your child's route to reading

[maisiechain]

Could you tell me briefly how your home ed child learnt to read?

My daughter tried and hated phonics, so we ditched the phonic readers etc and I just read to her a LOT, all kinds of fiction, non-fiction, poetry etc We visited the library each week and borrowed loads of books to read together. She also listened to story CD's. She read song lyrics and sang along with her favourite music & eventually she followed the text as I read I think.

she discovered 'Peter & Jane' books & loved them(!!!) and this gave her some confidence that maybe she COULD do this reading thing!

Just before turning 8, she picked up a chapter style book and read it.

Interested in your experiences:) What worked or didn't work for you.

A few years ago our local home ed magazine had a feature about this, which included the stories of several children's reading journeys. It's here: www.ohed.org.uk/6.html . My older daughter is there, under the pseudonym "Maria".

My younger child is nearly eight and doesn't read at all yet. She hasn't been interested. I have not yet met or even heard of a home educated child reaching adulthood functionally illiterate unless they have profound learning difficulties. I do know quite a lot of HE kids who have learned to read considerably later than reading is taught at school! So, older nonreaders are part of our "normal", and I am quite relaxed about it. As I said in the magazine article, I suspect that my older daughter would have had an easier time if she had felt able to wait longer. I'm glad her sister doesn't feel the same pressure she did.

Thank you Saracen:) I would love to see some research/studies done in this area. I find it fascinating.

Me too! There's this comparison of the long-term outcomes of children who were taught to read at five versus seven: www.otago.ac.nz/news/news/otago006408.html

Peter Gray looks at anecdotal information about autonomously educated children who have decided for themselves when to start reading: www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read

And here's something I wonder about: in our great hurry to get children reading at the earliest possible age, have we looked at whether there may be any disadvantages to reading young? I've never heard it discussed. But here are a few things I've noticed with my own family:

Memory deteriorated when my dd started reading. She began to rely on being able to look things up. The ability to remember songs, poems and facts was inhibited.

Like portable electronic gadgets, books provide an ability to detach yourself from your surroundings and become immersed in another world. It's alluring. My older daughter stopped chatting so much with strangers at bus stops and on trains once she had books. I actually got attacked once on a street corner while I was paying attention to my book and not the people around me!

For book-orientated people like me, observational powers decrease hugely. When I wonder what sort of trees grow near our house, I consult the internet instead of just looking at the trees. When my daughter has a question about how the world works, she tends to look up scientific articles rather than doing her own experiments as she once did. For over a thousand years people believed that heavy items fall faster then light items because, well, Aristotle wrote that it was so. My nonreading child is much more engaged with the world and notices things I don't see.

When a child can read but is not yet a completely fluent reader, his access to complex information is reduced. People expect him to spend a proportion of his time learning through reading, and this limits what he is able to learn. When that information is provided in a different format instead, it doesn't have to be dumbed down so he can decode it. Ah, the tedious stupid textbooks we had at primary school!! It wasn't because the teachers thought we couldn't understand more complexity, but because they knew that many of the children couldn't read big words, complex sentences or long passages.

I have a strong suspicion that children who learn to read at a later age will tend to master reading at a faster rate. If so, that saves huge swathes of time and self-esteem. They could start early, before they are developmentally ready, and struggle away at it for four years, or they could wait 3.5 years and then achieve proficiency in six months.

Interesting points Saracen & I will look up your link later when kids are in bed................
The last point you made is one I am sure is true. I feel my daughter has had years of playing instead of years of phonics! It seems she went from reading at a basic level to becoming a fluent reader overnight. Since phonics was not going to be her natural route in to reading, I do think her self esteem at school would have suffered. What tends to happen in school if you do not pick up phonics easily, is that you just get more of it!
In the time leading up to my daughter reading, she just concentrated on other things for which she could get some success. Dancing, swimming, art and like I said a lot of playing:)

I've just had a moment to read the links, thanks Saracen. I found the psychology today article very much in line with my children's experience.

My dd although not home ed (yet) taught herself to read before she went to school. I just read to her, reading her favourite books repeatedly and she could recite them in no time. It was a party trick in Waterstones where she'd sit in the buggy and seemingly read a pile of books (Hairy Maclary series and Little Princess series were her favourites) . In no time at all she worked out for herself that the words in print were the words she spoke and she'd marry the two up.
She started school at the latest possible point reading fluently and was taught phonics, she saw phonics as an entirely different thing to reading so she could read and alongside knew all the phonics rules and for a while she'd read the word and then fit the phonics round what she knew.
I'd say she still uses her exceptional memory to read unfamilliar words rather than phonics tbh.

DS is not home educated but we are abroad and he has not started formal schooling yet. He is 5.5. He kept asking me "What number is that?" about letters when he was about 3 or 4 so I started teaching him the letter sounds. I happened to come across some phonics information so was careful to make the sounds mmmm, lllll etc. He loved this and picked it up very easily.

When we decided to move abroad I knew he wasn't going to be satisfied by just knowing the sounds, because by this point he was asking about things, how to put the letters together, I started to teach him some simple blending based on things I'd read/come across online. I bought a book about phonics and some phonics readers (songbirds) and he's really loving it and finding it really good. I'm a big fan - obviously one thing isn't going to work for all children but I love the building block method of it, and he seems to be getting on really well.

The only thing is that he can read quite a lot now but he still doesn't know the alphabet He only knows the letter sounds and not the names.

I do remember the day when he came proudly in and said "Look mummy, I wrote "bum"!"

Ds1 we taught his letters and then words from around age 4.5, did not use phonics. Is 7, reads well and loves to read but still stumbles on some phonemes.

Ds2 could identify all his letters and capitals at age 2, so in order to have something to do with him (he wanted to do reading like his big brother!) we started teaching him various phonemes. Is now just 4 and knows a huge number of phonemes (dh and I had to keep coming up with more, he was insatiable!) but only reads words, not sentences (and not hugely long words either, although he can cope with some odd spellings).

My dd was still struggling phonetically and would still be now aged 10.
She persevered whilst at school, then when H.ed we just left it for a while. She hated reading amongst other things, but now will read for pleasure.
I think by just reading books rather than trying to work out words she gained a lot of confidence. Now she will recognise words and if she doesn't know a particular word she will invariably get it if she reads it in context of the sentence.

Well so far it seems all your stories highlight that there is no ONE way> Loving hearing how your children learnt to read, thanks so much for sharing. Guess it does not matter how they get there, as long as they do and also great if they actually enjoy it:)