NotSheep

I left a comment on someone’s blog about this recently ages ago, but thought I might put some thoughts here too then wrote a post about it and stuck it in my drafts and forgot about it. Now I’ve been sick for over a week, and haven’t written here much because I didn’t want to whinge, so, a bit later than planned, some musings on reading.

It seems to me that for a lot of us (home-educating parents, that is), one of our biggest concerns in the early days - by which I mean the couple of years after our children would have started nursery or school - is teaching our children to read. Certainly reading is an important skill - once a child is a fluent reader, a huge new world is opened to him. Without the ability to read, it’s much more difficult to become informed about an issue, to find out how to do something for the first time, to learn a new skill, to make plans… I would say that reading is as much a milestone in a child’s development as his first steps.

But most of the discussion about “learning to read” seems to be about skill, rather than enthusiasm. My feeling is that enthusiasm for reading is probably at least as important than technical ability - possibly even moreso when just beginning to read. There are lots of children who can read, but who never do so by choice - there are lots of adults the same! I suspect that almost all children who are enthusiastic about reading become fluent readers unless something puts them off. So the question is, I think, how do we impart the skill while encouraging the desire?

Watching a child learn to read is a marvellous thing. I suspect it’s a wonderful experience whether you choose a structured programme of teaching a child to read or simply observe the child’s interest and ability grow. I don’t know whether school-teachers realise this; I certainly haven’t heard any of them talk about it. But they are in a very different position to home-educating parents: they are expected to produce “readers” in a specific amount of time, without much one-on-one, and regardless of whether the children are ready. As home-educating parents, we are (yet again) in a much more pleasant situation, because we can do what works for our children, when it works for our children, without the pressure of curriculum goals and end-of-term reports and OFSTED inspections - and we can spend as much time on it as needed.

So…how to do it? The current trend in the education system seems to be towards synthetic phonics - in essence, learning individual sounds and putting them together. Despite a lack of consensus amongst educational experts, the government seems to have decided that this is the way all children in schools must be taught to read. I can see the advantages of synthetic phonics, and have one child who learned to read very quickly and easily using this method - but I have another child for whom the method held no appeal, and who would have been put off reading had he been forced to learn using it. What worries me about the way this is being implemented in schools is the lack of flexibility, the lack of respect for the individual child. No doubt it will work very well for many children - but for Every Single Child? I’m unconvinced. Fortunately I’m not constrained in the same way that school-teachers are.

I have three fluent readers and another child who is getting there. He’d have been in his second year of school now, had he gone to school, and I think he’d probably have been able to read by now, if that was the case. I think he’d also have been able to read by now if we’d concentrated more on teaching him reading skills over the last year. But we haven’t - because he’s been much more interested in doing other things. Now his interest in reading is picking up, and I expect he’ll be reading well within the next few months - and I do not think for a second that he has been damaged by not learning to read “at the right time” - which seems to be defined as “right after starting school”. In other words, like much of the education system, the timing of learning to read appears to be more about what’s efficient for the system than what’s best for the children within it. In my humble opinion, the “right time” to learn to read is when a child wants to.

Of my three fluent readers, one did start to read shortly after starting school. The timing was right for him - in fact he quickly became the most fluent reader in the class (and was so good at spelling that it was a topic of conversation in the school staff-room - it must have been a fascinating place to be ) I think the school probably used a combination of methods; certainly there was some look-and-say involved, some sounding-out. Looking back, I suspect he’d have learned to read when he did no matter what we’d done - whether he’d been in school or not, whether we’d provided any formal teaching or not. Perhaps he’d have learned even sooner if we had been actively teaching him ourselves, rather than “handing over” to the school. It doesn’t really matter though, for he acquired both the ability to read and a love of reading. When he was about six years old, he told me thoughtfully, “Reading is my destiny.”

He is the only one of my children to have been to school. When my next child reached “school age”, it fell to me to “teach him to read”. I was quite anxious about the whole thing and really wasn’t entirely sure where to start. I got lucky - I’d picked up a Superphonics book and he loved it. My luck wasn’t about having that book, but about it suiting my child so well. Long before we reached the end of it, he was a good reader. (We kept going to the end anyway, although he was just going through the motions by that time. I’m not sure why!)

A couple of years later and it was the turn of the next child to learn to read - and things were very different with him. He didn’t go for phonics at all. He had no interest in the Superphonics books. I’d heard people recommend “100 Easy Lessons” so I borrowed that - he hated it, and so did I. We both found it tedious and boring.

In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that at that time, we were having a very busy time as a family (moving countries, buying and selling houses, etc) and there wasn’t a lot of time to sit down and do formal work with him, because continuing to slog through phonics-based systems would probably have put him off reading altogether. Scratchy was concerned that he wasn’t reading yet - both his older siblings had been reading well by that age - but I could see the small steps he was taking towards becoming a reader. I could see him acquiring little skills that would, I knew, all fit together one day and become “reading” - and that’s just what happened. In June, he could barely read simple words; in the first week of August that year, he finished reading the first book of the Harry Potter series.

By the time he started to read, he’d have been in school for nearly two years (starting a year earlier here than he would have anywhere else). I think that if he’d been in school, one of two things would have happened. Either he’d have learned to read at the “right time” - about a year and a half earlier than he actually did - but he wouldn’t have been enthusiastic about it, or he would have struggled with reading and considered himself “no good” at it - and again, wouldn’t have been enthusiastic. Instead, he started when he wanted and when he was ready - and at a time when I was busy having a baby and my children were out all day making friends in their new neighbourhood.

Many parents who’ve observed their children learn to read (rather than just doing the homework sent from the school) describe a similar process - one in which one day, something just clicks. Learning to read is not like climbing a mountain. When you climb a mountain, you take one step after another, and each step takes you closer to the summit. Reading is more like learning to ride a bicycle - you acquire a variety of (often apparently unrelated) skills, then one day you start to put them together, and after a bit of wobbling, you’re off - flying down the road (or through the books).

So what’s the key? I don’t have a degree in education, but I do have three children who not only can read well, but do read - a lot - so I think we must be doing something right. I think what’s important is to use whatever method suits your child, when your child is interested, and to only do as much as your child is eager to do. Schools don’t hold some magical knowledge about the process that isn’t available to the rest of us; in fact, contrary to widespread belief, most people were able to read before legislation made educational provision compulsory. (In many places, literacy rates today are lower than they were then - I’d ask what schools are doing to screw up literacy, but I think it’s pretty obvious when you consider what I’ve said above about the key to success! If you’re still wondering, go and read Dumbing Us Down.)

(Out of interest, today I downloaded a “reading age” test and asked my three older children to take it. The child who is now 8 years and 5 months - who started to read nearly two years after he’d have started school - got a reading age on it of 12 years and 10 months. The child who is now 10 years and 4 months - who started reading shortly after his fourth birthday - got a reading age of 13 years and 10 months. The child who will be 13 years old next month? He got a reading age of 14 years and 1 month; he got one word on the test wrong, and to be honest I don’t know a lot of people of any age who would read “phthisis” correctly )