This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.
I wrote about how Kelly learned to read in a previous post that also featured this rather pixelated video with scratchy audio. We had read Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat so many times starting about when Kelly was three she started to memorize it. As I believe is fairly common she knew it well enough to correct us when we got distracted and read something incorrectly. That is when we realized that she had the poem memorized. After that, when we read, we started to drag our finger under the words we read until Kelly caught on and wanted to do it herself. Pretty soon, she began to make associations between the words as we said them and their appearance in the book.
About that same time, Dalton, a boy who lived next door of about the same age as Kelly and Christian got into video games. I believe his favorite was something called Monster Truck Madness. The kids wanted their own video games, but if we were going to get sucked into the computer game vortex we wanted to exercise some control over them. We did this by getting some educational games including Freddi Fish, Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam that featured cartoon characters in adventure games that required logic skills. The kids got into the habit of sitting on my lap to play the adventure games because they were a little bit scary for a three or four year old.
After the kids had played the adventure games for awhile we found a series of phonetic reading games called Reader Rabbit. The games required the players to make decisions based on the sounds of letters, letter combinations and, finally, words shown on the screen. Because she sat on my lap when we played the adventure games, Kelly wanted to sit in my lap to play Reader Rabbit, too. So, every night when I got home from work, we would sit for fifteen minutes and play Reader Rabbit together with me mostly just acting as the chair and watching Kelly play the game. I do not think I can overstate the impact of my presence with Kelly in the playing of the games. She was excited for me to sit down with her the instant I got home. I do not believe, at that age, she would have been willing to sit down for nearly as much time on her own.
The games taught her how to sound out words. She already had knowledge about the appearance of some common words from her memorization of The Owl and the Pussycat. By the time we put a new “easy reader” book in front of her that she had never before seen, she already understood the concept. She read aloud to us a little in the beginning, but rapidly graduated to books like the Junie B. Jones series which she read on her own. We had many Calvin and Hobbes comic books in the house, too. Kelly and Christian “read” those books endlessly. When she learned to sound out words, she tried to work her way through some of these comic strips, learning in the process that there are more things at which to laugh in a comic strip than just the pictures.
Kelly could read fluidly when she was four, well before she got to kindergarten. Of course, we foolishly thought we were great teachers. We went through the precise same process with Christian that had worked so well for Kelly and failed miserably. It was not Christian who failed. It was us. We did not take into account the vast differences in the way our kids learned. He had great joy in learning to read at age four, too, but it was by a completely different process that required a good chunk of additional work on our part. That is described in the next post.
Betty Blonde #201 – 04/23/2009
Click here or on the image to see full size strip.
Leave a Reply