read nor write. That was interesting, but by Christmas she was doing both. What she read in school was pretty twaddly, though that hasn't handicapped her in the long run. Of course, at home we were reading the good stuff, so that the teachers thanked us at every parent-teacher conference for sending her to school already equipped with learning, which was why eventually we began to wonder why exactly we were arranging our lives around this middleman. But I digress.
Amicus received a smattering of phonics in the one year he went to school -- he did start full-time at age four like everyone else and spent the year, as he now says, "writing 'curly kuhs,'" ie the letter c, and watching the teacher mix it up with a kid named Storm. When we moved back to the U.S. and began homeschooling, I continued the "smattering of phonics" approach, but as we were new at homeschooling and still reeling from the effects of a transatlantic move, joblessness, and life with two school-aged children (at least one of them seriously unhappy about the move), a manic toddler, and a newborn in an apartment, you will understand that when I say "smattering," I mean, really, smattering, as in a few random drops of ineffectual rain on drought-stricken earth.
We did, however, go to the library a lot. I was too tired and overwhelmed to care much what people checked out, and what Amicus wanted were books on military themes, so as I have said before, we took home a book called Amphibious Techniques roughly eight thousand times that year, and he spent hours poring over the pictures. One day he came to me and shamefacedly confessed that he was "only reading the captions" to these pictures. As each caption was a paragraph in itself, and the book really wasn't in any way aimed at six-year-olds, I was taken aback. Oh, you can read? And that was that. His favorite book at age nine was Sun Tsu's The Art of War (see a theme developing here?), and this year he's read Beowulf (the Seamus Heaney translation, because that's what we have), and most of the Stephen "Band of Brothers" Ambrose oeuvre, and a shorter work by Stephen Hawking, so whatever it was I did or didn't do seems to have worked all right.
I also can't remember how Helier learned to read. When he was four and five and six, I again tried the phonics approach, with smattering -- at some point I did acquire a set of plastic word tiles, and one of our favorite games (his and mine and Crispina's) was making up goofy sentences and reading them, but again, actual reading was a matter of a switch flipping. One day he didn't want to read; the next day he wanted to read the entire Redwall series, all four million books of it, in one 24-hour period. Right now he's reading R. L. Stevenson's The Black Arrow. If someone had told me two years ago that this child would sit still on a couch for an entire morning with a book in his hands, I would not have believed it. But there it is.
With Crispina, meanwhile, we're still in process. I can actually recall what methods I've been using, because I haven't had a chance to forget them yet. We've moved from our set of super-basic phonics readers to two books between which we alternate: a nature reader called Seaside and Wayside, from Lepanto press (original copyright circa 1911), and Book One of the American Cardinal Reader series used in Catholic schools of the early 1930s. For roughly ten minutes every day we "buddy-read" from one of these books. She reads a paragraph, then I read a paragraph, and we take turns reading aloud through the entire lesson or chapter or story. We're still informally doing phonics as we run up against words which make us stumble: mistakes offer the opportunity to review basic rules and to look at families of words (currently we're struggling with -igh words, like night, light, bright, fight), and I think I'll use copywork to help her memorize these. She's reading pretty fluently at this point, handling dialogue and complex sentences largely with ease -- one of the things I love about these old books is that the sentences are complicated and elegant, as if children were actually capable of digesting good prose.
We also practice reading via copywork -- this is largely how we "do" poetry. I give her one to two lines a day, Helier two to four. She's currently copying this poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:
Travel
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn't a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn't a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And I hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I'll not being knowing,
Yet there isn't a train I wouldn't take,
No matter where it's going.
(from one of my own childhood books, All the Silver Pennies
)All right, this very child has appeared at my side to beg me to get her blueberries for breakfast. After that, we'll do some math and *reading* before heading out for our day at church.
Later, all.
13 comments:
Twaddly. Love it.
I taught my oldest two to read, and largely they wanted to learn the alphabet and letter sounds and then when I showed them how they went together to form words...they shot off and haven't stopped.
My 3 year old (almost 4) is a bit different. You mention ABC blocks or magnets and he begins to whine and convulse. It's rather amusing, but pulling out the old reading lesson book isn't even close to happening. My others were reading by 4.
I was dicussing this with another mom of one child. She plans to let her child get into reading when she wants to, and not worry until she's 7 or 8. She wants to homeschool, and I tried to say that a reading child is much easier to homeschool than a non-reading child. Do you agree...that reading is a fundamental and should be focused on? That's been my philosophy, and my older kids flourished. Now I have my almost 4 year old and am experiencing a new creature when it comes to reading.
Horning in here where I have not been invited, forcing a reluctant child to read is the last thing I would do, especially a 3 year old. I would just read to the child a lot. For the most part, the phenomenon that Sally talks about just happens, but sometimes it happens later--especially with boys. And I've seen them develop such a resistance to reading that you can't overcome it.
Lisa, my oldest who is now 36, learned to read in much the same way as Amicus. She was 5--maybe 4 and in kindergarten. One night she was sitting next to her first grade cousin who was reading her a Richard Scarry book. She knew the sounds of a few letters, but that was about it. I was thinking, I can't believe she'll be able to read like that in just a year. The next morning, she picked up the book and read it to me.
AMDG
Though also not invited, I agree with Janet.
My approach to reading is very scattershot, because I can't remember not being able to read English. My sister and I figured it our by ourselves, my mother says. I was spared the boredom of being taught to read in school by being sent to school in French. I grade 2 I attended a British school that used whole-word approach and allowed invented spelling. As a result I never got a single English phonics lesson and have a bit of a hard time teaching it. Thank goodness for the Bob books!
Of course I am not implying forcing something that the child is clearly not ready for. That would be highly ineffective, surely. As for my son, something will click eventually and we'll go from there.
I know some mothers whose homeschooled children are not reading at 7 or 8. Not in the case of a reading disability, let me say I do not refer to a unique situation.This is too long a wait, to me. I know homeschooling is terrific in it's flexibility, but I think of how much my older kids would have missed reading and learning by reading at that point.
Well, I had a whole huge long answer, and lost it. Here's part of it, though:
I do know children who were/are reading independently at 5, at the level at which my 8-year-old is reading now. None of mine did that, but the older three are all very strong, avid readers -- and more than that, they're "book people." My 17-year-old was as overjoyed to receive Janet's box of Barbara Pym novels as I was.
I know that some families wait to begin any kind of formal schooling until fairly late, and it's hard to tell the extent to which a conscious decision to delay academics intersects with the instance of late reading (ie, would the child still be a later reader if reading instruction had been introduced earlier? Would that child be in the low reading group at school? Or, as happened to the child of friends of ours in England, would the teacher just ignore the fact that that child was at the bottom of the class in reading?).
The variety I see in my second-grade First Communion class, for instance, all 37 of whom go to school, is HUGE. Even the fact that most of them come from Spanish-speaking homes doesn't account for the proficiency range among these 7, 8, and 9-year-olds (in fact, the child who has the most trouble with reading and writing is an Anglo kid, in school . . . and she's a girl. As far as I know she doesn't have a learning disability. But she exhibits what I think of as very boy-like frustration levels right now, which I wish I had the time and energy to address in some more individualized way).
The other thing I was going to say is that our homeschool is very centered on reading aloud, at least until they do take off as readers. K, first, and second grade have been particularly hands-on for me, because even once they're reading fairly fluently, what I want to share with them is generally above their heads in terms of reading level.
For example: right now for science we're reading A World in a Drop of Water, by Alvin and Virginia Silverstein, a Dover book first published in 1969. The prose style even from that late date is far more complex and less "breezy" than is currently in fashion for books at this level -- it's definitely written for children, but not for "today's children." Even my 8yo, who's reading Robert Louis Stevenson, would not have picked this book up right away, and the 7yo would have melted right down if I'd suggested she "buddy-read" it with me. But I've been reading it to them, and they love it. We've had to get up to play "amoeba" and "paramecium" on the kitchen floor, practicing eating each other, scurrying around flapping our cilia, and undergoing mitosis.
They're hearing good English prose, they're being exposed to fairly advanced scientific concepts, and we're having a good time sharing the experience. Later on, my role will largely be to hand them books and say, "Go read this and write me something about it," and I kind of look forward to that. I enjoy sending people off to read, then talking about what they read over the dinner table. But I'll miss all this read-aloud that goes with the early years of homeschool.
Though yes, insofar as we use workbooks (which isn't very far, but we do use them for math), it is nice to have a child who can read directions without help. In that way, reading proficiency does make homeschooling easier.
My daughter was having trouble teaching her son to read...he hated flash cards. As a tutor I recommended Ring Around the Phonics, which is learning disguised as a game.
It worked.
And I mean to say: yes, I think reading is a fundamental and should be focused on, though I think the schedule of formal instruction ought to follow, to a great extent, the child's signs of readiness. The smaller the gap between beginning to read and that point of taking off independently, the better -- I think.
Demonstrating a love for books is the first step, I think. We're a family that reads all the time, and I adore reading aloud to my children -- that's always been our default entertainment, especially since we don't have a tv (the computer I have to fight; I fear I model a great deal of computer-love to my children, probably more than is good for any of us). Even the older kids love an evening of James Thurber read aloud.
We always have books available to the children. The 7yo has always had shelves of picture books in her room and taken them to bed with her to "read," even when "reading" just meant looking at the pictures. I think we underestimate how important that experience is, or discount it as a form of reading, but it is a reading process: looking at the elements of a picture to figure out what's going on. A child paging happily through a book is a child profitably engaged, whether he or she is decoding the words yet or not.
Things like road signs have been the things my children were first interested in -- I think "STOP" was probably the first word any of them read. And that's a great phonics lesson right there -- when they say, "What does that sign say?" you can respond with the letters and the sounds. So in the early years I tried to find my reading lessons in their own curiosity about the world around them, which is full of written language.
From there, I've tried introducing things to see how they were received, backed off if there was resistance, and gone back to pointing out road signs.
And FWIW, my youngest has put up the most resistance and been the most reluctant to move forward. I have seen that she can read -- though there are word families which give her trouble, generally when we read together she trots right along. But she is very aware of her position as "the baby" and reluctant to let go of that; for about the first month that she was 7, she insisted on telling people that she was still 6.
In response to this, I've been trying to give her more grownup responsibilities and privileges -- since we got a dishwasher, she can actually be far more helpful with things like after-dinner cleanup (before, to have her wash the dishes was to create a whole new level of mess to clean up), and I've been having her vacuum, which is very exciting to her. She has a small allowance, and we practice budgeting and spending it wisely. Our parish has just started an American Heritage Girls troop, and she's joined that, so she now has meetings to go to, which is a big deal to her. Right now it seems to be ok to be 7, which is a gigantic step forward. (and NONE of my other children ever did this. It's all her thing).
So if the 3yo is your youngest, or even just far down the age range (I've had some similar issues with my 2nd-youngest -- he and the 7yo are the much-younger "set" in my family, with a big gap between them and their teenaged siblings), there may just be some of this "I want to be the baby" business going on, at least subconsciously, and you might find it a little bit helpful to work generally on the fun of getting bigger and being able to do more things.
Oh, and Starfall.com has been a very good friend of ours, too. My kids have played it like a game. That's how both the younger ones learned basic phonics.
Starfall is fun, we've played a bit on there.
Out of our five, my 3 year old is in the middle. Two older siblings, and two younger.
Thanks for the reply, Sally.
Oh, well, so much for my brilliant birth-order theory! Though as our mutual red-headed friend will tell you, middle children have a mojo going that's all their own.
Well, they are all different, and some kids do have a built-in "initial-negative" switch, too, which means that automatically, when you introduce something to them, the answer is no. I have a couple of those, and I've found that just letting the matter drop for a while, then maybe putting stuff out in view, like I really didn't have any plans for it, but you know, I have to put it somewhere, even though I really don't think it's very interesting . . . that works.
Thanks for the link to Starfall. My 3 year old is pretending to read and starting to point out letters, and since this is our first I'm dithering about how to work in 'real' alphabet and beginner-reading lessons. I think he's old enough (or almost) to enjoy it.
Oh, yeah, it's good fun. And maybe I should be embarrassed to admit this, but I'm sure my youngest was navigating it on her own at 4. There are things a non-reader can do without needing to have instructions read, and there don't seem to be those kind of problematic links strategically positioned to be clicked on by a neophyte mouse-user. Not that we've ever wound up anywhere really bad, but the Funbrain site, which my kindergarteners and up have liked, has ads which put you in video games which, while not offensive, are also not educational, and I never wanted my kids to get sucked in. Starfall doesn't seem to have those little traps, which I appreciated.
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