How do I know when my child is ready to read?

A very long time ago I entered kindergarten as a four year old who would turn five that October.  In hindsight, which is always 20/20, I was far too young and not ready on many levels.  I was very immature and was not developmentally ready.  My mom worried too, but they assured her that there was a reading readiness class between kindergarten and first grade if I needed it.  The consequences of beginning school too soon negatively impacted the rest of my school education.

I have vivid memories of kindergarten.  There were centers set up around the room we could rotate through.  I remember playing house in the kitchen and the  big cardboard blocks the boys liked to build with.  There were puzzles, the memory game and lacing cards.  I remember playing with clay and cutting with safety scissors with rounded tips.  We had story time and singing and dancing.  Every day we played outside on the playground quite a bit and took naps, even in my half day class. We were taught the alphabet and to count to twenty, but the one thing we never were taught was how to read.

All those years ago in the early 1070's, the teachers knew something that we have forgotten today.  They knew that children needed to be ready to learn to read and there were physiological signs that indicated readiness.  Reading was never taught in kindergarten or earlier because the majority of children are not physiologically ready to read until, at the very least, age six and for some children it is later.  My kindergarten and first grade classrooms had balance beams in them.  Why?  Because children who are ready to read can walk on a balance beam without falling off.  I remember my first grade teacher requiring her students to skip and jump rope.  She was looking for the students to be able to skip with opposite hands and feet extended with smooth, flowing movements.  Today we know from modern neurological research that reading requires both hemispheres, the right for the spatial sight words and the left for phonetic decoding.  The Corpus Callosum, the neurological bridge between the two hemispheres that allows bilateral movement, is not developed enough for reading and writing until around age six or seven.  In some children it doesn’t develop until age ten or eleven.

Teaching a child to read before the bilateral pathways have developed can cause lifelong reading disabilities.  Remember that reading is a bilateral activity for the brain.  If the Corpus Callosum is not developed enough then signals cannot travel between the two hemispheres and only one side, the right side which is responsible for sight words,  must do all the work of reading.  The majority of reading must be done by decoding, but cannot be accessed.  For some children who have been trained to read this way, they will continue to access the right hemisphere only when the Corpus Callosum eventually develops.  Math as well requires both hemispheres which may be why so many children struggle with it in the early years.

It is the gross motor movements of the body that develop the neural pathways necessary for reading, writing and spelling.  Think about the untold hours children before the age of six spend sitting in front of a screen.  Their bodies and minds are disengaged from the real growth their neurology and body needs.  Provide your child with plenty of outdoor time running, jumping, spinning, climbing, swinging, riding a bike, throwing a ball, etc.  Your child needs hours and hours of gross motor movement every single day.

There are signs you can look for that will indicate that your child is ready for formal education, and more specifically, to read and write.  Can your child skip, jump rope with an added hop between jumps, walk on a balance beam or log without falling off, ride a bike or stand on one foot with arms out to the sides with eyes closed for a prolonged amount of time?  These are all indicators of the integration of the bilateral pathways.

What if your child is not ready by age 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 years old?  What if they are 10 or 11 years old and still cannot read?  Do not panic!   For these children it is perfectly NORMAL and something that should not concern you.  Your child will learn to read when the neural pathways develop.  You will need to read all of your children’s school books to them during this time and hold off on writing.  If you have a positive attitude of acceptance, your child will not think it abnormal and feel like a failure.  Do not attempt to teach them to read until they show the physiological signs that there is bilateral integration.  In the meantime, offer your child plenty of time each day for gross motor activities.  Bilateral activities like Taekwondo, Bal-A-Vis-X, basketball, soccer, etc. will all help.  The good news is that the late bloomers will catch up with their peers very quickly.  For some children it will only take a matter of months.

If your child shows the physiological signs of reading readiness and they are still unable to learn to read, then there may be a reading disability that needs further investigation, but I suspect that there will be very few of those indeed.  It is this teacher’s opinion that early reading education before a child is ready, has caused the majority of the learning disabilities we see today.

If you would like to learn more about this topic go to the website below.  It is written by a Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrician who has been working in the field for 27 years and contains an abundance of helpful information.

http://www.youandyourchildshealth.org/youandyourchildshealth/articles/teaching%20our%20children.html

Delight in Handicrafts

“The points to be borne in mind in children's handicrafts are: (a) that they should not be employed in making futilities such as pea and stick work, paper mats, and the like; (b) that they should be taught slowly and carefully what they are to do; (c) that slipshod work should not be allowed; (d) and that, therefore, the children's work should be kept well within their compass.”  Charlotte Mason

Last summer I was looking for a handicraft that I could do to occupy my hands in my quiet times.  I had an idea what I wanted to do and found these delightful, felt bird patterns that you can download for free.

“What a good Christmas gift these would make,” I thought to myself.  “Wouldn't my Christmas tree look pretty with all the birds I see around my house all year, hanging from its branches?”  In the evenings I began to sit down with my patterns and felt, sewing these pretty birdies for friends, family, and myself.

On the second evening my son asked if he could have a piece of felt to make a toy mouse for his kitten, Whiskers.  Without any pattern and very little help from me, he produced his first cat toy. She loves her toy mouse!

Just seeing me work with my hands inspired his desire to do the same.  Often, introducing a handicraft is as natural and effortless as modeling the behavior.  I enjoyed thinking about the person I was making the gift for as I worked on it and so did my boy.

Later, I found a pattern for these adorable, lavender, strawberry sachets.   I bought dried lavender to fill them with, so every time I sat down to sew, the lavender scent wafted around me, increasing my sense of peace and well being.  They were a quick project that I could complete in one or two sittings.  You can leave them next to your bed for a restful sleep or put them in your drawers when they are finished.

In the past we have done many different handicrafts.  It has been challenging finding ones that interested my boy who has always resisted crafty projects.  Here is a list of some of the things we have done in the past.

• Learn to sew a button
• Take apart old appliances to see how they are put together
• Soap and wood carving
• Whittling
• Sewing a pouch and bean bag
• Leather work
• Weaving on a loom
• Making a bench, birdhouse, and ramp for toy cars from wood
• Collecting seeds from produce, making and decorating seed packets, painting paint sticks as garden markers to go with the seeds for a gift
• Learning to knit
• Learning electric circuitry with Snap Circuits and creating many projects
• Creating video movies and stop action films

The key to handicrafts is that they should be useful skills that will bless others and yourself through life.  You never know when a handicraft could become a business.  My sister sells her handcrafted Mason jars and has a very successful growing business, Kelly's Creative Outlet.  You can see what she has to offer on Etsy!

The Privilege of Homeschooling the Charlotte Mason Way

As a homeschool educator I have the privilege to witness things that most parents miss with their children at school and I am very grateful for the opportunity.  This week was our first week back after summer break and I would like to share some observations from our week.

When we listened to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet, Firebird, and he listened to the story, I saw my son’s imagination take flight as he played out parts of the story and then he created a new story.

Dull textbooks, busy work, or worksheets have no part in my child’s education.  Instead he is presented with a wide variety of living books with vital ideas written by authors who are passionate about their subjects. His science book is Fabre’s Storybook of Science. This week’s readings sparked an intense interest in pearls and the ocean.  He was fascinated by mollusks, the slimy creature in its shell that would form a protective crystalline coating, nacre, around an irritant and the pearl divers that risked their lives in the days of old, to get them.  We watched a video I found on YouTube about the unique and rare Sea of Cortez pearls and were mesmerized by the beautiful array of colors in pink, blue, purple, green, silver and black.  I pulled out my big bag of shells and we looked at the different shades of mother of pearl and sorted them by their attributes.  It created a desire in him to see the ocean and feel the sand under his feet as he searches out shells.  Yes, there will be a trip to the shore in the near future.

Then nature study happened quite by surprise, while walking home from the neighbor’s house, he found a toad and captured it.   What a joy to observe his desire to care for the toad properly so that he may observe it.  He got out his book, Pets in a Jar, by Seymour Simon to learn about what it ate and how to care for it.  We found his toad on the internet and learned his Latin and common name.  Each day he searched out morsels for his toad, Robert, to eat such as worms and even a baby gecko.  I did cringe a bit at the gecko, but Robert ate it.  Everything was meticulously recorded in his nature notebook, first by carefully painting a picture, working to match the color properly with watercolor paints.  Then, he recorded everything that happened, being sure to include the Latin name, Bufo speciousus, and common name, Texas Toad as well.  I was there to watch his pleasure and satisfaction in a job well done.

While reading in his history books, This Country of Ours by H.E. Marshall, George Washington’s World by Genevieve Foster, and Abigail Adams: Witness to a Revolution by Natalie Bober, I witnessed his growing understanding of the cost of war in lives, property, and civilization.  He is learning that our freedom was bought with a high price and what happens on our shores or in foreign lands, has a global impact.  He is coming to know that what happened in the past affects the present.

Through his citizenship book, Plutarch’s Lives, he can see that the character of a man can have an impact on others for good and evil. Through our grand conversations I see how he is taking in these ideas and it is growing his character.  We have the opportunity live out our faith by applying what we are reading in the Bible to our lives all day, every day.

We study artists, geography, Latin, grammar, foreign language; we read poetry from the best poets, literature with rich vocabulary and has stood the test of time, Shakespeare, and sing songs.    Every day I see him drink from the feast of knowledge that I present to him and it has created an even greater hunger to know.  I am a witness to how the ideas presented by the best artists, authors, creation, and Creator are shaping his character and equipping him to think for himself, to take in what he needs or what is right and reject the rest.  It is truly a privilege and an honor that I wish every parent could have.

How to Choose a Mathematics Curriculum Part 1

Charlotte Mason’s Key to Teaching Mathematics

“Of all his early studies, perhaps none is more important to the child as a means of education than that of arithmetic.”  

Charlotte Mason vol. 1 pg 253-54

Mason’s statement is bold and elevates mathematics to the top of the priority list as a means of education.  This puts choosing the curriculum for mathematics something of the utmost importance and not to be done without considerable thought and research.  Can you make a mistake and choose an ineffective curriculum or one that is very difficult to work with?  Yes, I did in my sons first year of homeschool, kindergarten.  Like most American’s, I grew up and went to college in the public school system.  Although I originally went to college to be a chemist, I eventually switched majors to graduate with a teaching degree and a science major and mathematics minor.  I had been so trained in my thinking about mathematics by this history, that I had made my choice with that mindset. Fortunately, I realized early on, my grave error.  I hope to share with you, the insights I have gained by reading what Charlotte Mason had to say about teaching arithmetic, so that you are fully equipped to make a well informed choice.

“That he should do sums is of comparatively small importance; but the use of those functions which 'summing' calls into play is a great part of education so much so, that the advocates of mathematics and of language as instruments of education have, until recently, divided the field pretty equally between them.”  

Charlotte Mason vol. 1 pg 255

The ability to make a calculation has little importance according to Mason.  In today’s high tech, fast paced culture it is even truer than in Mason day.  Everyone has access to calculators on their phones, computers, tablets, or iPods.  If you can push buttons, you can make a computation.  It requires very little thought or ability.  She goes on to explain that it is the use of these calculations that hold the value to the education of the person.  While easily measured, computational skills are not the goal of mathematics education.

What I am about to share with you I learned, not from my teacher training in college, but instead from reading chapter XV- Arithmetic, in volume 1 of Charlotte Mason’s Homeschooling Series, which in turn caused a monumental paradigm shift in how I understood the teaching of mathematics.

Think about how you were taught to add and then how your child is taught the same concept in a traditional mathematics programs today.  Not much has changed.  If you open a math workbook today, you probably see problems like 2+5=___.  To a young child, addition is a difficult, abstract concept to understand.  He must first understand what the numbers, addition sign and equal sign mean.   In the workbook there may be two objects printed under the 2 and five objects printed under the 5 which the child then counts and finds the sum.  With the new hands on approach to learning, the student is given counters to represent each of the numbers and then he counts them all together.  Either way he is expected to find the sum of seven.  The pictures or counters are the means to make this abstract number sentence more concrete and to help the child understand what the number sentence means.  On an average math page you may see up to 20-30 computation problems.  The child labors and struggles to understand the idea of addition some with more difficulty than others.  This is the traditional approach to teaching abstract math concepts and how, you may agree, mathematics is taught.

Through decades of observing children, Charlotte Mason discovered that this is not really how children learn math naturally. She discovered the missing key to teaching mathematics.

Imagine trying to teach a person to read music.  You show her the notation and tell her the names of each of the notes and symbols, but you never give her an instrument to actually play the notes.  You may be able to teach her to read the notes on the page with much struggle along the way, but does she really know music?  In the same way you may be able teach him to do math calculations with much struggle along the way, but does he really know math?  In the case of the music, the playing of the instrument is the proper context for the understanding of the abstract symbols that represent the music.  Presenting abstract ideas and concepts within their proper context is the key to understanding knowing the ideas or concepts.  Properly framing the abstract ideas or concepts in the real world setting is what makes learning something abstract so natural.  What then is the proper context for knowing mathematics?  Charlotte Mason went directly to real life application.

“Engage the child upon little problems within his comprehension from the first, rather than upon set sums.” 

Charlotte Mason vol. 1, p. 254

All mathematics starts with a real life problem that requires the use of numbers in order to solve it. You cannot go through a day without using math in one form or another.  We use it all of the time. This idea of starting with a real problem is a crucial foundational concept to the teaching of mathematics.  It is also the exact opposite of the traditional understanding of mathematics.    In traditional teaching of mathematics, the symbolic is the beginning and then manipulatives are used to make the symbols concrete.  Remember those long pages of ciphers with two word problems at the end?  This is not how we do math in the real world and this is not how children learn math concepts naturally.  First, start with the problem and offer the use of manipulatives to help solve the problem and make the real world math problem concrete.
For example:

You have two gerbils.  The mama gerbil gives birth to five baby gerbils.  Now how many gerbils do you have?

Next, give him counters of some sort in order to solve the problem.  It is after he has solved the problem and discovered there are seven gerbils that the symbolic representation of the problem he just solved is presented.

2+5=7.

It is very easy at this point for the child to understand the meaning of the numbers and symbols.  Do you see the difference?  The symbolic representation now has meaning because it is representing something the child already knows.  The knowing (solving a real world math problem) must precede the representation (the corresponding number sentence).  Mason goes on to explain the need to demonstrate what needs to be demonstrated and here would require the skill of the math teacher to be able to present a concept in different ways if the child does not immediately grasp it in the way you initially presented it.

“The practical value of arithmetic to persons in every class of life goes without remark. But the use of the study in practical life is the least of its uses. The chief value of arithmetic, like that of the higher mathematics, lies in the training it affords the reasoning powers, and in the habits of insight, readiness, accuracy, intellectual truthfulness it engenders.” 

Charlotte Mason vol. 1 pg 255

Mason eloquently lays out the chief end of mathematics, the true value of it for the child.  The result of teaching children in the way they learn naturally as she has described is the training in reasoning.   The habits of understanding, willingness to work, accuracy, and being intellectually truthful are also developed.

When children are taught in a way that is compatible to the nature of learning, it is like paddling a canoe down a river along with the current.  The way is gentle and joyful.  There may be challenging problems to solve, but the struggle is with many rewards.  On the other hand, teaching in a way contrary to how learning is done naturally is like paddling that canoe against a turbulent current.  The journey is filled with frustration and confusion.  Some of you may have experienced this yourselves with the way you were taught mathematics.  The result of teaching contrary to nature is that you and many other people relate feeling that they are not good at math, but what is not good was the way in which you were taught.

Now that you understand the way in which mathematics should be taught and the goal of that education, when you analyze the curriculum choices you will be able to filter the choices by looking for a curriculum that matches this natural way of teaching children.


Look for part 2, my next article on how to analyze the curricular.

A Revolutionary Idea

‎"An idea fitly put is taken in without effort, and, once in, ideas behave like living creatures––they feed, grow, and multiply." Charlotte Mason, Vol. 2 pg 77 of Charlotte Mason's Original Homeschooling Series

Atheistic, secular humanists have taken over public education and they have won the hearts and minds of the youth in our country.  They have removed any ability for a public school educator to teach the Bible as God’s truth.  Children are treated like they are computers, a product of their mechanistic biology. The goal of the public school education is to have an equal output for all.  The way this is done is to give every child the same input, so that every child will have an equal output.  It is measured mechanistically by testing.   The result is generations of children leaving school uneducated and indoctrinated.  They can reproduce the propaganda, facts, or information poured into them to regurgitate on a test and then to be quickly forgotten.  They can repeat what they were taught to think in short pithy sound bites, but they have not been educated on how to think critically for themselves.  This has been disastrous for our country and a recipe for the masses to be controlled by its rulers.

In the middle ages, the Christian church opened schools and began to educate the people.  The concept of the university was a Christian one.  The impact it had on western civilization was transformative.

What if the Christian churches in America or around the world offered a free education to their church member’s children and to the public?  Give the parents in this country a viable alternative.  The teachers in the Church schools would not be muzzled like they are in public schools.  Children would learn God’s truth.

“What about the cost?” you ask.  Who would fund this endeavor?  The church would.  Think for a moment how much money is sent by the church for overseas missions every year.  The amount of money is in the billions.  What if some of that money was invested in the missionary outreach in our own communities to reach the hearts and minds of the youth for Christ?  Do you think that it would be possible?  I do.

As thousands of homeschooling families already know, a quality education does not have to be costly.  With a free online curriculum like Ambleside Online, www.amblesideonline.org, that offer’s a guideline for a quality education following the educational philosophy of Charlotte Mason, it would be affordable.  Most of the high quality books needed are already available as free ebooks and audiobooks in the public domain.  For the books that needed to be purchased, they can be purchased as used at a fraction of the cost of a new book.

A Charlotte Mason education starts with God as the creator and children as persons, made in the image of God and capable of intelligent, independent thought.  From birth they have all the faculties they need to learn and build relationships with everything and everyone in the world around them.  With an insatiable desire for knowledge, the mind of the child grows and thrives on ideas.  Provide their minds with a feast of the best ideas from the best minds throughout mankind’s history and include a wide subject areas and the child will learn and grow.    Study the works of the best poets, writers of literature, composers, artists, historians, as well as language, geographies with history taught from the begin, “God created the heavens and the earth” to present times as a proper context for the ideas.  History taught rightly as the story of the relationship between God and his creation, our story, the story of mankind.  With the aide of the Holy Spirit and God’s truth from the Bible, student’s world view will connect them to reality as it really is in Truth.

Can you just imagine how that kind of education of millions of children would impact our world?  The church providing an education for all and winning the hearts and minds of our youth for Christ.  Its revolutionary!  

"Why aren't children in the early years doing an abundance of writing?"

Back in the 90’s when I was a teacher in the public school system I was trained in the New Jersey Writing Project. We learned to teach children the writing process through something called Writer’s Workshop. We taught children to brainstorm, write, edit, and to publish their work in a finished product. When they were finished they had a story. The process was cumbersome and the stories the children produced were well, childish, bland, flat, and predictable. Being hindered by their lack of knowledge, the grammar and vocabulary was simple. But the product did not matter so much because what really mattered was the process, right? Charlotte Mason had a very different perspective. She called the practice of teaching young children composition an educational futility. 

“I think this great moral teacher here throws down the gauntlet in challenge of an educational fallacy which is accepted, even in the twentieth century. That futility is the extraction of original composition from schoolboys and schoolgirls. The proper function of the mind of the young scholar is to collect material for the generalizations of after-life. If a child is asked to generalise, that is, to write an essay upon some abstract theme, a double wrong is done him. He is brought up before a stone wall by being asked to do what is impossible to him, and that is discouraging. But a worse moral injury happens to him in that, having no thought of his own to offer on the subject, he puts together such tags of commonplace thought as have come in his way and offers the whole as his 'composition,' an effort which puts a strain upon his conscience while it piques his vanity. In these days masters do not consciously put their hand to the work of their pupils as did that 'prodigiously well-read and delightful' master who had the educating of George Osborne. But, perhaps, without knowing it, they give the ideas which the cunning schoolboy seizes to 'stick' into the 'essay' he hates. Sometimes they do more. They deliberately teach children how to 'build a sentence' and how to 'bind sentences' together.” vol 1 pg 244-245

She explains that to expect original thought from a child is to do him great injury and frustrate him because you are asking the impossible.  She goes on to explain that composition comes naturally and therefore does not need to be taught formally.    

'Composition' comes by Nature.––In fact, lessons on 'composition' should follow the model of that famous essay on "Snakes in Ireland"––"There are none." For children under nine, the question of composition resolves itself into that of narration, varied by some such simple exercise as to write a part and narrate a part, or write the whole account of a walk they have taken, a lesson they have studied, or of some simple matter that they know. Before they are ten, children who have been in the habit of using books will write good, vigorous English with ease and freedom; that is, if they have not been hampered by instructions. It is well for them not even to learn rules for the placing of full stops and capitals until they notice how these things occur in their books. Our business is to provide children with material in their lessons, and leave the handling of such material to themselves. If we would believe it, composition is as natural as jumping and running to children who have been allowed due use of books. They should narrate in the first place, and they will compose, later readily enough; but they should not be taught 'composition.'

Oral narration is the first step to becoming a good writer.  A child of six that is asked to write a composition of any kind is hindered by his lack of writing skills.  He does not know how to spell nor understand punctuation and grammar.   The forming of his letters can become a hindrance as well.  As a result the child must limit his composition to fit his limited skills.  Let him compose orally and you have just removed all of the obstacles to successfully communicate his ideas.   When a child narrates he is telling back what he knows from an experience he has had, a reading selection, nature observation, or picture observation.  When he tells back what he knows from a chapter in history or literature he will incorporate the grammar and vocabulary from the selection read.  As he gets older he will learn to add connections he has made or his thoughts and opinions into his narrations.  If you are presenting the child with living books written by authors using rich language and complex sentence structure your child’s narrations will eventually reflect that which has been model.   It follows that if you are presenting the child with dry, uninspired text books, his oral narrations will reflect the writing modeled in those books.  At the age of 10 or 11 the child will begin composing written narrations.  By this age the child will have spent extensive time reading and listening to models of good writing and are far better equipped to write than a child of younger years. 

There is wisdom in Charlotte Mason’s writings on this topic.  I can see there is also truth in it.  Let your child compose, orally, everyday with all of his books.  Just be sure those books are of a high quality with vital ideas and a rich vocabulary written by one author who is passionate about his subject.  

Nature Study Comes Knocking on the Window

Nature study can happen in the most unexpected ways.  A snail oozing across the window sparked questions and investigation.  We pull out our jewelers loupes to look at it under 5x magnification.  Did you know the eyes are on their retractable antennae?  "Are snails born with shells?" he asks.  A quick internet search turns up the surprising answer, "Yes," and gives us more fascinating information.