As many of you know, Big has wanted to read for a couple of years now. She’s known her letters for quite literally years – she wrote her name on her own Christmas cards the Christmas before she was three.
We have tried many methods to get her reading. I bought Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy lessons
, but while it probably has worked for lots of ppl, and I know it has its supporters in the home education community, it didn’t suit us at all. I think we managed the first couple of lessons a couple of times. Maybe.
But reading kept on being something she wanted to do. We go to the library regularly, using our Muddlepuddle bookbags of course, read lots at home – Tim has a standing promise that he will always read to her whatever she wants read at bedtime (which means she’s neatly circumvented my refusal to read Jasmine the Present Fairy
to her! :mad:) – but she hasn’t done the just picking up on reading thing. I know, I know, she’s still very young. And I’m guessing that while she is saying that she wants to learn to read, there must be another part of her that doesn’t, or she would be cracking it.
We’ve tried Toe by Toe: Highly Structured Multi-Sensory Reading Manual for Teachers and Parents
which someone from Early Years HE (muddlepuddle as way) sent to us for free (had forgotten how much it cost! Hope whoever we passed it on to is getting good use out of it, can’t for the life of me remember who it was) but while that seemed to work for about a week, then it just became another flash point.
We’ve shared Help! 
and the other Red Nose Readers with Kirsty, and I have to say that they were about as successful as anything else we’ve tried. Even the Bob books only went down alright, and that was because they were borrowed from someone she idolises 😉 But now, although I’ve a house full of books (quiet at the back there!), we’re both being forced to admit that reading is not taking off and it’s again becoming a point of contention between us.
Now, I very strongly believe that it’s up to Big what and when she learns. I think there are some things that are very important, and I do try to squeeze those in, but basically, all I can do is to offer education, and I do my best to do that, but she has to choose to partake. This weekend she suddenly got all mathematically minded with Tim, and while I was out running errands for pretty much the whole day Saturday, they did a load of work on how to add up big numbers, write down sums in columns and carry the tens. I got home and got the Base 10 blocks out and that was good too, so it seems that the basic maths skills are pretty much there, and will keep on just filling in in every day life for a little while anyway.
I know that her computer skills are pootling along nicely – the whole buildabear fascination required much more surfing than she’d ever done outside of cbeebies/ nickjr herself. And we will fit in some more programming soon as well 😉 I think she’s beginning to grasp the value of money – could be how much I went on and on about *how* much these bears were costing! (Out of their Christmas money I hasten to add, not from our budget.) But reading is something that she is still going on about, and it’s spoiling the limited time I have with her, as I feel like I’m nagging – she says she’s going to do something, I come home and ask whether she did it, and I get wriggles and whines and ‘I’ll do it later…’ I only left her something specific to do because she said she wanted me to!
So tonight I issued an ultimatum. I will indulge in no further setting of reading type homework. I won’t ask her to practise. I will read for her and to her, and if she requests of me, I will help her to read. I will not respond to whinging that she can’t read with suggestions that if she tried she might manage, and I will leave it completely up to her to lead the way. I intend to model not child led home education, but child dragged 😀
And you know, I feel so much better for it.
Now, who wants to open the betting on how long I last? 😉
Comments
18 responses to “An ultimatum”
well I seemed to come back to it pretty much monthly. But then to be fair Davies never actually said he *wanted* to read, it was always me singing the virtues of it. And while I don’t think we’ve totally cracked it yet we do seem to have hit a lightbulb moment here.
Could Big be that next stage along where she sort of can read but just not as fluently as she wants to? I imagine that to be possibly even more frustrating than not being able to at all… like having the computer but not being able to make it do what I want it to 😉
I should take a leaf out of your book and lay off. I have a poor child who is being phonics to death here. All cos he went off reading last September. I have spent in excess of £150 this weekend in my quest for literate child and all he does is go back to his x box!!!!
I have that Toe-by-Toe book of yours and it’s marvellous. It gave Myf the push she needed – she loved the nonsense words bit. And this morning (how co-incidently!) Tea brought it to me and asked me to go through it with her. So we did the first page together and I’m astounded at how many of the letter sounds she knows.
However, for you, Big and reading, swap me, Myf and maths. It’s an absolute nightmare. I gave her a page of single digit sums to do today and the fuss and furore it created was unbelievable. We’ve covered money and tens and units and used cuisinaire rods and the abacus and anything else I can think of… and none of it goes in or appears to be understood. Why don’t you have the ‘banging head against brick wall smiley’?
I think that reading fluency comes with self-belief. It certainly seemed that both of ours just ‘took off’ when they realised that they had all they needed. I think there’s probably not much you CAN do, so I think its a good plan to make it clear that it is something she can do for herself now. How does she feel about your new plan?
She *can* read though – just not fluently. Was going to say the only thing that helps is practice, but I don’t even believe that – when Violet was at the stage where she could sound out anything you pointed at, but not reading independently at all, she would only try once or twice a month, and every time there was an obvious improvement – *without* a literacy hour every day! And then she went from “Here is Peter and here is Jane” by her 6th birthday, to Narnia and Harry Potter by her 7th.
When you can’t read very much, the stuff you can read is mostly pretty boring, so there’s not an awful lot of incentive, imo. Takes perseverance to get through this bit, and I don’t think it’s really something you can make her do, so your ultimatum sounds like an excellent idea 🙂
I agree with Alison, for sure, and I found that it was easier when Abbie was like that (ie could read but hadn’t really taken off with it) than Josiah being the other way around – for example, now, he can and will read pretty much anything you put in front of him, but I’m struggling to find age/length appropriate things that stretch his reading – there aren’t any, really, so having got off to a flying start with reading, essentially he is going to plateau with it until the emotional/understanding part of him catches up. I suppose that’s as natural as doing it the other way round, really!
I found that once I had given S the building blocks she needed to read, ‘forcing’ her to practice just put her off, so I left her to it. She honed her skills herself by surfing the web looking for websites that interested her, using her own spelling and then correcting it when google asked her “did you mean…..?”. Once she’d found websites she liked which were usually games, she read the instructions and played them. No help from me whatsoever and I wasn’t looking at what she was doing.
One day, about a year or so after I had last heard her read to me ( a very difficult session) she came into my office and read The Times over my shoulder, commenting on the subject matter.
Kris: maths is a subject that S finds very difficult because she is dyscalculic but I found that dry maths, ie just teaching sums, didn’t engage her at all. Playing shops with all the foodstuffs in the kitchen worked best, then her having her own pocket money, followed by her doing small bits of shopping in the local corner shop. She can now, aged 12, do a full weekly shop within a budget, has learnt to recognise bargains and compare prices. She is a whizz at internet banking and learns the maths she needs to solve a particular problem at a particular time.
Dunno if any of that helps but just my ten penneth worth 🙂
I’ll bring Titchy Witch if you like, we don’t need them at the moment and i think they turned the corner for Fran.
I don’t know what to tell you. Looking back, i still believe that i was right to do what i did with Fran – she has stugfgled so much with the mechanics of reading, she needed to have some rules practically drummed in. But then, she’s a much more malleable (is that spelled right?) (but also probably more flighty!) child than Big.
It really stuck home yesterday though when i was reading with Maddy. I pointed to “ran” she said “r-a-n.. .ran” – i’ve barely covered sounding out with her, Studydog taught her her letters 6 months ago, she has had so little attention in the reading stakes. Yet SHE can do it. Amazingly different. Fran was still struggling with sounding out 3 letter words 6 months ago.
I do think child dragged is an excllent go; such is the number of children here that much of our education is child dragged – they have to plead or show VERY willing! Does work.
Hi Jax, I have tagged you on my blog for the 4 things meme. If you wanna do it, have a look at mine on my blog. It is friendly :o)
Jax – put an Amazon search box on your blog – then at least i can use yours and you can use mine 😉
we seem to be doing ok with the dissasociating reading from literature – as it were.
SB quite happy to do the explode the code books, and I read to her interesting stuff. we do get her to read the odd word now and again, but am trying to decided whether to ebay all the reading scheme type books.
i do like starfall, as has games and you can press the word to have it read to you.
Big can read though, i think as alison said, she just cant read interesting enough stuff.
I can’t quite believe I am typing this as I remember a discussion somewhere about LeapPads a couple of years ago (muddlepuddle?) where I said I hated the idea of them teaching children to read from that advert where the parents are peeping in the room so the child can’t see them. But now D seems to have the mechanics he is quite enjoying the ‘self testing’ aspect of his leappad – he can read the word then touch it to check if he’s right, essentially what I’d do if sat with him for 2 hours! I seem to recall electronic toys from my childhood doing similar sort of stuff – speak & Spell or similar? Maybe something like that would help? Or those cd stories with books to read along with?
Really Sarah? I look at our bookshelves and don’t think I’d have any trouble giving E things to read if he could read now. I know a lot of us could read at an early age, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t lacking for books at any time in my childhood! What sort of things does he read, or what sort of book are you thinking would be ideal atm?
I don’t know really – what I meant was that he’s reached a stage in the ‘mechanics’ of reading where if I want to stretch *that* then it would have to be something that is way above his level emotionally, iyswim. I’m not really bothered, tbh, as long as he enjoys reading whatever he picks up, which he does – picture books are still his favourites.
Go to a decent bookshop Sarah 😉
I think the evening move was a good one. I have at least one who behaves similarly with some things. Other things she’ll put hours and hours into. Still haven’t figured that one out.
Kieran taught himself to read (and talk!) via various CD-ROMs we have. I think you’re right to lay off, she’ll probably do it when there are fewer buttons she can press by not reading (and I mean that in the nicest way, Carys worked out she got loads of attention by not swimming so she didn’t for ages).
Elllow chick.
How old is big? I can’t remember! Well sounds like her and my Viv are very alike. As a toddler seemed super clever writing names and some words and such. We have stuck with the 100 hundred lessons, tho the first few did bore us to tears, then we had the practical screaming fits at each other cause she claimed she couldn’t do things we new she could…almost hated each other whenever it came to anything reading!!! But relaxed some (have to remind myself to relax every couple of weeks!!) We now make sure we sit at the table, with nothing around to fiddle with!! We have got to about lesson 37 (we don’t do it daily!!) and she doesn’t actually realise she is learning as it is so easy..but as she learns each de-coding she has no excuses!!! So she is reading words around her now,,,but if you ask her to read a ‘hard’ word, she claimes she hasn’t learnt that yet!!!!
Also the girls have only just started to lose teeth, and it is thought that it’s a good indictaion to readyness for reading…brain growing and pushing down teeth stuff!!
phew, i got carried away there!!