Making It Up

as we go along

how we do it

Learning to read, take three.

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What with the whole home education thing, I’ve been very involved in the learning to read process for both of my older children. I think I’ve learnt something from that experience.

Point 1 – there is no one way that suits all children. I know about the current educational vogue for synthetic phonics, and I suppose in a way Small learnt to read using phonics, but he doesn’t sound things out and never did. He skipped that stage of Montessori in a matter of days and went from not appearing to know all the individual sounds to working through Stile trays to a quick flirtation with Oxford Reading tree and suddenly reading fluently in the space of a single term. And when I say reading fluently, I mean reading Harry Potter. By contrast we laboured on a huge variety of methods with Big from age 3 (when she asked to learn to read) to about age 6 when she finally cracked it. Not a set of years I plan to repeat to be honest, it wasn’t fun. (And if you don’t believe me, have a wander through the archives. It’s all there, in glorious black and white.)

Point 2) It ought to be fun. Reading is a fabulous tool, but it does no one much good if they don’t enjoy it. Turning kids off by trying too hard too soon to get them reading is totally counter productive. The vast majority of kids *will* get there in the end, so take it easy, and trust the process.

Point 3) I’m not sure I have one 🙂

I do have a plan though. With Smallest, we read loads. More I suspect than we did with either of the others, when reading had to be fitted in around everything else we did (like working and commuting and living and so on), and kind of was an item on a good parent checklist. So reading happened, but it wasn’t natural or spontaneous in a way I think it probably works best.

my bookThis time around, there are books everywhere (well, OK, there have always been books everywhere…) and reading goes on all the time. In the bathroom during nappy change, though I don’t let her take board books in the bath. Mean mummy 😉 Out in the garden. At the leisure centre. Wherever we are – there’s always a book or two in my bag, or she might even be carrying her own… There are also extra readers who both demonstrate the skillset in use on a near to daily basis and read to her as well.

demonstrating

And I’m not planning on actively teaching her to read. I’m going to follow a bit of a Montessori approach with it – I already do in fact. So when we look at alphabet style books, I trace the large letter with my finger and “This is a. a.” in much the way sandpaper letters are used. (I won’t be using sandpaper letters when we get to that stage. I might make them out of hama again. But sandpaper makes my skin crawl, so no, no sandpaper!) Sometimes she traces the letter too, sometimes she doesn’t. It’s not that important yet, and really, I wouldn’t expect her to do any of that for a good couple of years if not longer.

As she gets more interested though, I will try to find some kind of movable alphabet. I think this is a fabulous tool – children learn to ‘write’ without actually having to write. It means they learn to spell, and hear the sounds in words without having to decode the squiggly things on the page, it’s coming at reading from a whole different direction. And I know it works – I saw it in action at Montessori lots of times.

When we get past that stage, I might bring in pink materials (probably home made rather than this sort of download, I’m linking it to give you an idea. Note that really you should start with real things instead of abstracts in the form of pictures, so a very small toy cup, a toy hen, that sort of thing) mainly because they are fun. And if I go to use a reading scheme, the one I like best is Bob books. (And you can get it as an app for your iPhone! Drat, first time I’ve wanted an iPhone. Maybe not the best reason so far…)

And hopefully, that will be pretty much all we need. That, and time and patience. So, like I said, I have a plan.

This post will soon be featured in the learn to read carnival I’m ever so rapidly writing…

A quick rant.

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I’ve been inspired by an article in a newspaper to have a quick end of year rant.

Toby Young is displaying his educational ignorance in the Independent.

As the father of three boys under five, I share the Government’s concerns. My oldest boy, four-year-old Ludo, started in reception last September and is finding it more difficult to master the basics of reading and writing than his sister did at the equivalent stage. Sasha is now six and has a reading age of nine. Ludo has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, past each developmental milestone – and his two younger brothers are the same. If the discrepancy between them remains, Sasha will start secondary school with a huge advantage over her male siblings.

If all six year olds had reading ages of nine, a reading age of nine would be a reading age of six. Which makes about as much sense as the rest of this article. How can anyone talk of dragging children past developmental milestones? They aren’t requirements for pity’s sake. It reminds me of the health visitor who told a friend of mine that her child’s weight had to be at least average. (And if you can’t see what is wrong with that, I suggest that you may want to brush up on your maths skills 😉 )

Mr Young goes on:

In my experience, the most effective way of kick-starting boys’ development is old-fashioned rote learning. At the beginning of 2009, I hired a tutor to teach Latin to Ludo and Sasha and the results have been remarkable. Ludo was three when he started these daily, half-hour sessions and couldn’t even count to 10, let alone write his own name. Almost 12 months later, he can count to 20, write simple words like “mum” and “dad” and recite his times tables up to five. As for his six-year-old sister, I’m convinced she could achieve a passing grade in GCSE Latin.

Toby Young’s experience is very limited. I have a son too. At the age of three I doubt very much that he could count to 10 or write his own name – he’d only just begun to speak. I certainly didn’t panic and engage a Latin tutor. (A Latin tutor for a three year old? Is this man completely barking mad?) Instead we went on with child led learning both at home and at the montessori nursery/ school he was attending two days a week. At 5 he still couldn’t read his alphabet and I was beginning to get a little nervous. At 5 and a half he was reading Harry Potter. Without a single rote lesson in sight.

So, based on my extensive experience (which is more extensive than Mr Young’s it would appear, as I’ve spent two terms teaching in a Montessori school as well as raising my children to age 9 and 6), I advise the government to drop their insistence on boys learning earlier, bin their nappy curriculum and move to a play based system where children don’t start any kind of formal learning until 7 and home educators are fully supported by being left alone to do what they do best, unless they ask for anything else.

There, sorted.

How do you get from no structure to sats

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in one quick year?

Today I had the children do a Level 3 Sats Maths paper. Earlier this year they were doing nothing structured at all while I waited for them to deschool, so how and why have we got all the way to Sats papers?

It’s for my confidence I’m afraid. A thing that sometimes doesn’t get said, I suspect for fear of letting the HE side down, is that not all children have fantastic overwhelming interests and occupy themselves autonomously in projects that seem (or can be written up as 😉 ) educational from morning to night. Perhaps this too is my fault for having sent Big to nursery at the age of 14 weeks, perhaps the externally imposed structure from an early age removed any self direction she might have developed. Certainly her brother is very capable of occupying himself and you can see him learning all over the place, and he didn’t go to (a very different) nursery until he was 2 1/2.

I don’t believe that’s the case though. Big is a child who wants and needs a lot of input from the adults around her, always has, and I suspect always will. On balance I don’t think nursery adversely affected that, but then I suppose I wouldn’t would I? I do recall another friend once stating in some exasperation “I am not an entertainment machine”, and there have been many times in the last nearly 10 years when I’ve felt that too.

And this is after trying a wealth of different approaches. After nursery there were a couple of years before flexi-schooling started, when I was at home full time with Big and Small. We went to home ed groups and camps, I strewed the house with workbooks, imported enough fact and fiction to open my own library, stocked the shelves with art stuff and science kits and demonstrated crafts left, right and centre. Nothing has really taken her fancy for more than a few days here and there. We’ve visited castles, museums, science sites, houses, done workshops, learnt to make baskets, attended forest schools and nature reserves, supplied instruments and activities and still nothing has really taken off.

So, structure and Sats. Partly because I was worried that if school ever became a factor my lovely bright daughter would be left wallowing behind her age mates, and partly because I felt that I was letting her down and failing in my legal duty to offer that suitable education.

What is a suitable education in my eyes? What was I failing to achieve? When it comes down to it, I don’t think that the facts that children may or may not acquire at primary school are particularly important. If you wish to learn information, you will do that when it’s important or relevant to you. Atm very little appears to fall into those categories for Big, and that’s fine.

Basic skills, to my mind, the foundation of education, are a different story. I know that children learn in fits and starts and that it works better when they are interested in something, but Big doesn’t seem to have those fits and starts very often, and she definitely isn’t interested in maths. Or English in terms of grammar, spelling or handwriting, and I’ve gotten way too jumpy to wait any longer. Plus attitudinally she deteriorates when she is not occupied, whereas when I enforce some kind of structure that tends to spill over and she becomes more productive the rest of the time as well. So atm she’s reading lots about Anne Frank, as detailed below. And because they both managed to acquire computer bans, they’ve actually played together without screens between them, which has meant tempers all around have been much more pleasant.

Last week we did the Sats level 2 paper, and they both achieved level 2A. Today we did the level 3 paper, and despite much stress caused purely by neither of them listening to me, they both sailed through for a level 3. This taught me a couple of things. I have immensely perfectionist children who get terribly stressed by things they feel they can’t do, despite me explaining over and over that this exercise was so that I could find out what areas they needed help in and I didn’t expect them to be able to do it all. And also that the national attainment levels really aren’t set very high. Small has just achieved beyond expectations for his age with very little tuition, and I suspect that if I could get Big to calmly attempt the KS2 papers, she wouldn’t acquit herself so badly either, even though maths is definitely not her strength.

So I feel reassured that a knock on the door from a LA inspector could be repulsed without me having to make anything up. They are certainly not receiving a worse education than they would in a local state school, and when it comes down to it, they may well be doing better. And I know where the gaps are in their skillset and what I need to cover over the coming days and weeks.

If I’d left it longer would Big have developed interests and started learning autonomously? I’ll never know I’m afraid, but there are still many hours in every day that I’m not filling for them, and I am following their interests as far as possible in the structure that I’m employing. So perhaps as the years go by, they will become more self-directed and I’ll be able to step back into a facilitation role. We can but wait and see. And blog it of course 🙂

A tale of two children.

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My children are very similar, and very different.

I’m often accused of cloning, which I find amusing now that they are growing up – Big’s hair has darkened and her blue eyes are now brown. Small is still blond and blue eyed, but they are so very obviously brother and sister. Stick their half sibling there as well and she’s very much from the same pod too and given that she’s no blood relation to me it all gets a bit confusing.

Character wise, on first glance they are very different. But they both display a startling level of intensity. For Small that makes him incredibly self-directed, and woe betide the adult that gets in the way. He has a turn of temper that he has absolutely no control over, and while it’s better than a year ago in that he’s more likely to take it out on inanimate objects like doors instead of soft ones like ppl, the force of it still takes me aback.

Big also has a hair trigger temper. Her’s comes out verbally and in attitude though – she’s been practising teenager style strops since she was about 3. I keep assuming she’ll grow out of them, but there’s little sign of it happening yet.

When it comes to learning though, that’s when they really differ. As I’ve blogged before, I was waiting through a long deschooling period and seeing no inclination to get on with anything. If it seemed vaguely educational I would get wails and tantrums – Big has a perfectionist streak that holds her back from trying a lot of the time.

So I imposed some loose structure. A requirement for a certain number of work items each morning, to include basic skills like maths, english and then history, science, languages, whatever. And we got into that routine, and OK, we still had a lot of strops but overall life was calmer.

In the last week, things have changed. Small suddenly started wanting to substitute his interests for the third work. Then for the second work. Maths is non optional – I’m not going to get to the point we’re at with Big where the basic skills are a real struggle. So now he has a geography book, and he’s looked up a variety of countries on wikipedia, printed off maps, drawn or coloured in flags, written bits of language in, learnt about population, area, density. I didn’t know that he could read numbers into the millions, but he can, and another side track took us off into large numbers, learning what comes after million and billion (some of which he’d come across in Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Space)

Yesterday, for some reason, he dived off into dinosaurs. He’s spent nearly an hour looking them up this morning, and we’ve discussed how ppl know what dinosaurs were like, and which bits we don’t know, and how we know about their behaviour. He was quite agrieved to look up one and be told that it has very unusual teeth and therefore nobody knows what it ate, as they don’t fit the standard herbivore/ carnivore/ omnivore pattern. He’s looked up various other animals as well – came bouncing into the bedroom this morning to tell me that tigers eat crocodiles and boars. And then he looked up boars 🙂

There’s a vague interest in Albert Einstein coming through, and courtesy of Tim buying a 3-in-1 tuner from Lidl this week, his guitar is now out again and he’s working through his lesson book (Progressive Guitar Method for Young Beginners: Book 1) again.

It’s fantastic to watch him taking off like this, and it’s having an unexpected side effect this time around. First of all Big got very upset that Small didn’t have to do the defined three subjects. I pointed out that really all I want to see is them learning, and I don’t particularly mind what they are learning. And if she could come up with something that she wanted to do instead of something I suggested, she was very welcome to do it too. So she stopped stropping, and went off to find her myths and legends book, and spent a gratifying amount of time writing things up in a book for herself. She even went and got her spelling log, used it to write out words she knew she had in there, and put in words she wasn’t sure of.

She’s still doing maths every day, and we’ve agreed on a short amount of handwriting practice every day too. It’s paying off – we looked back to the beginning of her english exercise book and can easily see an improvement in legibility. She’s also starting to pay more attention to how she writes the things she’s writing, so we’re getting fewer spelling mistakes that are just missing letters. She wants to get back to playing the piano too, so we need to clear away the pile of clutter currently surrounding it that’s waiting a trip to the loft for storage.

So, tell me, can you teach autonomy? Is that what is going on here? Is it still autonomy if it’s externally encouraged? Thoughts in the usual place please 🙂

Pondering that statement of intent from the home education review.

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We all have plans for the future and hopes for our children. It’s kind of what parents do. And it is our responsibility to equip our children for a life in the community that they are part of – sounds like a sound statement of responsibility to me.

But how did the Badman home education review(pdf link) leap from that to an annual statement of intent? Is it a good idea? Necessary? How would you do it?

Right at the moment these ponderings are very relevant to us, as you’ll know if you’ve read any of my previous posts about autonomy and curriculum. I’m still working on getting the balance right for us day to day, but one thing that this has brought back home to me with a resounding thud is that I could not have sat down and written a plan for the next 12 months. Well, I could, but we wouldn’t have stuck to it for more than a couple of days. And then if someone wanted to judge my educational provision against such a forced plan, presumably I’d have failed and I’d be measuring the kids up for uniform right about now.

But it’s the flexibility of home education that is its power. I have two children (soon to be three) to cater for, not thirty or more. I can chop and change how I’m doing things to respond to expressed interests and perceived needs of those two individuals, and I can know them far better than any teacher can ever know individual pupils.

For example, atm, I’ve split handwriting and spelling out of English comprehension and grammatical studies for Big. While we are still using Focus on Literacy: Pupil Textbook Bk.5, instead of her struggling to write out her answers, we talk them through together and I write them down. This has several plus points, for starters she’s having to think harder about her answers rather than just dashing something off to satisfy the need to write something down. I’m finding out about her strengths and weaknesses – her absorption of the detail of the excerpts she’s reading is phenomenal, as she quoted directly from the passage after just two read throughs to answer one question. But her ability to logically structure a sentence is probably on a par with most nine year olds – she doesn’t think where it’s going when she sets off so it wanders. Discussion allows us to fine tune this, and means, I hope, that she’s getting far more out of these short sessions together than she would out of doing it alone in a longer space of time.

The handwriting and spelling we’re addressing separately using copywork and spelling sheets, again in short bursts.

How though, did we decide on the core subjects that we’re following? Is this a curriculum that is good enough for everyone to use?

No, this is purely personal choice, based on our beliefs and experience. Tim and I have made a judgement about the skills that we value most and see being needed in the future. We are not so arrogant as to think that we can foresee what they will need in terms of knowledge in the world around them once they are adult, and we both know from personal experience that all the teaching in the world won’t get information into your head if you aren’t interested in it. What we think is important right now are the basic skills of being able to communicate verbally and in writing (hand as well as type), which means a certain level of legibility and spelling has to be achieved. We think children need room to learn to learn, and guidance to achieve that – so while we do answer Small’s frequent questions on what words mean (over the last couple of days he’s wanted to know about revolution, genre, and consistency to give just a few examples) we’ve also given him a dictionary and are showing him how to use it.

He loves to use his science book, which doesn’t just teach him about science, it shows him how to structure investigations and follow instructions. And he’s learning how to use a computer as a tool instead of just a toy – so he has downloaded things, changed his profile, created files, saved them and uploaded them. Knowing how to learn to use new tools was something I don’t think either Tim or I learnt at school, and we certainly didn’t learn about computers, the web or programming then (in the 60s, 70s and 80s 😉 ), but we’ve both managed to acquire the information we’ve needed since to have very successful and continuing careers in IT.

I can safely say that the vague bits of history that I recall about Disraeli and Gladstone have been no use to me whatsoever in my adult political life – when I’ve been interested in an issue, I’ve done research, watched TV programmes, read up on wikipedia and talked to ppl who knew about it. So I’m not worried about individual factoids when I read history

with the children, I just want to give them a glimpse of the bigger picture and we do it with fun outings and narratives. If they want to go into more detail they will – as Big has many times with Victorians, Elizabeth I and now her Lady Grace Mysteries.

So, is a prescribed curriculum necessary for home education? I don’t think so, and I think it would utterly be the wrong decision for it to be imposed, even just some basic educational standards plucked out of thin air. I think it’s individual choice and the responsibility of each and every home educating family to decide how they do it, and not something that the government should be sticking their grubby paws in to. And let’s think about it – how many of these government ministers actually have any real knowledge about education? They’ve been through it, and their children might be going through it too, but they haven’t done research, won’t listen to researchers such as Paula Rothermel who have studied it, and I don’t rate their opinions as highly as I do the home educators I’ve met who are living home education every day.