learning to read

My sister-in-law asked a great question about unschooling and learning to read, and I wanted to think out loud about it a little bit more. She wondered how I planned to approach the teaching of reading to Little One, as an unschooler.

Let me first say that while I freely admit that my approach seems like unschooling, smells like unschooling, looks like unschooling, I am not comfortable with that term. For me, it conjures up images of children playing video games all day. When I use the term, what I mean is that I don't know where we're going to end up, and I don't have a strict schedule. Curriculum flows from what the children ask about, write about, read about. I really believe that this is the way it should be, and that it is the very best way we can respect our children as fellow human beings.

But this is far from a completely undisciplined approach. We "do school" at the dining room table and there is a certain amount of skill drill for Big One, in the areas of math facts, grammar, handwriting, and punctuation. But what I find is that the time we need to spend in these pursuits is quite short, and the rest of the day can enjoyably be spent drawing, reading, doing legos, listening to music, singing, doing yoga, going for walks, etc. I consider all these pursuits to be "school" as well, but I don't have to schedule them or insist that they take place. They just happen, and that is the essence of unschooling as I am choosing to use the term.

Now then....

Little One loves books. He likes to look at books on his own, he loves to have them read to him, he does some spontaneous writing in his drawings and in the letters he writes to us. He recognizes all the letters and knows what sounds they make. He knows about rhyming, and knows that some rhyming words look the same as each other,while others look different. He will happily write a word on the grocery list if I help him with the spelling. All this, to me as a teacher, constitutes the teaching of reading. And I expect that he will naturally come into reading sometime in the next year or so, without me sitting down with him and explictly teaching him "how to read."

Big One did it this way. Sometime after his fifth birthday, his teacher and I realized he was decoding text. That is, he could figure out how to read unfamiliar words. This was with very little explicit instruction, but with lots and lots and lots of experiences with words and reading and stories, and so on... It took another 18 months before he really "became a reader" and was able to sit with a book and just enjoy the story.

And now here is the important caveat: I can tell from my teaching experience and my work with Little that he is going to learn to read easily and naturally. If it were otherwise, I would be taking a more direct teaching approach with him. Because I can tell it's not going to be hard and that he is coming to appreciate the world of books without me pushing them on him, I know I don't have to worry about his learning to read.

And this is the crux of the matter: if it were going to be very challenging for him to learn to read, I don't think an unschooling approach would work. Given that reading is an essential skill for any life I can imagine either of my children wanting to live, they must learn to read. There are some children who really struggle with reading, and many of us avoid what is difficult for us. If it were going to be hard, I'd have to spend a lot more time and effort on it: an unfortunate irony.

The elephant in the corner

... or why I'm not talking about homeschooling all the time.

Chez Deluxe has undergone massive transformation in the last six months. This time last year, I was working full time (and more) as an early elementary teacher at a small private independent school. I taught there for over six years, since right after I finished my MSEd. My children were both students there, and the vast majority of our family's social connections were through the school. It was a great place, fraught with certain problems like any organization, but on the whole, it worked and was a good place for my kids to go to school.

Also this time last year, my husband was working a part-time job, from home. This meant he made dinner every night, kept us stocked with fresh-baked bread, and did most of the laundry and general household management.

In September, the school opened as usual, but with many fewer kids and a sharply reduced faculty. Three weeks later, we closed. There followed a brief flirtation with opening a new school with a group of parents, and then an even briefer consideration of sending Big One to public school. And so we became homeschoolers.

Also in September, my husband got a full time+ job that actually appreciates his presence on-site. Every day.

I have spent exactly zero seconds trying to figure out what kind of homeschoolers we are. I knew I didn't need to buy any curricula. I knew we'd be working from the interests of the children, that I'd be addressing academic issues as they arose organically from the work the children are already doing. I knew we wouldn't be scheduling breaks or using worksheets. I knew we would continue to go to the library, talk about issues as they come up in the news and elsewhere, to research topics that the kids ask questions about, to go for walks, play music together, sing songs, do yoga.

For many homeschoolers, all this meets a definition of unschooling. For me, it is the logical extension of the kind of teaching I was doing in a classroom with lots of kids. The great compromise we are making without a school is that we don't have a community of kids with us on our walks and our yoga and our discussions. But it hasn't taken a whole lot of thought to get here. I already figured it out, years ago, as I grew into my role as a progressive teacher.

I have spent many many hours trying to figure out how to get a reasonable dinner on the table at a reasonable time, how to stay caught up with the laundry, and how to create a structure that will allow me to live in a reasonably tidy house without walking around behind the kids, picking up their stuff all day long. This has been a huge challenge for me. Here we are, four months in, and I still haven't completely figured it out yet.

So the knitting and the house projects were just hobbies before our world got rocked, and the work we did to pay the bills was explicitly outside the scope of this blog. Now that my "real" work is in the house, quite literally, I must admit that I struggle with my new role. Being a homeschooling mom is like being an ultra-mama, and that's a role I've never identified with.

Ironically, I became a teacher so that I would have a project of my own that I cared about, so that my children wouldn't become the center of my life.

I had no idea what I was doing.

living on the edge

So for about the last year, I've been knitting virtually nothing but socks. I wrote them all down recently, and it seems that I average a pair about every three weeks, since last Thanksgiving. My photography skills are not good enough to make a post of ALL THE SOCKS interesting, and besides, many of the socks have gone to live elsewhere. So, instead of socks, here's the pair of mittens I'm knitting. The light blue is a heavy and coarse unknown from the stash, and the cuffs are made from equally unknown leftovers. All wool.

The darker blue is a lighter weight yarn for a lining. If you've never done this, it's really very simple. After you knit the first mitten, you just pick up stitches along the cast on edge of the first one, and knit another mitten, checking along the way to see that the second mitten is slightly narrower and slightly shorter. I usually accomplish this by doing the same number of stitches in a skinnier yarn with smaller needles. Then when your second mitten is complete, you just tuck it inside.

The pattern on the cuffs is from Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting Around. There's a picture of an antique Norwegian mitten with an intriguing pattern on the wrist, but no chart for it. I worked out the pattern on graph paper several years ago, in order to use it for a sweater I made for Big One. This is the first time I've used it on an actual mitten.

See that ball of the light blue yarn? That's how much yarn I have left to finish the outer mitten. It's not enough. Living on the edge, indeed.

On my 40th birthday, almost a month ago, a friend of mine taught me how to spin. That is, she showed me how she does it, gave me a few pointers, and then gave me access to her excellent spinning wheel. It was bad going at first, but yesterday for the first time, I spun a more or less consistent piece of stuff for almost an hour. It was exhilarating. I don't know anything about the technical aspects of what I was doing, ratios and batts and so forth. I don't even remember what kind of sheep she has. But here is the so-called yarn I've spun so far. From left to right in that little arc is the first and worst to the most recent and best.

And here's the most recent pair of socks I've made. The yarn is leftover Sisu from a pair for my dad and a pair for Big One. There wasn't quite enough Sisu, so I used some Reynolds Swizzle for some of the parts. Many adults think these socks are quite charming. A certain five year old dislikes them, but is generous enough to wear them on occasion. His complaint is that they are different from each other. Socks are supposed to match, he thinks. I guess he has a point.

About Sisu: I really disliked this yarn at first. It seemed rough and splitty. I think I may have been responding to its price tag. It is relatively affordable, at about $6 for a 50 gram skein. Certainly the cheapest sock yarn I can find in a LYS. After the first pair, though, I really came to like it. It is consistent, and springy, and knit up into a great pair of totally washable socks for Big One. It may not be dryable, haven't tried.

As for the Swizzle, there's a nasty yarn. Rough, stiff, and ugly. Anybody want to take it off my hands? I have two red balls and two green balls, 100 grams each.

After I took photos of the socks the way I thought they should be photographed, with feet in them, much silliness ensued. It seems Little One has his own ideas about sock photography. First there was this:

And then this:

And finally this, exactly the way he wanted to show them:

And then he thought perhaps socks should hang from the ears:

Or maybe this:

Sweet silly boy.