Your average week

[RainbowDashMustDie]

We are stuck in a bit of a home ed rut at the moment and I'd like to pinch a few of your ideas! My dd's are 5 & 6 and I think we need a little more structure.

We currently attend a few local home ed groups including art, singing and a language group (French and Spanish) but I'm worried that we aren't doing enough. 6yo dd is a very reluctant reader. She can manage 4 letter words but anything more is too hard and she won't even attempt them.

Do any of you have things you do every day? Set routines or activities? We've mostly been plodding along letting them play and make friends whilst they are still so little but I think they need more now.

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

I just read a blog post about reading for HE children but I'm so knackered I can't find it! I will try tomorrow! Sorry

Thanks. Hope you got some rest!

Mine will go to school in sept. But atm with 4 year old:

• read daily
• writing practice daily
• history - once a week, usually go somewhere ie castle: museum etc, then spend the rest of week discussing
• geography - pick a country a week. Might go somewhere related, so bake food from country, discuss famous icons/ people/ events
• daily outside ie tree climbing/ bike/ scooter/ football/ tennis/ swimming
• craft as and when, but spend a morning or afternoon showing new art materials and using them, ie charcoal one week, clay another

• everything in between varies and is socialising/ or combo of above. Obv things work with others ie we might incite friends over and all the kids make an art project that morning

Thank you. I especially love your geography ideas

Rainbowdashmustdie (lol) sorry I couldn't find the blog I read it from, I found it whilst looking at the recommendations of HE blogs on a thread here though.

But it basically said try not to worry about your child's reading ability because they felt they had caused their child to turn off reading more by worrying about it rather than allow it to happen more naturally.

Of course that's just one persons perspective, but I would say the only thing you can do is to let your child explore books in their own time and they may just find one they love. This is what happened with my daughter, she was never a big reader until she discovered Tom Gates (by Liz Pichon) on world book day. These books have lots of doodles and easy to read + are funny. Since then she's read almost every book (I'm getting her the latest one soon, will save it for our long car journey to Europe in summer hols).

Do you usually follow what interests your children? There seems to be plenty of events and places to go in the HE groups...on FB mostly but I'm not on FB...

Perhaps you could play reading games? Make them fun with lots of rewards if they manage to find a new word/say it out etc....? Not sure, the idea just came to me now!

Hope that helps :)

Hello OP.

My dd was the same both in school and H.ed and I worried like mad as she still wasn't interested at 9.
In the end it was Pippy Longstocking books (she's H.ed) and then Famous five that got her reading. Now at 10 she devours books and really enjoys reading for pleasure.
For us it was finding the switch and then trying different books to see what gels. If you can find a series she will be into well that will take care of many hours of reading.
As for structure we don't always have properly organised subjects as her main activities vary so much.
When she doesn't have as many commitments we try to be more formal but she has a regular language lesson and several music lessons, practice is between 0 and 5 hours a day, again depending on commitments.

I have heard the computer based 'headsprouts' recommended for reluctant readers before. On the minus side you do have to pay and it starts right from the beginning so your daughter may already be beyond this. (we aren't at that stage yet so haven't tried it, just bookmarked it for later)

Rainbow, on the subject of reading you might be reassured by the anecdotally-based conclusions reached by psychologist Peter Gray. www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201002/children-teach-themselves-read He believes that the information he received from HE families indicates that

"1. For non-schooled children there is no critical period or best age for learning to read.

1. Motivated children can go from apparent non-reading to fluent reading very quickly.
2. Attempts to push reading can backfire.
3. Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end or ends.
4. Reading, like many other skills, is learned socially through shared participation.
5. Some children become interested in writing before reading, and they learn to read as they learn to write.
6. There is no predictable "course" through which children learn to read."

The first in that list was a real eye-opener to me. We are very used to thinking that when it comes to reading, early is better than late. That's true for schooled children. Much of the curriculum is delivered through reading. In nearly every subject, assessment in based largely on what they can read and what they can write. There is quite a stigma attached to being an older non-reader. But none of that has to be true for a home educated child.

I was just thinking that in the HE families I know, the ages at which children learn to read varies widely. But there is one pattern I see, which is that often the youngest child learns to read much later and more spontaneously than the others. I think part of the reason is that with some experience, parents become more relaxed about the whole issue and don't push it.

All the same, I do know it is hard to sit back and feel you are doing nothing to promote your child's reading. Here's what I'd suggest: plenty of reading aloud to her and using audiobooks. Doing that provides many of the building blocks which make the mechanics of reading easier. In "The Read-Aloud Handbook", Jim Trelease makes an excellent case for the broad educational value of reading aloud. I summarised his key arguments in a book review in a home ed magazine, on Page 7 here: www.ohed.org.uk/6.html

maisiechain my daughter is 8, and whilst she loves reading I actually recently discovered she's not as good as I thought at reading. She read to me out loud and I noticed she skips words and has difficulty with some big ones...so all this time I thought the school were helping her with reading, they weren't, and all this time I thought by giving her a book to read was enough, it isn't. She needs to read to me.

So with books she's chosen I read her a page before bed and she asks to read some to me. So each week I increase the amount she reads by a few lines...I just say "OK read to the end of this page/read this paragraph" etc

Once she finishes school we'll have more time to allow free reading but it doesn't have to just come from a book, pointing out instructions or something written outside and casually ask "what does that say?" May help encourage them to read too.

Maybe a treasure hunt with some written clues/instructions to get to the treasure would be a good way to encourage reading?

Good luck, hope this helps :)