I don't often write homeschooling posts these days, because they would tend to be a collection of miscellany and short anecdotes. I guess I exhausted the bigger philosophical and political considerations at my old blog. But we are indeed still homeschooling.
Anya went through a major reading and audiobook phase over the past 3 months, so I left her to it, and we haven't done much else, recently. It was about one year ago that she began reading, and she has been learning on her own, since "doing reading" together does NOT work for us. She really likes an old book series featuring Freddy the Pig, written by Walter Brooks in the 1920s to 1950s. There are 26 of them, each around 220-250 pages, so we are in hog heaven (sorry, couldn't resist). I like it that the books have old slang, old figures of speech, and old words (such as the word she learned that her dad didn't know: phaeton; I wouldn't have known it either, had it not been for regency era novels). They also have moral messages that are not overdone or heavy-handed, as well as witty social commentary. And they introduce ideas from the adult world, such as how banks, trials, and political campaigns work. I think these books are brilliant, and can't believe they were out of print for so many years. I came across this NPR piece [scroll to the bottom] on how the books got republished, after a small regional publisher was talked into attending a mass Friends of Freddy meeting. He was so inspired by these fanatical Freddy fans that without knowing a thing about the copyrights or anything, he got up and gave a short impromptu speech promising to publish them.
In the last week or so, we've returned to math after a long hiatus. Anya's been finishing off equations with a mix of symbols (+, -, x), where a different number is missing. E.g., [blank] + 5 = 9, 3 x [blank] = 21, etc. There was an equation written out like this:
[blank] = 5 - 4 + 7
She had written in 6 as the answer. This is a perfect example of what used to happen to me in school all the time-- her reasoning was absolutely logical, even though she got the wrong answer according to mathematical convention. I asked her why she'd put 6 there, and she said "Because 7 plus 4 is 11, and 11 minus 5 is 6." That is, the equals sign was on the left, so she read the entire equation moving from right to left, assuming it should be read in reverse order. In school, this would have been marked wrong, no explanations given on either side.
A friend of Anya's who is about the same age went back to school this year, after having been homeschooled for a year and a half. Today I was talking to his mom about how he really adores his teacher. She mentioned that he had read a long book (120 pages) and written a book report summarizing it, then attributed this largely to the teacher by saying the teacher had "done so much for him." But Anya has also had a leap in reading ability in the past few months, and all I've done is supply the books. Possibly, around the age of 6 or 7 or 8, many kids have this reading explosion. But because this friend goes to school, and this was a school assignment, somehow his teacher is given some of the credit for his reading that 120-page book. I thought this was kind of sad-- it's his accomplishment, not the teacher's.
The truth is, you can't actually "teach" a kid to read. You can give them the very basics, the most common rules of phonics; you can force them to memorize certain common words; you can help them when they get stuck on a word. But that's really not very much. English is ridiculously idiomatic and phonetically inconsistent. Every supposed phonics or spelling rule is broken constantly. You carefully teach them that when a "g" is followed by "e" or "i" it makes a "j" sound, and the first sentence they come to contains the word "get". We imagine we are the reason they begin reading, but frankly, most of those rules and explanations make kids frustrated and confused when they turn out to be wrong, which is often. And yet, in spite of our rather bizarre written language and the enormous English vocabulary, when kids are ready they pick it up like a sponge. That reading explosion is not due to teaching. You can't simply install this mixture of motivation, brain development, and epiphany inside a kid's head. The best you can do is to get their foot in the door (phonics & common sight words), wait (and wait, and wait), and be ready to jump in with books they'll love when the reading explosion begins.
By the way, I have no idea what people mean when they talk about whether a child is reading or not. Anya could read her name and the words Mom, Dad, and Moo when she was 2. Was she reading? She could sound out a few words at 4, and a good number of simple words at 5, but she couldn't string those sounds together (e.g. "hhh-aaa-t" never became "hat"). Was she reading then? We were at that stage for two solid years. When she was 7 she began reading the Webkinz site and Frog and Toad, but not fluently. Was that reading? I can now definitively say she is reading, but I am not sure how other parents decide this. I suspect we homeschoolers discuss the ages when our kids started reading, but have many different ideas of what "reading" entails.
