Comments on: Reading happens

By: Evan Lenz

Evan Lenz — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:52:23 +0000

“she often takes issue with the authorâ€™s choice of words.” I love it! Right now, my youngest son (almost 4) has a favorite book: The Very Bumpy Bus Ride. We play a game with it by garbling the words or mixing up the sounds or doing baby-talk. He’s practically got the whole book memorized. One of his favorite ways of engaging books is to say what he would do if he were so-and-so. There are lots of ways to engage books. Messing with the words is one terribly fun way, and we’re turning it into an art.

By: Pippa

Pippa — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 17:10:02 +0000

Lovely blog!

I also love the various paths each different child follows in this process. My 3rd child is just picking up steam at the deciphering of text. Only in the last couple of weeks did she successfully break a word into it’s constituent sounds. She mainly looks at the pictures and makes an educated guess. If her guess is different from what the author wrote she often takes issue with the author’s choice of words (important for a budding writer). Then she repeats the same story over and over until she can read it by heart. She will be 11 next month.

By: Evan Lenz

Evan Lenz — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:30:49 +0000

Bethany and Eurika, thank you both so much for sharing these stories about your family members. What better way to illustrate both the positive and negative aspects of this subject. Keep ’em coming.

By: Eurika

Eurika — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:59:42 +0000

My son is an ice hockey nut. He learned to read from memorizing the Team Canada hockey players names for the 2002 Olympics. He was 5. We came across a large glossy folder with pictures, stats, and bios of all the players (a freebie fm some newspaper) and he’d lie on the floor studying it, asking us constantly who this one or that one was. He’d also study the sports section of our daily newspaper. It didn’t take long after that before he was a fluent reader. Thank goodness we were unschooling at the time and the following year a Sudbury school opened in our city. He attended for a year, but then decided to go to public school (gr-r-r-r). We were unhappy about his choice but understood his reasons and felt that forcing him to stay wd not be true to SVS philosophy (and didn’t feel right). He’s still in public school, still enjoys reading (hooray!) but this year (Gr.8) is only attending part-time.

By: Bethany

Bethany — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 13:09:00 +0000

Totally agree. My brother was forced to learn to read in school at the usual age, far before he was ready. To this day, he hates reading and writing. Had he been in a situation where he could have learned to read at age 10 (for example), I think his current (adult) situation would be much better. He has zero confidence and limited ability now, because he was always made to feel dumb, even though he is actually a VERY intelligent person. Throughout his schooling, everyone was trying to figure out what was ‘wrong’ with him, but there was nothing wrong with him, there was something wrong with the ‘system’ of expecting children to learn to read before they are ready.