Reading, Play, and Growth
I am participating in an event designed specifically for homeschool parents with struggling readers. To find out more, please click HERE for your FREE TICKET to the First Annual Close the Reading Gap Summit, a free virtual conference featuring 21 reading teachers and experts from around the world sharing tools, practical strategies, and advice for home teaching a child with dyslexia!
What is covered:
How to see dyslexia as a gift, not a curse.
How and when to invite in support for your home teaching efforts.
Home assessment tools for screening your child for dyslexia.
Emotionally supportive messages for your homeschooling journey.
Lots of free give-aways by our generous speakers! This includes a Free Week of Tutoring, 40 chances to win a complete Reading Curriculum, Many Useful Free Curriculum Guides and Tools, Free Session with an Educational Therapist, and much, much more!
If you’ve been looking for a way to feel more confident about teaching your struggling reader at home, this is for you.
To give you a sense of what I discuss in my talk, here are some stories from Growing Without Schooling magazine about older readers and what parents can do at home with their children to encourage reading at any age.
ADVANTAGES OF BEING AN OLDER READER (From GWS 69)
Jean Jakoboski (CT) writes:
Justin (9) is a late bloomer in reading, and I want to share some of the blessings in that. We were asked how Justin picks out books in the library. When asked, Justin says, “l know what I want. I look at the pictures.” Gift number one: knowing what he wants, I don’t remember having much of a sense of that myself at 9. An example: The Money Game by David Erickson. The cover shows dollar bills. Justin is drawn to this book because of his general interest in police work and, more spastically, in counterfeiting. Lo and behold, it’s the first book he’s been able to read aloud himself, forty-four pages, minimal pictures.
I am continually impressed with the books Justin finds for me to read aloud to him. I wouldn’t pick them out for my own reading; I probably wouldn’t pick them out for Justin either. Gift number two: expansion of my own interests and knowledge. An example is a book we’re reading now, Sam Colt and His Guru: The Life of the Inventor of the Revolver, by Gertrude Hecker Winders. This Junior Biography is written in a way that keeps my interest as well as Justin’s. Even though Colt was born close by in Hartford and we’ve driven by the Colt Building many times, it never occurred to me that someone making guns might have an interesting story. And an interesting story is it! If Justin read on his own a lot, I would be missing so much. It would probably take more effort on my part to remember to read aloud, too. As it is, I consider his ability to listen phenomenal and worth taking note of.
LEARNING TO READ, PLAYING WORD GAMES (From GWS 69)
Ellen Shipley (CA) writes:
Billy now reads books with few pictures and fifth-grade heroes (he reads faster than I do), but his comfort level is probably at the Bernstein Bears stage; when he’s had too much of the former, he retreats to the latter. He consults his Golden Book Encyclopedia almost daily, as topics catch his fancy. We ordered it straight from Western Publishing for $85, and it is the best investment we could have made in his education. It is up-to-date, colourful, chock full of photographs and diagrams, with entries one-page or shorter.
Billy and his daddy play word puzzle games that involve addition and subtraction. (“If there are four riders on four horses, how many legs. . .?”) Billy has invented his own symbol for “take away” that looks like a wagon to pull the number away with (Bill, his father, didn’t want to rush into formalized symbols, so he hadn’t shown Billy the subtraction sign yet). Billy does his own problems spontaneously, using his little wagon. Lately Bill has introduced the concept of multiplication, Just to test the waters, and Billy is intrigued. They also write coded letters to each other using a simple numbers-for letters substitution code, which gives Billy endless practice writing.
Hangman has become his favorite game. We play it on the backs of placemats in restaurants while waiting for our meal. We’ve also developed a verbal version, using hand signals for the unfortunate hanged man, which we can play on walks. To steer away from the morbidity of the hanged man, I developed a variation I call VOLCANO, which builds up to an eruption in seven stages, if the word is not guessed beforehand. Billy is pretty good at guessing and making up the words.
TACKLING A CHALLENGE (From GWS 64)
From Kit Finn (VA):
It’s very hard to identify what our children use fantasy for because they never do anything that doesn’t have fantasy content. Even eating breakfast has a plot line. Life is never at all prosaic at our house.
But I can think of some occasions on which the fantasy that is a constant background to everything they do has made it easier for them to tackle a challenge. Danette spent a lot of time this spring on roller skates, learning how to be really at home on them. She didn’t go out of our yard and join the neighborhood kids until she could skate with skill. This is unusual as she generally dives right in and learns as she goes. But at 10 she is beginning to be aware that it can be embarrassing to do things badly in public. She found the practicing very dull. She doesn’t normally like to play alone. But the fantasy of being able to skate well with her friends got her through it. She was acting like an adult in this—setting her goal and heading for it step by step.
More usual is something Socorro did this year. She was 6 and hadn’t yet learned to read. Since we have to submit test results every year I was beginning to be a little concerned when she continued not to read at all. I suggested a little reading together, but she wasn’t willing to do any reading herself. She would giggle and tell me, “Mommy, you know I can’t read.” Well, round about Easter she announced one day that her doll didn’t know enough about letters and sounds and proceeded to spend a lot of time for a few weeks on phonics with me. Of course, she never once admitted she was learning to read. The doll had to be present at every session. When it came to herself we just went straight from “of course I can’t” to “reading is easy.”
I do want to emphasize that this kind of plot line is present in every activity. The vast majority of the time it doesn’t seem to serve any use beyond pleasure. When we do housework they are often the three girls from Little House on the Prairie. But this does not mean they are more willing to work. Bridget can be just as balky about picking up her room when she is being Laura as when she is being herself. And there are times when I think the plot line makes life harder. Bridget goes through this cycle with her violin. She will work very hard to get better for a while and then hit a plateau where she seems pretty satisfied with her skill. Then she will chance to hear a better violinist play and become very unhappy with her own level of skill. And then we’ll have sheer hell for a few days with Bridget growling at her violin and herself in utter frustration because she “can’t make it sing.” The reason I say this is negative is that she actually progresses faster during the happy times simply because she does much more playing then. If she is happy about her sound she will spend hours playing around with sounds and trying to write music. But during the frustration periods she spends most of her violin time on temper and puts it away very quickly. …
