Teaching to Read Tips

It's hard to believe that I'm finally teaching my last child to read.  Thirteen years after first starting this teaching to read journey, we're finally on the home stretch.

In the process, I'm thinking about what has worked for all five girls.  Bear in mind that my experience is all with girls, so my tips may not be as applicable to boys... And, of course, every child is different, but here are a few things that might help if you're just starting.

Remember your priorities!
It's so easy to get excited about this first step in "real" schooling and to lose track of why you're doing it.  You can find yourself sacrificing the relationship with your child if you start pushing them to reach arbitrary benchmarks.  Please, please, please IGNORE all the "shoulds".  "Amy should know her letters by now."  "Children should be sounding out CVC words by this age." "Michael should be able to blend sounds at this year level." 

Keep it fun and relaxed.
There is no faster way to put a kid off reading than sitting them down for an age to read a long list of unrelated words.  Personally, I like my kids to learn to read by doing "real" reading.  We start with super short, simple stories.  For my eldest, I created stories of four short sentences.  "The cat is fat.  The cat sat on the hat.  The hat is flat."  Another method is to find easy words (repeated ones are especially good) in a favourite story and get your child to read them.  Hairy McClary stories have wonderful rich language, but they also often have a word that gets repeated a lot that a child can read.  There are many other books that you will find that may be far too hard for your child to read, but have a word or two that they can read.

Work together
There definitely comes a time when a kid needs to read on their own with NO help from you, but early on, be ready to jump in and help with difficult words or remind them of a letter sound.  Avoid shaming or impatience, just say something like: "oh, that's a quite a long word, it's "together"".  If you help them with bigger words, it means you can read books that are a little more fun and complicated.

Break it down.
No need to read a whole book in a day.  It may be a sentence, or a page, or two pages - try to stop before it gets tedious for both of you.

Model, model, model.
After my five-year-old reads a page or a story or sometimes just a sentence, I will read it to her and point out the words as we go.  It's a reward for her effort, and then she gets to focus on the story while consolidating in her brain the "look" of each word.

Give strategies along the way.
Whether it's breaking down big words into smaller pieces, or teaching the sounds that certain groups of letters make, or teaching that an exclamation mark is "loud and excited", pointing it out along the way helps make the rules stick (just try to do it at the end of a sentence or paragraph so it doesn't interrupt the flow of the story).

Be patient!
Oh boy!  This has been so hard for me.  All four other girls seem to desperately need my immediate help with something every time I sit down for a fifteen minute reading lesson with the youngest, but it's so important I don't rush through it, even when there are so many other things to do in the day.  Just tonight, Pepper (the youngest) couldn't remember the word "I".  It would be easy to lose my cool and give her a lecture about how many times she has read that word in the last few months.  But it wouldn't help.  Sometimes, what our kids do just doesn't make sense.  The read one sound in the word and then just guess the rest.  Or, as Pepper was doing, they read everything with an 'h' as 'sh'.  Or a bunch of other seemingly random and weird stuff.  Try to remember that reading is a HUGE feat for our brains!  For most of human history literacy has been the exception, not the norm.  Be patient with the process and don't assume that just because your kid reads a word TOTALLY wrong they're being rebellious or naughty, even if they read it right 500 times before.  Maybe they are, but bite your tongue, be patient and pay attention.

Read the signs.
Once again, we can get a bit excited and then push our kids to keep going for too long.  Be careful.  You don't want to burn out that precious little brain, because, believe it or not, it has a lot of other work to do as well!  If they're getting the fidgets, if they're struggling with words that were easy yesterday, if they keep losing their place, if there are tears... It might be time for a break.  Poppy hated how I used to get her to do star jumps and run around the house and all sorts of other things before reading, but it really did help her to hold the book and her head still enough to actually follow the text.  Looking back, I'm sure I could have done a lot better with her (refer to "be patient" above), but thankfully she is a very competent reader despite my mistakes!

Don't squash the sillies too soon.
Some days they'll just be silly.  Deliberately reading words wrong or... whatever.  Take a breath and don't get serious too fast.  Remember, you want your kid to have a positive association with reading.  There is no rush.  Really.  Truly.  I have a 17-year-old.  We were (mostly) very relaxed and she is perfectly well equipped for whatever she chooses to do next.  Poppy, 15, has a shelf full of neuroscience and Psychology-related books she is working through reading because she wants to be a counsellor.  She has already read books like The Brain that Changes Itself and The Decisive Moment. I was even more relaxed with Ivy, the 13-year-old and she reads faster than I do.  No, they are not unusually gifted - they're perfectly ordinary young ladies.  Let there be time for silliness.  They will still be able to get into college (if they want).  Trust me.

I know I said it already.  Remember your priorities.
Hopefully your priorities for your kids are something along the lines of a good relationship with God and a good relationship with the family.  Remember those.  Live by them.  Don't let any academic goal get in the way of those priorities.  That way, when, at some point, you encounter the inevitable obstacle, you'll know what to do.  You'll get down on your knees.

Happy teaching!

They'll (Probably) Be OK

I have a young lady in my family right now who is particularly challenging.  Actually, I have a few that are particularly challenging in their attitudes and actions.  What is really reassuring NOW is that I've been through this before.

I don't have a three-year-old any more, but I noticed that each of my girls got particularly difficult at the age of three.  The first couple of times, it was scary and I felt like a failure.  By the third time round, though, I could look at my older kids and realise that they didn't *stay* that way.

So now, with my growing-up girls, I have hope.  I'm still finding certain attitudes and behaviours very difficult to handle with wisdom and grace, but I can see the older girls are turning out OK... they haven't stayed that way

Every day that I'm thinking straight, I pray for wisdom.  I pray for God to guide me in His will, to walk in His ways.  And day after day, I struggle, but over time, I'm seeing the fruits of God working in my life in every area that I have truly submitted to Him (since I'm not perfect, there are plenty of areas that I'm still working on submitting to God!)

So, what I'm saying is, when we put *our* lives in God's hands, our kids will (probably) be OK.  Does God guarantee that they will walk with Him? No, because then there would be no free choice, but we can know that we haven't inadvertently ruined them.  When you're battling with the three-year-old, or the six-year-old or the 13-year-old, you can know that if you keep coming back to God, they will be OK... mostly... probably.  They will make their choices, and yes, some may go off the rails, but you can know that you did your best.  AND that God doesn't give up on anyone.

As my dear Nanna used to say: "it'll all turn out in the end."

It Gets Easier... And Harder... Sometimes at the Same Time

Ten years ago, life was different.  I had a newborn and a toddler and was trying to teach a five-year-old to read, while also trying to make meaningful progress teaching a seven-year-old.  I can barely remember it now.  How did I do it all?  I don't quite know.  Twelve years ago was really tough.  Starting school with a five-year-old, a pre-schooler screaming through the night with eczema, and a baby who seemed to cry all. the. time.

Mammas of littles, life does get easier.  There are the things you are probably already looking forward to being over - nappies (diapers), waking multiple times a night, needing to constantly supervise everything from bath-time to meal-time...  There are so many things that change as kids get older, it can be hard to imagine what life is like.  For me, it really is easier.  I can actually relax at a swimming pool - in fact, I don't even have to get in anymore.  I can leave at least some of the kids home on a shopping trip.  I can say, "I'm making a phone call now," and shut the door and not worry what the house will look like when I get out.

Some stuff gets harder too, especially in a big family (funny, our family doesn't seem "big" to me, but it is by western standards).  My older kids really need to be waking up early, but some days the five-year-old needs to sleep in.  That comes with complications, especially since the big kids doing the dishes don't want extra dishes several hours after they get up.  I have a teen that needs 120 hours of driving instruction.  And in six months there will be another teen in line for that.  And then another... 

My oldest girls are dealing with big decisions about their future direction and beliefs.  The very oldest is looking to me for help with getting a job and learning many skills to navigate the adult world. 

Family movie night is increasingly complicated.  There are things I *want* my big girls to see or hear that are totally inappropriate for littles.  There are deep and serious conversations that I need to have with some of my older girls on their own... but as bed-times get later, and younger ears are more tuned in to private conversation, that gets more complicated.

Some days, I really would like to hit pause.  With increasing independence, there come more opportunities for mistakes that I have to help clean up, and often those seem to come all at once.  Yesterday it was a broken guinea pig water bottle at the same time as a gate left open and goats out.  Closely followed by the neighbour's goats getting onto our property.

I'm very happy to have the baby and toddler years behind me.  I'm very, very thankful for where we are now, both in place and time.  It's definitely easier.  But some days it is harder at the same time!

Our Year of School (After 11 Years of Homeschooling)

At the beginning of last year our family took a big step.  We put our oldest two girls (16 and 14 at the time) into public school.  Every step along this journey we have prayed for God's guidance in what is best for our daughters.  It was a sudden decision, but we realized that if our older girls wanted to "try out" school, this was the time to do it. (We particularly didn't want to wait until year 12 for this experiment, since the stress would be too much!)

So, I thought I'd share what the experience has been like for our family.

First of all, the school is tiny.  Here in Australia, we just have primary school (prep to grade 6) and high school (grades 7 to 12)... except Tasmania, but that's another story!  This year 7 to 12 high school had under 200 students.  For our introverted grade 11 daughter, most of her classes were 6 to 8 students.  I think the biggest class for our grade 9 was 15 students.  This was one of the things that made us happy to try out public school for our girls.  In our previous hometown, public school was NOT an option (among other things, drugs were a significant issue in our area) - we considered a private school, but couldn't really afford it for all five girls, even just for a couple of years each.

So, what was GOOD about school for us was this:
Opportunities we couldn't provide.  Both because of government subsidies and sponsoring by community groups, our girls got to participate in camps, excursions and activities that are beyond our family to provide.  This included extensive skiing for our grade 9 (there was a cost, but nowhere near what it would have cost us ourselves), a 9-day camp in the nearby mountains with cool activities, a trip to art galleries three hours away for our grade 11 girl, sporting competitions, the opportunity to learn new sports like badminton (apart from the skiing, the costs were fully covered by sources outside our family)...  In some cases, as homeschoolers, we find ourselves limited by cost, but sometimes our limitations are logistics.  Schools are working with students all around the same age, and they have extra adults and resources available. Let's face it, managing the needs of a wide range of ages without backup people to help out is TOUGH.  It was exciting to see our girls have a chance to do things that our family just can't do.

A new set of challenges.  I have been thrilled to see my grade 11 daughter try out lino cuts and painting in art.  She has put a lot of work into her art over the years, but has mostly stuck with drawing.  Being in an art class pushed her to try some new things.  Both girls have improved enormously in their writing skill because they have been pushed by someone else.

New skills. In theory, my husband could teach our girls woodwork and metal work, but his health has been a real obstacle for many years, so it was great to see our grade 9 daughter learning these skills.  Visual Communications was another great subject for our grade 11 - she has learnt a whole bunch of technical drawing skills that neither my husband or I have.  To be honest, this had never been an area I considered exploring with her.

A wider social network.  In the beginning, our grade 9 girl loved meeting a lot more people her age and forming some friendships.  There aren't many teen homeschoolers in our area, so she had been feeling a bit isolated.

A break for Mama.  Even though my "big girls" aren't really hard work, I was surprised to find that I felt like a weight had been lifted off me this year.  I was struggling to give everyone in the family the attention they needed, and somehow having just three girls at home for most of the day helped.  I could focus my attention on the young ones in the morning, and then the older girls in the afternoon after they got home. 

So there were some really positive aspects to sending our oldest girls to school last year.  This year, though, the oldest is back at home, and our grade 10 is doing just two days a week at school.  On the flip side, especially as the year progressed, there were some challenges that affirmed that homeschooling for the most part has been the right thing for our family.

So much pressure.  In different ways, both girls felt it.  Pressure to "keep up" with class work.  Pressure to perform to a certain standard, regardless of natural ability or otherwise.  Pressure to appear to be socialising correctly.  Some teachers just couldn't accept that my eldest was happy spending some of her lunchtimes in the library... or that "collaborating" was not going to help her do better at maths. 

Homework and busywork.  Weekly Math and English worksheets were a school requirement for my year 9, but they were rarely marked and seemed to have little relationship with what was actually being learned in class.  Traditionally hands-on classes still had what I consider an unreasonable amount of written work.  The homework frequently interfered with our family life outside of school hours.

Considering all the time spent in class, they really didn't learn much.  I have been very relaxed in my approach to homeschooling (OK, so not in the very early years, but for many years now.)  We have covered the basics at a pretty relaxed pace and I have tried to focus more heavily on "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom/knowledge" and life skills with plenty of time for interest-led reading.  Surprisingly, considering how long they spent in class, they just didn't seem to learn very much this year, apart from in Math and Chemistry.

It just got in the way sometimes. Although they're old enough to be at home on their own, I didn't like the girls to come home to an empty house.  Suddenly, I was trying to fit outings for the rest of us into an 5 hour window (considering travel time).  That was actually surprisingly restrictive quite often.  Also, trying to organize eye appointments, family holidays, and shopping for clothing got a whole lot more complicated.  They were also quite worn out at the end of a day of school, so I lost two of my best helpers at home, which in some ways put more work back on me.

School lunches. Trying to provide lunches that are nourishing AND enjoyable is so much harder when they have to spend the day in a lunchbox.  Lunch is SO much easier at home!

Socializing was hard.  Not all hard is bad, so this was an important challenge for them to face, but both girls found it difficult to spend day after day with people whose conversation revolved around technology (their phones and computer games, not useful technological advances), modern music, celebrities and gossip.  My year 9 enjoyed connecting with more people, but in the end it just got hard.

It got tiring.  By the end of the year, they were really exhausted.  It's hard to define just what it is about school that does this, but I remember being tired all the time as a teen.  Maybe it's being an introvert in such an extroverted world.  I don't know...

So, in summary, I'm really glad the girls had this experience.  We felt that God led us in this direction, just as He had led us to homeschool for all the years to this point.    There were some great experiences in it all, and we have also come to appreciate how blessed we have been to be able to homeschool for so many years.  I do look forward to a day when all our girls are making their own way in the world, but in the meantime, I feel incredibly blessed to have such an integral part in their education.  I am so thankful that we are given the time and capacity to pour the teaching of Godly values into their lives.  I hope this rather long "report" is helpful in your homeschooling journey!

Beware the "Christian" Romance

So I've been struggling to keep up with my teen girls' reading habits.  They can "consume" in a day a book that takes me weeks to read.  Even though the oldest is now sixteen, I still like to "screen" what they read, and have been hunting for good books for these girls.

In the process of this hunt, I have discovered "Christian" romance novels.  I keep reading reviews of books by authors such as Melanie Dickerson, Lynn Austin, Valerie Comer and others which assure me that their books are "clean" and "pure" with "nothing inappropriate".  I'm just glad I didn't take these reviews on face value and read some of these books before handing them over to my daughters!

Sure there aren't explicit references to genitals, nor is there crude language, but  there is an awful lot of implied physical desire that I consider inappropriate even for me as an adult, let alone my vulnerable teen girls.  It seems I am almost entirely alone in this, but I really do believe that the books that I'm finding in the Christian romance genre are liable to light a dangerous fire of desire in young women.

And so, I keep going back to the drawing board trying to find good books for my girls to read.  Many that I enjoyed in my youth are unfortunately out of print.  Gutenberg project has been a great source of books online (although just because a book was written 100 or more years ago doesn't guarantee respectability, so I skim them first), but we do like a "real" book to hold in our hands.  Our local libraries, it seem, specialise in all things zombie, vampire or otherwise completely inappropriate (apart from the few classics that we've already read) for teens, and I find it insanely difficult to find adult fiction that I'm OK with even reading myself.

Thankfully, life is about a lot more than reading!  I think the lesson in all this for me is that our family need to engage hobbies other than reading :)

Preparing For The Real World??

"We want our children to be prepared for the real world."

"Don't you think your kids need to experience the real world"

These are statements I have heard more times than I can count in discussions about the merits of public schooling versus homeschooling.  It's implied that school is "the real world" and homeschooling is some kind of utopian virtual reality.

I would like to question the idea that school is representative of "the real world", even the secular "real world".  Where do adults experience being in such close proximity to twenty or more adults of almost exactly the same age for hours a day with all breaks scripted by a bell?  Where do adults experience having to ask permission to leave their workplace for a toilet break?  Where do adults need to raise their hand in order to speak to their boss?  Where do adults need permission from their boss to speak to their colleagues during working hours?  

On the other hand, while homeschooling, my children experience everyday activities that I rarely experienced as a child -  grocery shopping, meal preparation, house cleaning and more.  They also interact regularly with people of all ages in our community.  Something that I rarely experienced as a child.  My daughters have milked goats, raised chickens and slaughtered sheep.  They have also made phone calls to organize buying animals from strangers.  How is this considered less real than the life of a classroom?

For some school serves a purpose.  For some that purpose may be mostly worthwhile.  But please, let us stop this pretence that the purpose of school is to prepare children for the real world.

Not Why We Homeschool

For some time I've wanted to correct a misconception.

It seems that many people believe that homeschoolers - especially religious homeschoolers - are "sheltering" their children from an evil world.  For our family, as for many, many others, this is not why we homeschool.

Yes, at the very beginning we started out of (partly legitimate) fear.  We started from a fear that our children would be bullied and supressed as my husband and I were.  While I think it is fair and reasonable and even desirable to protect small children from some of the abuses that can occur in school (especially in a drug-infested, violent community such as we lived in), that is not why we homeschool.

We don't homeschool to protect and shelter our children, but to equip them.  Yes, one day they will encounter the "real world" and they will need to be ready for it, but it doesn't follow that throwing them into it will prepare them for it.  Would you send your five-year-old son to a brothel to prepare him to resist the temptation of porn?  You don't prepare for a marathon by running one, you prepare first by training for it.

Subjecting our children to immorality at an early age does not prepare them to resist it as adults.

However, that's not my main point.  We are homeschooling our children to give us time to instill in them the values that are truly valuable.  We are equipping them to face a world hostile to our beliefs by teaching them those beliefs day in and day out.  This is hard, and I certainly don't do as good a job at this as I would like.  I also appreciate that many families send their kids to school and diligently train their children in Godly, Biblical values.  I admire anyone who can do that.

It has been through much prayer and seeking guidance that we have concluded that really, the only sensible way our family can adequately and effectively equip our girls for the world they will one day face head-on is by homeschooling them.

I have sometimes heard the experiences of Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael and Azariah (more commonly remembered by their Babylonian names of Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego) in Babylon compared to the experiences of Christian children in schools.  There is a big difference.  These young men were taken into captivity as teens or young adults.  They were not children, and they were not sent there by their parents!

Coming back to where I started, we are not trying to shield our children from a hostile world, but to prepare them to face it with courage and confidence. We are taking this time while they are young to teach them Biblical values and truth, and to help them to see the hand of God in the world around them.  Even now, as our older girls reach the end of that time, they are gradually experiencing more of the world at large.  If we were trying to shield them from pain, suffering and antagonism, we have failed.  They have all experienced hard things - some very hard things - at home, at church, and in the world at large.  Sometimes the hardest things have been the closest to home.

Avoiding pain is not why we homeschool.  Equipping our girls to rise above pain and grow from it is why we homeschool.