The Lionsgate School

August 28, 2007

I have a vivid memory of sitting on the living room floor when I was five years old reading a Dick and Jane book. My mother said, “It’s time for dinner.” I replied, “Coming …” whereupon I promptly forgot about everything except the book I was reading. That was the beginning of a lifetime of saying, “Coming …” while reading. I guess with maturity, I have strengthened my ability to actually put the book down and go to wherever I am supposed to be, especially since I am now usually the one making dinner and calling everyone else! In any case ever since that day when I was five, I have been reading at least one book (usually several) every single day. Reading gives my mind a very large space in which to move about.

As a mother I now look at reading from a different perspective. I have been avidly reading about and engaged in homeschooling for almost 16 years now. I have read a lot about how to teach reading. What I have read is typically about what materials to use and why. When to start teaching and why. How to assess problems with reading and what to do about them. There are long discussions about research into brain processes and how it does or does not bolster arguments for and against phonics and/or whole language approaches to teaching reading. There are endless discussions as to which phonics program is best under which circumstances. There is the right brain/left brain discussion. There is talk about readers and whether or not to use accompanying workbooks. There are elucidating comparisons between the readers used now and the ones used one hundred years ago. And so on and so on and so on. Discussions may be neutral or very heated but they are almost always technical. I have never read a discussion about how absolutely amazing it is to teach children to read and what this implies about the human mind.

So guess what? Teaching children how to read is awe inspiring. Truly. If you can step back from the monotony of practice and keep everyone’s personalities in harmony when challenges are being faced, then the extraordinary nature of the process can’t help but fill you with wonder. While I remember reading Dick and Jane, I don’t remember what the process of learning to read felt like. So I am watching with care as I teach three of my children to read at the same time. The beauty of teaching three of them at once is that I can observe how significant differences in personality and seemingly slight differences in age (they are all within two years age of each other) impact the learning process. It is fascinating and deepens my appreciation for their individuality in ways that will serve us in the future in areas other than reading.

For the record, we use the TATRAS phonics program which is a “vertical” approach to phonics. Most phonics programs are “horizontal” which means that whenever a letter is taught, it is taught with only one of its sounds. In vertical phonics, all sounds of any given letter are taught at once and in the order of frequency of use. This is much more logical and gives young readers a wider scope of reading material that is within reach more quickly. I learned about this program from the Bluedorns (whose opinion I greatly respect on such matters) and they now sell it on their site.

We are happily using Pathway and Harriette Taylor Treadwell readers. The Pathway readers were created to use in Amish classrooms. As such, they are based in family life and extol the virtues of simplicity, obedience and cooperation. My children find the stories compelling and appreciate the black and white line drawings. I appreciate being completely comfortable with the material. Having three children reading from each of the three first readers all at once makes me feel like Peter and Rachel are a part of our family. Any of you who use these readers will know who I mean! The Treadwell readers (go here for the online versions and here to purchase printed books) are reprints from 1910. Both readers draw from classic literature and are designed to deepen an appreciation for good literature at the same time as they teach reading. The Primer, for instance, is full of classic stories like “The Little Red Hen” and “Three Billy Goats Gruff”. The illustrations are charmingly old fashioned and give opportunities for learning in and of themselves. For instance, in “The Little Red Hen” each child and I together looked at and discussed the wheat berries (like what we have in pails in the kitchen), hand scythes (related to a tool we use for trimming some of our grass), threshers, mills (both water and wind with a reminder about the water mill we visited recently), brick ovens and the system of having a village baker (along with a discussion about the clay oven we will someday build) and sourdough bread (and the rise of industrial foods such as quick acting yeast and what that did to bread making and nutrition). All of that delightful discussion - and it is delightful because it draws upon the old paths we ourselves are following into the future - was an added bonus on top of the already well known character lesson contained in this folk tale.

That is the nuts and bolts of how we are teaching reading here. Not only are these all worthy materials for teaching my children, I am learning too. As fluent as I may be in English, I never consciously knew that the letter “a” makes three sounds and in what order of frequency those sounds appear in our language. Furthermore, I never considered ahead of time that my methodical, detail oriented boy would read very differently than my emotional, storyteller girl. And that my more right brained, intense-drive-towards mastery daughter would seem to read almost as if by intuition rather than skill or knowledge.

This last bit is what brings me to my main point. Reading is an incredibly abstract, uniquely human activity. How do young children do it? So you teach them some phonics. Having read Charlotte Mason (particularly Volume 1) and knowing that in general the answer to almost all either/or debates is BOTH (i.e. the answer is not either phonics or sight words but both methods used judiciously and together), you also teach them some sight words in whatever way suits them. How does that suddenly leap into reading a funny story fluently enough to induce giggling in the new young reader? That is the awe inspiring part of all of this that we can forget about in our day to day march towards mastery.

Human thought force comes directly from God. It is made from God. Our thought force is our most potent force or ability. This is easy to believe when you watch young children soar into reading books. But what else can they do? Our minds are made to do much greater and more subtle things than we humans currently do with them. “The human brain has enormous but unexploited possibilities.” What other wondrous abilities (we aren’t even guessing at) do our children have latent within their minds and beings? How can we guide them into expressing abilities that we ourselves have long since forgotten we were also born with? How do we guide and educate these true “pockets of the future?

I think that being full of awe and wonder is a good place to start. Holding each of these children in prayer and acting on the inner guidance that flows from that is a good follow up and a lifetime practice. May we all be molded as Nature works to shape our children into shining examples, for the sake of the future.

With prayers for the future,
Leslie