Year: 2014 Page 2 of 13

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.

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I described how Kelly learned to read at age four without a lot of planning on our part in the last chapter. We actually worked hard at a lot of things that helped her get there like memorization, phonics games, making interesting books available to her and reading aloud, but it was not part of some greater plan. Christian is 15 months younger than Kelly. When we saw what worked with Kelly, we just thought we would do the same thing with Christian, but with a lot more planning and organization. We did exactly that and it did not work.

We continued to read aloud to Christian. He loved it. We played the same phonics games that Kelly played when she learned to read and with equal success. We did lots of memorization. We ran our fingers under the words of “easy reader” books as we read them. Christian got great joy out of it all, but did not make the leap to reading. A few months after he turned four, we decided we needed to change our plan. We kept doing what we were doing (with little or no reading progress, but Christian loved it) while I investigated other reading programs.

About that time, we sent Kelly to a local kindergarten that used the Spalding method so we tried that with Christian. We quit after a couple of weeks because it completely killed the joy of reading for both us and for Christian. I continued to read as much as I could on the subject and continued to try things for the next several months, but nothing really clicked. At the end of Kelly’s kindergarten school year, we moved into a new house in another town so a couple of more months went by without a whole lot of concentrated effort. Then, literally just seven weeks before Christian’s fifth birthday, we were looking at books in a Christian bookstore in Beaverton that had a large homeschool section and I found a series of books titled Explode the Code.

Explode the Code looked like something Christian might like to do. It consisted of a series of workbooks that systematically taught children phonics and built their vocabulary. I liked the books. I was pretty sure Christian would like the books, too, especially if I sat with him and did them. I was very much less confident the work he did in the books would lead to his ability to read. I was completely wrong.

While we were at the store we went through several of the books to find the right level with which to start. I think we started with Explode the Code 3–Reader Rabbit had at least gotten him that far. So that night and virtually every night for the next five weeks, Christian and I sat down on the carpet for fifteen minutes while I watched him do Explode the Code exercises. We actually used the oven timer so that we would do exactly fifteen minutes. We made it through about book 8 and Christian was a reader. We replaced Explode the Code with “easy reader” books and moved on up to Junie B. Jones within less than a month.

Do we think Explode the Code was the system/program/method that actually taught Christian to read? Well, kind of–it is a great program that we highly recommend. In reflecting on it, though, we think his learning to read had more to do with a couple of other things. The first and most important thing was the timing. Christian saw Kelly read and get all kinds of praise, even from her kindergarten teachers, for her ability to read so well. As Kelly got better at “reading in her mind” she was less willing to read aloud to Christian so he no longer had as much access to the books he loved, especially Calvin and Hobbes. He also saw that it was important to Lorena and I that he learn to read. We spent lots of time on it and had great joy when he read well.

I might not be precisely right when I say that Christian learned to read in a different way than Kelly. Timing probably had more to do with it than method. Both of the kids learned to read when it became important enough to them to make the effort.

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Betty Blonde #202 – 04/24/2009

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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.

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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.

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Betty Blonde #201 – 04/23/2009

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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.

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There are a fairly large number of studies that show that the greater the access to books in a home the greater the academic advantage of the children who live there.¹ This is another one of those things for which we would like to take credit but cannot. Both Lorena and I grew up in households with no television, no computer games and no video-game consoles. The only alternative was books, so even when our budget was tight, books were high on our list. We decided when we got married we decided we wanted the children to benefit from the both the lack of television and an abundance of books.

We had (have) books everywhere. The picture to the left is the niche in the bonus room where we store some of the book and homeschool project overflows. From the time the kids were old enough to understand, we read at least an hour a night to them including weekends. As they got a little older we often read much more than that. We started reading some of books the old books from my childhood that I loved–Homer Price, Henry Reed, Laura Ingalls Wilder. It was fun for them and fun for us. The kids had their favorite books and, as is the wont of young children, we read some of the books repeatedly.

The kids were so dedicated to their books, Lorena had a little bit of a struggle managing them. I actually walked into the house one day after work and heard Lorena yelling at the kids, “QUIT READING!!!” because they read so much. Lorena often had to take away their books to get them to play outside the house or to do art or build something with legos. They liked that, too, but perusing books was like breathing to them.

In the early days we spoke Spanish to them and read to them in Spanish and English. As they got up toward elementary school age, it got harder and harder to find Spanish language books so we transitioned to mostly reading to them in English while continuing to speak only Spanish to them. They could both speak both languages quite well, but we felt if either of us would have quit speaking to them in Spanish, their skills would have diminished because all the neighborhood kids, people from church, and everyone in my family, the only family close enough to visit regularly, spoke only English to them.

We had neither enough books nor enough money to buy sufficient books to satiate the kid’s desire for them so Lorena began to frequent whatever local library was available. I remembered them going to the library at least three days per week at that age. I asked her whether that was right, whether she actually went that often. She said they often went more than that and almost never less. Each kid had their own cloth bag to take books to and from the library. The checked out as many as they could every time and we frequently needed to do frantic, last minute searches to find books to get back to the library so we would not be fined.

So I guess we qualified as one of those households where the kids had access to books. One particular book that we actually owned and that we read time and time again was a beautifully illustrated picture book version of Edward Lear’s poem, The Owl and the Pussycat. That book was instrumental starting a program to memorize stuff. I will talk about that in the next post.

1. The following citation is from a long list of citations on the contribution of access to books in the home to the ability of children to learn to read from this article at the Children’s Literacy Foundation: (Source: Reading Is Fundamental, Access to Print Materials Improves Children’s Reading: A Meta-Analysis of 108 Most Relevant Studies Shows Positive Impacts, 2010). This page asks and answers questions about child literacy with relevant citations of the research. I recommend it highly.

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Betty Blonde #200 – 04/22/2009

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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.

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People generally like to think their children are exceptional. That is especially true when the children are young and the topic of conversation is intelligence. We are not immune to that and maybe it is a good thing. Studies have shown that one’s perception of their abilities has an impact on performance. If you think you are good at math you will do better than if you think you are not. In addition, more and more research is showing that intelligence is not immutable. If you diligently study a broad range of hard stuff, over time you can dramatically improve your performance on intelligence tests.

The funny deal with respect to our family is that Lorena and I have never had much of an illusion about our own intelligence or the intelligence of our children. I like to think I am a pretty smart guy, but I work with people who are much more intelligent than I, many of them PhD physicists and engineers. I am disabused of the idea that I am brilliant virtually every day. That being said, it always seemed peculiar to me that the ones who had to study really hard just to keep up are the ones who seem to perform best in the technical areas in which they were trained while the ones who make the claim that none of the math was hard end up in management. It kind of makes me think the ones who said it was easy were talking trash.

To be honest, when the kids were little, we did not think about what our children would have to do to perform well academically when they got into college. We believed our children were of at least average intelligence, most likely a little above that. We did things when they were very young that would serve them well in their academic pursuits later on, not because of of planning or goals, but because that is what we all liked to do. Much later we realized they would have to work hard to perform well academically. Fortunately we just happened to like to do some of those things that would help them in that regard.

I will talk in this chapter about three specific things we did when the kids were little that gave them an academic advantage when the got to a more formal educational setting. First, we read a lot together and were surrounded by books in the house and out. Second, we spent a lot of time memorizing poems and scripture. Finally, we came to the realization, very early on, that Christian learned in very different ways from Kelly. I will explain how this was manifested with two examples: The different ways they learned how to ride a bicycle and the different ways they learned how to read.

Of course, all this happened in the context of other normal, often quite frivolous childhood pursuits that included art (clay, PlaDoh, Legos, massive amounts of printer paper, crayons, etc.), swimming and swimming lessons, museum, zoo, aquarium, park and farm visits, play dates, etc., etc., etc. One of the understated elements of their pre-Kindergarten education is that it happened consistently, every day for between a half an hour and several hours over a period of three or four years. What we did was important, but that we did it in a way that all of us enjoyed and that we did it consistently was what made it work.

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Betty Blonde #199 – 04/21/2009

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