Making It Up

as we go along

learning to read

Binge learning. 

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People often ask how home educated children learn to read, and the answer is in as many different ways as there are children learning. Let me tell you about Tigerboy this week to demonstrate why I think that. 

Tigerboy lives in a house (over) filled with books. He has free access to a wide number of resources, and shared access to things like computers, tablets and so on. He’s had an account on Reading Eggs (see affiliate link in sidebar for more info) for ages, and we’ve done a variety of montessori type activities from time to time. He has three elder siblings who have all learnt to read in very different ways at very different times. Oh, and in case you’re wondering how old he is, he was 5 at the start of the month, so would be in reception if he had gone to school. Scene set. 

Two days ago I saw a tweet or Facebook post commenting that the iPad app of Teach your monster to read was free until Sunday (tomorrow). I’ll have that, I thought, found the educational iPad and charged it and set it up. 

At some point during the day he came bouncing in to find me and I told him I had a new game for him. He likes games, so this was an instant hit, and he played for ages, with a minor blip when we thought he’d lost access to his monster and all his stuff (oh boy the wailing! ) but Big rescued it, and all was well again. 

Yesterday morning started like this. 

He sat next to me at the table for around three hours, with breaks for getting dressed, eating breakfast etc, then bounced off to do other things. And when I say sat, I mean jumped, balanced, perched, twisted, fidgeted etc etc. He’s rarely still even when utterly focused. 

I was quite surprised to discover he had gone from asking me what letter made what sound and vice versa to being able to sound out all the words in quite long sentences. Ok, more than quite surprised, very surprised. 

After his mammoth app session, he did a variety of other things for the rest of the day. Until at bedtime, after I’d read a picture book and a chapter of Harper and the Circus of Dreams, when he grumped that the book I’d read (Nibbles the book monster) was too hard for him to read for himself. I went and fetched a stack of Bob Books instead. 

Bob books start off *very* easy. It’s still a massive boost of confidence for a child when they manage to read their first book, however short and simple it is, and he was thrilled when he managed to read the first one. So thrilled that he wanted the next, except I couldn’t find it so he had to jump to book six. 

Didn’t phase him at all. 

So last night he managed two books. 

This morning he picked up Teach your monster to read again and watching him play I realised that he was reading the instructions without needing to vocalise at all. Instructions like “I do not need the red hat”, she said. “Get me the black one.” 

OK then. 

In montessori terms I think this would be described as a sensitive period – a time when all the pieces for a particular bit of learning have fallen into place, and the child has interest and focus and can develop amazingly rapidly. I’ve seen it happen with other children when I worked in a montessori nursery and school – I don’t think I’ve ever seen quite as drastic a leap in as short a time, but my children have never done anything by halves. 

It’s entirely possible that someone in the next few days he’ll seem to lose interest in all this stuff for a while, that happens too, and while it’s incredibly frustrating from the outside I’ve learnt that if you try to push or pull at that point you just extend the period of disinterest. So I’ll be over here, sitting on my hands and doing my best to gently strew opportunities for him, as I do for the others. 

So there you go. One child, binge learning to read, the way that suits him. 

Details on the Teach your monster to read app offer here on Facebook. Bob books on Amazon (affiliate link).

How to use Reading Eggs to help your child learn to read.

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At the weekend, I posted a picture that I’m incredibly proud of, so I’m going to take this opportunity to share it again.

Smallest reading her first book

This is Smallest. She’s 5 in November. She hasn’t started school – we home educate. And she’s reading her first book.

We don’t do school at home. No formal sit down lessons. We have lots of resources round and about, but I’m a child led home educator, I pick up on the children’s interests and I do a fair bit of accidental strewing. So we’ve got Bob books, and Songbird phonics (thank you the book people!), more picture books than you can shake a stick at, and of course, computers, tablets and various reading technologies. More on those tomorrow.

Today though, I’m talking about Reading Eggs and how it’s fitted in to our learn to read journey mark 3.

Smallest plays on Reading Eggs most days. To begin with she needed some help finding her way around, or understanding what to do on the various activities. That just meant that I sat with her and did the clicking, until she could do it for herself. And when she eventually completed the first section and did the test on it, it recommended she start over. This was the turning point theough, as she discovered all the games she could play with the golden eggs she was accumulating, and at that point, there was no holding her back 😉

She’s romping through it now, and she rarely needs any help. She loves seeing what pets she gets as she moves through the lesson maps – there are plenty of incentives for children to keep playing. She often has a small assistant – Tigerboy loves to sit alongside and watch. And the other morning, as she was saying words, he was repeating them, so I’m giving Reading Eggs credit for enhancing his speech as well 🙂 I’m fairly sure that is why he recognises so many letters.

Sometimes Smallest gets a little confused between the names of letters and the sounds they make, and plumps for the names first. It surprised me a little to begin with that Reading Eggs does names and sounds together, but then I remembered that there are upper case letters in Montessori classrooms too, and while the focus is on sounds, both bits are taught pretty much at the same time. She’s certainly got the hang of sounds and names anyway, enough to be sounding out phonics books, without any reading lessons from me.

I remember teaching Big to read. It wasn’t pretty. It took a very long time, and I vowed I was never going there again. I was really pleased when Small used the Montessori materials at school to figure it all out for himself. I was kind of thinking that I would start something semi-formal, and probably Montessori based, with Smallest in September, knowing that most people would expect her to be in school then, but now I’m thinking I’m just going to keep on going the way we’re going, with plenty of reading aloud to her, letting her read the books she’s interested in, and allowing lots of time on Reading Eggs and other favourite game sites. (Cbeebies. She likes Cbeebies mostly.)

If you’d like to look into it, clicking the banner above should take you over to the site where you can sign up for a free trial. It’s a bit of a pain to navigate your way in from the front page to where you actually play the game – there doesn’t seem to just be a play now button as such, but once the child is at their bit, they don’t seem to have a problem with it.

You don’t have to be a home educator to use Reading Eggs by the way. If your child is at or is going to go to school, it will support what they’re doing, and stand them in excellent stead in the classroom. You’re not quite sure how the whole phonics thing works and worried you’ll get it wrong? Reading Eggs has it covered for you, supporting the development of sounds with games, so you can focus on reading fun books, which I maintain is at least half of the battle. If you’re wanting something to keep your children in touch with their education during the summer, without making it into a battle, you could do a lot worse than check it out.

Disclosure: links are affiliate links. I have paid for and used extensively the products I am recommending above. That’s what gives me the confidence to recommend them as part of their affiliate program.

Home ed days: learning to read with Songbird phonics

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So, like I said the other day, The Book People had a sale on. Which was cruel of them. (Newsflash: Tuesday 10th until midnight, click here to use SHELL10 for 10% off your order! since released a new discount code of 5% off sales over £35, just use AFPEACH)

So I ordered Songbird Phonics, a reading scheme written by Julia Donaldson, and also a pack of Walker Stories, which I had some idea I could partly use as prizes.

I’m afraid I’m going to have to buy something else to use as prizes, these are such a fab collection there’s no way I’m giving any of them away!

Today Smallest has picked her way through Top Cat, the first of the songbird phonics books. I remember Small learning to read with these, right after Stile trays, and before his brief flirtation with ORT, before he gave up on all of that and headed for Harry Potter. I think it may take Smallest a little longer to crack it all – I don’t think she’s currently got the motivation he had, although it may well be coming. But she is getting the hang of most letters, beginning to blend, and does recognise words repeated from page to page. So, a good start.

Handa's surprising day jack's little partyAnd after she’d read that, I read Handa’s Surprising Day (Walker Stories) and Jack’s Little Party (Walker Stories). These are just great. They are small format, so the bag of 30 is quite portable, but each book has three stories in it. The illustrations are black and white, but they’re still beautifully detailed. I am a little confused, as we have Handa’s Surprise which is one of the stories in Handa’s surprising day, and I’m sure it’s not quite as detailed as in this book – I’ll have to dig it out and check.

(Rather than buying the books individually from Amazon via the affiliate links above, why not check out the entire 30 book collection of Walker stories for £15. (Yes this is also an affiliate link, but to the Book People. Books….)

Ahem. Enough of the subliminal advertising. 😉

Reading. Even though at the moment mostly what I’m doing is sleeping, and I’m very grateful that Big can cook (spaghetti bolognese for tea tonight, yum) we are still fitting in those little bits of home education that can be done quietly sitting down. So there’s our home ed days update. For more regular photographic input, check out the #100homeeddays tag on a variety of social networks – I’m tending to use instagram, but I’ve seen them on fb and twitter as well.

I will attempt to do a 300 Picture books update some time this week, if I can stay awake long enough (touch wood the headache is *finally* wearing off tonight) but blogging may be a little hit and miss for a while. Bear with me.

Linked up with #homeedlinkup – see the other posts here

Learning to read – a carnival!

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So sorry this has taken me so long to post.

without any further ado…

Here’s Katie from Outside the Box with her Change makes you wanna hustle post about different approaches for different children.

Drool over the absolute gorgeousness that is Chris’s post on the subject, Ready to Read, Something for the weekend. (Seriously, I felt inadequate trying to blog about the topic after I read this one. I need a better camera at the very least!)

And then take in the wise words from TbirdAnni who knows that not every child just gets it from the start: When words are an uphill struggle. Great tips and encouragement from someone who has experienced dyslexia from both sides of the fence as it were.

Katherine at Teknohippy shares how the process worked for her daughter E in E learnt to read while Zoe isn’t quite sure she’s doing it right – To read or not to read?.

Maggie from RedTedArt shared a fab crafty post sneaking letters into baking, or is that the other way around? Book and Cook – Alphabet Book while Carol tells us about four different children enjoying Real Reading.

Tasha reminded me of her Book Week posts – Tuesday was a whole day of learning to read posts, so check the round up while Ali from Fantastic Reads shared her memories of learning to read and the books that inspired her

Rachel from Midlife Singlemum shares her thoughts on the deeper importance of sharing stories at bedtime.

And my own post on it all? All I know is it’s different every time. But I have a plan. Learning to read, take three.

If I’ve managed to lose anyone’s post I grovel and abase myself hugely, and if you remind me, I’ll oh so happily add it in. Hope it’s of some use to ppl and thank you to everyone who contributed.

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…