unschooling: so far so good
As you may know, I'm a little nervous about this whole homeschooling thing. Well, sort of. I mean, I'm a pretty self-confident person once I get going on something, so it's not like I'm going to all of a sudden decide that I don't know what I'm doing—much less hear that from anybody else. But I've never been solely responsible for anyone's education so far, and I'm using some pretty non-mainstream methods, so I'm very interested to see if it'll actually all work. And so I'm very pleased to be able to report another positive result.
All this time I've been saying we're not teaching Harvey to read—because we haven't. Like, not at all. We did lots of fun pre-reading practice with rhyming, and we played around with the alphabet, but there's been practically no direct instruction in phonics or anything. Oh wait, that's not true; I did make sight word flash cards one time, and we went through them five or six times together. And of course, we read a lot of books, and I almost always answer Harvey's question when he asks about words or letter sounds. So I suppose the lack of instruction isn't as stark as I imagine.
But still! Harvey didn't know how to read, and didn't know how to read... but he seemed to be spending a suspicious amount of time with his nose buried in a book—and to be able to recount plot points for books we hadn't read to him. So the other day I tested him on a text he'd never seen before:
Although it is difficult to grow good food in Norway because the summer is so short, Knut plants wheat, rye, and barley on his land.
(From The Time-Traveller Book of Viking Raiders)
I gave him the "although" and we'd already talked about how to pronounce "Knut" (and the analogous "Canute" in Old English)—the rest he got perfectly by himself. I was particularly impressed with "rye".
So yay! And yet he's still not sure he can read, because he can't pick up any book and understand it perfectly. I told him reading development is a life-long process (I didn't tell him lots of people never even have that as a goal!). The next day he picked up a chapter book and read "as much of it as I can" in the car on the way to the feed store. I offered to help him with strategies for the words he couldn't get on his own, but he was non-committal. He's been doing fine so far—why change things now?! After all, this is the boy who taught himself to ride a two-wheeler...
At least I get to teach him math. I can't wait to see what he learns to do next!
at work on his "Mad Birds" video-game-on-paper
comments
This is amazing- Go Harvey! Although I know you're not writing to reassure others, I think Eug and I are also a little tentative on the unschooling, mainly because we want to do the right thing and don't really know what the right thing is. So we've also hung back on teaching Noah to read, and though he can't read exactly (we've tried to start teaching him a couple of times, but he lost interest both times), he's learning tons so I figure it's ok!
I think it's totally ok! Harvey had close to no interest in being taught, and at the age Noah is now wasn't reading at all. I figure as long as they're starting to figure it out by 8 or 9 they're fine—as you say, there's a lot of other learning that they're working on during those 4 through 8 years!