*How* appropriate?!

I’ve created a !

As I’ve said before, and indeed as Merry has said very recently the instant you start to fret about education along they come and show it everything is right on track. Sometimes however the reverse happens. So this week I’ve been banging on to people generally about how wonderful autonomous education is, how it really does work, how you have to take that leap of faith and trust the process, how ‘reading ages’ are a load of bollocks and in the same way as you now could not tell by looking at my two children which of them was walking at nearly 18 months and which was walking around their first birthday as they are both as good at walking as each other it doesn’t matter what age a child learns to read aslong as they do learn.

So could someone, anyone tell me why when my 5 year old clambered up on my lap with a book and asked me to read it to him I went into one? I started to say we could read it together and asked him what the first word was (It), he couldn’t tell me so I asked him what the first letter was. He also couldn’t tell me and did that squirming, coughing, tugging at his pjs, blinking, nodding his head thing that little children do while raising his (already quite high pitched) another octave and saying ‘I can’t do it. I’ve forgotten what the letters are. I don’t know.’ So I lost it 🙁 I explained that now he really is old enough that he should be in school and if he was in school ‘I can’t do it’ wouldn’t be good enough. I explained that it was OK for him to not go to school aslong as we could show that we were doing everything he would do in school and he was not being held back educationally by staying at home. I told him that we could get visited by someone to check that I am doing it right and if he couldn’t read they would decide that I wasn’t and they might make him go to school. Urgh! None of which I particularly believe or agree with or is very likely to happen but I just can’t bear him simply not even having a go at something just because it involves more effort than he is prepared to put in. So failings all round in both of us there really!

Anyway, this is a positive post as I’ve decided that it is allowed to kick start autonomy and then go back to being a lazy bugger again afterwards ;-). So I went and got the Bob books (the same Bob books I told someone – Ali?) that I thought were not that good actually earlier this week. And we sat, and we cuddled up and he read the first four! There was a fair bit of relying on the pictures and I don’t for one moment think if he was given the words out of context he’d be able to instantly ‘read’ them again. But he actually really enjoyed it 🙂 He ‘got’ the idea of the letters joining together, he ‘got’ the idea of different starting letters meaning the same sound (e.g. mat and sat) or a rhyming word he didn’t need to start from scratch with spelling out, he simply needed to change the starting sound and he actually agreed that reading was fun and it would be pretty cool to be able to do it all by himself (a first!).

We stopped at four when Scarlett started to get too distracting and he was beginning to get bored and I wanted to stop while we were ahead. So we’ve agreed to read one per day and see how we get on. Anyway, I headed off to get Scarlett dressed and far from running as far as possible away from the concept he decided AUTONOMOUSLY 😉 to try his hand at spelling! Writing is something he has long since mastered but of course you need to be able to spell or sort of read before you can actually write words, so I think that will be the pull for him to read – he actively wants to write. He got out a pen and paper and wrote the above and then called me in to tell me he’d written ‘monster’ Muh ssss duh argh. I wrote ‘monster’ out for him and talked him through why is is spelt the way it is and he then had a bash at writing ‘bananas’ which is the name of his favourite cuddly toy – a small red frog. He got bored after the ‘ba’ bit and ended up turning the ‘a’ into a picture of the toy instead – but that’s fine 🙂

Anyway it amused me greatly that his first self spelt word is Monster – which unbeknown to him is how he was known online for a year or so and indeed is his blogoname – I don’t think Tarly’s first spell is likely to be Teeny though, infact ‘Tarly’ and ‘spell’ conjour up visions of witches and cauldrons rather than home education ;-).