{pretty, happy, funny, real} -- Habou edition!

 ~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~


Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!


This week Habou is chiming in with a post:


{pretty}

Reading, Part III

This post is about knitting and reading.
You might want to read Part I here, Part I continued here, and Part II. All about what you need to teach a child to read!

Linking today to Ginny Shiller's Yarn Along!

These are the fingerless gloves I made to make good use of the one little 110 g. skein of yarn -- beautiful, springy, lovely wool -- I got for a dollar.

Last days and coming home.

 

 


 

Yesterday was ridiculous.

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~


Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter! 

{pretty}

After three seasons of a wreath bedecked with autumnal dried flowers, I finally pulled it apart and gave my front door a fresh look! I like to think of it as appropriate for the 4th of July, but not so holiday-specific as to look out of place for the rest of the summer. 

Before and After: Pippo's High Chair

Note: Our comment form hasn't been working properly lately - IntenseDebate seems to accept a few dozen comments, then give up and leave the job to Blogger (taking its comments when it goes). We have no idea what's going on; the whole thing makes us feel rather powerless. We've tried a few things to hopefully fix it, and if that doesn't work we'll take more drastic measures.

To those of you whose comments on the last few posts have disappeared - we're sorry! We saw them, and loved them, and love you.


I had a bit of a postpartum hiatus from most things crafty while I figured out how to get basic, everyday tasks (like dinner and laundry) done with a baby in tow. Now that I'm feeling a little more on top of things, I've really been enjoying getting my creative juices flowing again. The next step is carving out time to blog about it! My mom likes to promise posts from me, because she knows that I do well with deadlines.

This is the biggest project I've done recently. I found Pippo a cute wooden high chair (I had my heart set on wood) on craigslist. It was sturdy, but a little beat up.

It was $18. Which, if you ask me, is a random price to set for anything on craigslist. Ordinarily I would have taken it as a sign that they were happy to accept $15, but then the woman selling it started telling me how she couldn't help me carry it because she was just diagnosed with MS, so I decided not to quibble about a few dollars, picked my baby up in one arm and my new high chair up in the other, went back down the three flights of stairs, popped both baby and chair in my car, and said a prayer for her on the way home.

(One of the reasons I like craigslist is that I like people, and I like stories, and I like it when my things remind me of people and stories.)

Where was I? Oh yes. It was a little beat up.

It looked like it had a history of being well-scrubbed.

Doing just fine.

I knew you would come through with prayers!

We interrupt this blog to have surgery...

Bridget and her friend Katie at the Scottish Games in Rhode Island last week. The weather was truly Hibernian. Katie is actually freezing here, before she got her wrap, while we watch the hammer toss. These photos are all taken with my iPhone.

Specifically, Bridget is having surgery tomorrow early at Children's Hospital in Boston.

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}-- I just love red geraniums, don't you?

What you need to teach a child to read, part II

Part I: Using a combination of workbooks and simple (preferably older) primers, your child has learned the mechanics of reading. 

The second thing I want to share: Make sure that the reading you do is connected to the past!

Or they are not really reading, they are decoding!

Reading readiness, Part I continued...

This book was published in 1947, obviously as a reader. But it doesn't try to do everything. It's simple and delightful.

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

As you may have noticed, Pippo and I were in Massachusetts again, but this time we brought the Lt along for a much-needed little break from work!

{pretty}

Our time with the Lt's family was very busy, as we were there both for his parents' 30th anniversary party (which was a blast) and for his sister becoming a Sister!

What you need to teach a child to read, part I

Keep in mind that this is a blog post. A blog post written by a bleary-eyed entertainer of sequential visiting offspring. This fuddy-duddy can't keep up with it! But I will distract you from my incoherence with photos of our trip to Old Sturbridge Village, which I always love. Love, love, love!

Obviously children learn to read in different ways.

Anyone who has had more than one child (as the comments in my last post demonstrate) knows how all your preconceived ideas can be surprised into oblivion by that subsequent child. One child will seem hardly to have been introduced to the basics and he's off with Tom Sawyer. Another can't get the idea until he's almost an adolescent.

Bridget and Natasha, Nick's wife.

The way I do things here is to apply the 80/20 rule, or my take on it, which is the 10/80/10 rule. I have no idea if those numbers really represent how things break down, but I bet they are close. It goes like this: 80 percent of children will more or less do what they need to do to get on in life, including reading.

You would think you could only derive consolation from that fact, but here's what happens: Those little 80 percenters create a serious problem for the 10 percent whose quick, effortless mastery leaves them slogging with others' low expectations. And they create a serious problem for the 10 percent who are physically or developmentally out of sync and will take longer to reach a given level than the others. 

Probably each 10 percent should be further broken down into the 1 percent on either end who make the pigeon-holers really crazy. *

Regardless.

Being a parent means figuring things out. Think! Use your noggin! -- Use this rough-and-ready true-life guideline to relax just a little!  Knowing that institutions can't help but operate on the basis of averages, we, in the intimacy of our homes and the secure knowledge of the grace of our vocation, can make a judgement right out here in the field about this little one who may be having a little trouble, or who zooms ahead leaving us in his dust.

Okay. So having said all that, there are three basic things you have to know about how your child will learn to read. And you -- only you -- especially for that 10 percent on either end of the spectrum -- need to find the balance for the learning process.

Choose your materials based on these three things (as well as the other important thing I'll tell you next time).

 

Can we just admire these colors?

1. Knowing the letters and their sounds.

These are two different things, mind. Many a child has to sort out that fact, on his own, because we adults forget. Yes, he needs to learn the alphabet. That's easy. Sing the alphabet song, get alphabet books, use Montessori-style sandpaper letters for the child struggling with fine motor skills, etc.

What is a little trickier is to associate the name of the letter with its sound. Some letters have more than one sound, right? Some children get it right off the bat. Some need a little more work. Do the consonants first, making a separate list for vowels and doing them later.

In a classroom (because, again, you have to aim at that 80 percent), the best way to teach all this ("phonics") would be a system with a wall chart of sounds and cards that colorfully connect the letter with its sound. I would invest in this if I had several children close in age and wanted to get things going quickly.

My children, regardless of age, will always compete.

My eldest, Nick, was taught in school using this method (I was so relieved to find that they used just the program I liked best, although now I'd have to look it up in my files to know the exact name of it -- I told you I'm tired!). Rosie, who was home with me and the babies at the time, was desperate to learn to read and pretty much forced me to rec-reate for her, on a long strip of adding-machine paper, the wall chart with the letters with their sounds. She immediately learned to read using this ad hoc "kitchen phonics" program.

Later I settled on MC Plaid workbooks.

I think workbooks have their place right here, in the learning-to-read process (and maybe in early math).

There is not a lot of information online about this series (and I'm talking about this older series, not the newer editions). I can tell you that they are the ones I myself used in school (or something similar and way older) and have used with my children. They are orderly and clear. They follow a thought-out sequence. They are inexpensive. The child who works through them at the rate of three or four pages a week will learn to read and in later years learn all the basics of usage, spelling rules, and irregularities. (Unless you are teaching a class, you don't need a teacher's manual, I think. Just encourage your child to figure out what to do, explaining things calmly if he needs guidance. After he learns to read he should be able to do it all on his own.)

They are nicely produced and don't overwhelm the child with visual stimulation -- a much more important consideration than most educators realize, because a child who is trying to assimilate visual information, i.e., the written word, should not be distracted with extraneous visual information.

Somehow people have gotten the idea that things that require concentration, like schoolwork, should be organized and presented as if they are video games -- and then those same people fret that children have attention difficulties! I just can't go on -- the whole subject upsets me so.

2. Blending

The leap from knowing the sounds to blending them is, I think, the true stumbling block for the 90 percent who don't just instantly get it. For whatever reason, blending C and A and T into CUHaaaaaTTTT-CAT! just doesn't come easily. 

Sometimes just spending a week with words on cards and "cat on mat"--style readers does the trick. For our kids who stumbled badly here, we did get the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.

Here's what I want to tell you about that book. (I am sure there are others like it -- I'm not your go-to source for every available curriculum offering and I don't claim to be!) 

It works for some children for this one building block of the reading process. I take issue with the special orthography, and there are lapses in consistency. I have never used it all the way through. I have found that some children get out of it the ability to blend, and once they have done that, the book has exhausted its usefulness. As it goes on, the "stories" become inane, and that's simply not necessary and actually counterproductive. And it's hard enough to learn the actual letters without someone throwing in things that look different.

 

3. Memorizing certain words

I am a phonics/meaning theorist about reading.

I strongly believe that to become an expert reader later, a child now needs to learn the decoding process of language. Reading is something you're inspired to learn because books contain meaning, and if, in the name of phonics, you're required to read an inordinate amount of pointless nonsense, then you won't want to do it. But if you eventually want to be able to tell the difference between such words as essential and eventual, or intercessory and accessory, or polynomial and portentous, you absolutely must have embeded in your wee mind the ability to decode quickly.

Yet, the whole-word people have a point, which is that very early on in the easiest reader one will encounter words that don't follow any rules. Having drummed home the idea that there is a code and the code always works, we immediately foist on the little earnest believers the, that, thing, and most defeating of all, said.

However, going from that realization to the thought that all words can be recognized without the intermediate step of decoding is a mistake for the long run. It's a tricky process and I don't think we should mess with the tried-and-true method of a reasonable, not burdensome, amount of phonics to start.

So we have to be up front and tell our children that life will be easier for them if they understand that some words just have to be recognized, not decoded. That the rules work for the most part, but English is an old, venerable, and many-splendored thing, and like any other amazing work of culture, it has its little quirks. 

4. Yea, three things must you know, four I will tell you.

You need to stock up on stories that are easy to read but not stupid. Easy readers have to be printed a certain way, with large type and big spacing between lines. They have to be fun. They have to be well written.

If you have a good public library (by good I mean one that hasn't been purged of its old books), there might be a section in the children's room with early readers. Look for the most well thumbed! This stage doesn't last long and you only need a few. We always loved Go Dog Go and there's one that has three stories including a king who locks his sons in a tower, and they trick him into letting them go by feigning the measles. Do you remember that one? I can't remember the name! I need a nap!!

The Best Nest -- my children still quote, "East or West, our nest is best!"

Little Bear -- for when they get a bit better at it.

The idea is to avoid cartoonish books with busy graphics. Keep things calm and amusing and if there is a dash of pulling one over on the adults in your life (like that book I can't remember the name of, can you?), that's probably all to the good, as the goal here is to induct them into the mysterious pleasure of being in the know.

So that is my first criterion for how you choose learning-to-read materials:

A healthy but not exclusive diet of phonics along with fun books that they can actually read. 

Don't ever, during this process, stop reading your normal read-aloud selections -- nursery rhymes, fairy tales, stories. (Remember to check the Ambleside booklists for great ideas.)

Next time we'll talk about my second criterion. After I get some sleep!

Don't forget about {pretty, happy, funny, real} tomorrow! MWAH!



*********************************************************************

*A note: Eyesight can be an issue. If things don't progress normally, which just means that you aren't comfortable with how things are going, do consider that a purely physical issue might be at stake. A visit to a good optometrist is in order. In my experience, an ophthalmologist hands off the actual vision correction exam to an assistant, because his focus, pardon the pun, is on diseases of the eye.

An optometrist is trained to uncover vision problems, and there are some children who simply can't see the text well enough to make reading anything other than a chore to be avoided. 

Are you making reading too complicated?

First reading, then writing, okay? I'm torn between writing a tome, and getting it over with already, although even the latter will take multiple posts, at the minimum.

{And of course I can't resist adding photos of our recent visit from our little Philip.}

But in one way I just want to say, is it possible you are making this too complicated? And by you I mean the many sweet, earnest, loving moms over the years who have asked me, with only a slight tinge of hysteria in their voices, "What do you do for Language Arts?"

Sometimes they are home schooling.

Sometimes their children are in school and things aren't going well.

Sometimes they have taken their children out of school and found that what they assumed was the process of learning to read actually wasn't taking place, and now they have older, virtual non-readers.

Sometimes they have home schooled for a while and have gotten bogged down in all the possibilities, ditching multiple horses at various points in the educational stream, drowning in curriculum, overwhelmed by the experts, and generally suffering from "latest-program-itis."

And let's not even talk about grammar or writing.

It all seems so futile or panic-inducing to some of you.

And yet....








 



After all, as I hinted in the first post, and without getting into methodological issues, our country has been a nation of readers. Since the goal of early Americans was to make reading of Scripture universal, the definition of literacy was held to a fairly high standard. In later times, critics take issue with the figures, and I think that's more than justified.

But in the past there is no question that with very few resources, children learned to read. Often they were taught by a very young woman with only a small amount of education herself, certainly not the recipient of today's decades of training. Even in cities, she taught multiple levels, with nothing but a small shelf of books and plain old paper and pencil. You know very well that sometimes there wasn't even that much in the way of supplies.

In the 18th century, ordinary people read so well that the Federalist Papers, which are listed in book catalogs today as having a target audience of graduate students, were originally published in the New York Times as position papers for the ratification of the Constitution, aimed at the citizens of the colony, most of whom were farmers. Don't think that's an exaggeration; even the most far-flung rural area took its news very seriously.

Okay. Well, if they could do it, so can we. Let's take a quick look at the background.

The most important thing you can teach your child -- to read -- also just happens to require a way of life from you.

Well, some children learn to read no matter what. But long ago people figured out that for the majority of children to learn to read, they had to grow up a certain way, which is hearing language all about them, and having language elicited from them, that will motivate them to learn to read.

These are all books I've found at yard sales of some sort. They are some of the many lying around here. I've put most of the ones our kids used up in the attic, so at some point I'll get them down and we'll have a real book-viewing/listing!

Now that the language that's all around us, for the most part, is either geared to make us buy something or to make us forget that we are rational human beings (advertisements and noisy background music, respectively), it's a little harder to make our children's world one that works for reading -- and also happens to be delightful and conducive to a peaceful existence. I don't know how we got to the point where language and sound in general  have become assault weapons. But that's another rant.

 Click on the pictures below to get to the information about the books (I hope).

Suffice it to say that at home, at least, our goal as parents should be to create an environment that has both order and wonder. Even the smallest child should begin to sense that there is a rhythm to most days, with times built in that provide both silence and purposeful noise, or rather sounds.

Silence.

A wonderful, amazing state of being. Every day there should be some silence in your children's lives.

When there are sounds, make sure they are good ones. If we're just thinking about getting a child ready to read, some sounds are obvious -- the sound of your voice (both speaking in complete sentences and reading to them) the sound of them babbling with a book in their hands.

Maybe some are not so obvious: nursery rhymes and old children's songs -- these two elements, once so very common in every household, are perhaps the biggest contributors to literacy before the fact, yet the most overlooked today (after a good old translation of the Bible). When a child wraps his little tongue around rhymes that mean something to him, he's learning that individual words have the power to delight when paired with other specific words! When he sings a silly song that incorporates alliteration, rhyme, and repetition, he's getting great practice simply in knowing how words work. I learned this last year when we had a French friend visiting. She had trouble getting comfortable with the words "Go tell so and so that such and such" -- as I'm sure I would be in French. But you could get her to sing them ("Go tell Aunt Rhody, Go tell Aunt Rhody!) --especially if she had been used, as a child, to sing. 

Words are not just scatter-shot that you hope hit your target. They should have a purpose and be a pleasure to give and receive. And that takes all the practice of the years leading up to learning to read, years that are hard to get back once they go by.

Equally important to the big picture of learning to read: Running around outside. I do think that parents today -- certainly schools -- are unrealistic about the vital necessity for a child to, as my husband says, get his ya-yas out. Part of every day -- scheduled into that order I keep talking about-- should be spent simply running around and yelling!

Outside, of course. We smart, strong, intense, discipline-oriented parenting types forget what it's like to be a child. We have lost touch with how parenting has gone over the centuries, when children didn't get smothered by the intensive grip of their unoccupied mothers, and yes, I do consider, when compared to families of the past, that we are unoccupied. And even moms who are not disciplinarians are yet wimpily confining in their approach. The wimpy confiners don't require anything of their children, but they also never really let them run wild, even for a minute. Their children are still constrained, albeit not to any effect.

Children, even small ones, long ago spent a lot more time just running around. Thus, when asked to sit still for 20 minutes to learn something, they didn't regard such an request as the sheer injustice their counterparts today do.

Oh, make no mistake about it. When your child squirms, giggles, slumps, drops his pencil repeatedly, cries, or otherwise misbehaves at school (home or "real"), he's registering (in the only way he knows how, so give him credit) resistance at the sheer injustice of your requirements for his day. And I for one don't blame him one bit.

Next I will share some specific materials for early reading, along with the criteria for choosing them -- just as important!

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, here at Like Mother, Like Daughter! 

{pretty}

Making sure your child can read and write.

If I could only blog while doing laundry, spring cleaning or just cleaning of any kind, watching the Red Sox, and/or taking a shower, things would be more lively around here. Because that's when I have my ideas.

Coolers waiting to go to the farm for the milk.

Which tend to be not quite earth-shattering, but feature such images as myself in a cartoon, actually tearing my hair out. The little idea balloon above my head would say something like, "But even children who don't have shoes can learn to read!" or maybe "Literacy in America was 90% at the time of the Revolution! What's wrong with us today!"

Maybe someone would comment and say something like, "Well, that was just men! White men!" And then I would have another cartoon with me wagging my finger and saying, "Don't try to justify today's failure. Women could read! Slaves were taught to read by their elders and by tutors. Maybe sometimes they were taught to read so they could keep records for their masters, but they could read. Lots of them could!"

And then, especially when it's spring, I run out to water something or to go to some rite of passage of someone's child (often my own), and don't blog at all.

Headed down for the asparagus bed. Nothing like retro-fitting raised beds. That's how we do things here, folks. Backwards. But isn't he a good guy?

At least I have {pretty, happy, funny, real} tomorrow. You don't think I'm too lame, do you? I just can't keep things going the way I should and blog the way I want to. I'm a loser blogger.

At the moment, other than the cartoon thing, I have something brewing that I was going to be so proud of posting in May. Only, now it's June....

I don't know why he felt like he had to frown the whole time.

The reason for my pride was that I find it hard to think about school anytime after the beginning of April until late September when I really have to do something about it. However, I am aware that other people are stressing out and trying to get things lined up for next year. I was going to reek with self-satisfaction for a timely post -- actually, series of posts -- on making sure your child can read.

On the list of academic issues that make parents writhe with anxiety, I would say that the thought that their children are just not learning the basics of reading and writing comes right up at the top.

Parents with children in the very best schools worry about this. They worry about it not as if it's something that the ordinary mother with nothing but a grade school education taught her children way back when -- often with no access to paper or pencil. No, it's like they're worrying about needing to send their child to the moon using nothing but a slide rule (and, actually, that's been done -- not by moms with little children, but it has been done).

In a way, they're right. I don't want to sound like an alarmist wacko, but I do think that because education has become a big industry, there is way too much incentive to make things complicated and then sell the schools something to fix what they already paid big bucks for. But let's not get into that right now, because...

Home schooling parents worry about it too.

School or home, it comes down to how to choose? How to judge?

So that's what I'm going to be posting about. After {phfr} because yes, it's Wednesday night again and all my good intentions are for naught.

And yes, you are right, I will be here a little less frequently for a bit! But if you think it would help to have a little Auntie Leila perspective because you kind of feel like freaking out over curriculum, I will try to help with the reading and writing thing. To the best of my ability.