Monster & Teeny

When I was first thinking about Home Ed Monster was 2 and Teeny was a teeny baby. I bought all the workbooks and cherished the hot housing notion that possibly a lot of us did in the early days of them passing their first GCSE aged 7 and graduating from uni at 12. Monster had been very receptive to things like shapes, colours, identifying animals and lots of those other early learning things during his second year - very much the mark of a baby with no siblings and a mother who sat on the floor with him a lot talking and playing I imagine. Although Teeny who had a tiny percentage of that time spent sat on the floor with her at the same age certainly didn’t seem to get to those goals any slower.

But when we came to letters, reading and writing whilst I wouldn’t say Monster was slow at it he wasn’t really desperately interested either. We have lots of reading scheme books although we’ve never really done anything with them other than have them on the shelves and sometimes look at them if they are the book of choice brought to me by one of the children. I personally loathe Letterland and my quick glance at Jolly Phonics suggested I wouldn’t be too keen on that either. And unless one of the children comes to something I dislike under their own steam and loves it chances are it won’t be something we use . We have 100 easy lessons which I think is quite a good resource, Monster and I did do a few of the lessons when he was about 4 and when he was in an interested and receptive mood I do think the letter sounds and breakdown of how words are formed taught in 100EL is about the best around. I realised when he was about 4.5 that he did indeed know all the letter sounds and their names and by five he knew that to read a word you had to blend the letters together, so any basic phonetic word was readable to him.

He was writing his name at four and could copy most letters quite nicely. Sometime whilst he was five he could write pretty much any letter and at six I just need to tell him which letter for him to write it and if he is in the mood to think about writing he could do so as he is capable of working out which sound is next in a word and writing it. Spelling and punctuation have never been talked about really, but will obviously come with practise as and when he feels the need. He probably considers writing more important than reading at the moment, he does a lot of drawing and making things and often asks me to write on them or to spell words for him so he can. He can read sufficiently to navigate his way round an x box game but enjoys being read to too much to want to pick a book up and read it himself.

There was a time when I was just desperate for him to read. I considered reading the key to autonomy, the answer to critics of HE, the proof we were doing it ‘right’ and the salve to my fretting. Now I listen to him playing, talking, inventing stories and lives for his toys, chatting to his sister, instructing friends in things, asking me endless questions and talking things through with us and know that it is far more important that he is using words and communicating in whatever way he finds easiest then in focusing on sitting quietly and practising reading three letter words and writing endless rows of the same letter. It is articulating himself and understanding others which is the key to reading and writing, if you spend time working on cracking that skill then when the reading and writing is really necessary surely it will come much easier?

Teeny is the product of my far more relaxed attitude. She probably adores books far more than her brother, possibly because I have never made them anything other than a source of enterainment and education for her with some of the clumsier early efforts to get her reading like I tried on Monster. We looked at 100EL about a year ago and she was interested briefly but never remembered the previous lesson when next we came back to it, even the following day. She has very recently started playing a barbie game online which required her to enter her name so I wrote it out for her upper case and she copied it every time, finding the letters on the keyboard. She then lost the piece of paper but carried on typing it without help. Last week I bought some foam letters and she imediately picked out the letters of her name and put them in order, is often spotting the letters from her name in other words and this weekend wrote her name all by herself for the first time in my birthday card, then repeated the trick in the steam on the car window. It would be a crime to do anything to squash the enthusiasm and pride she has in this by giving her anything else to start trying to write as she would likely not manage it on the first attempt and lose all confidence in what she can already do. As her name is eight letters with only one repeated she already can spot seven letters so that’s over a quarter of the alphabet sorted

They are both very aware of the written word, are both pretty articulate children and I am witnessing them start to work out how to use the written word for themselves in their own time as and when it is important for them to do so.