The beauty of starting home education with Johnny while he is still in preschool is that we can introduce concepts slowly, and not be bogged down with deadlines and "scope and sequence" requirements. It is necessary for this mom to do this at a slow pace because his learning style is so different from my own...in fact, he is just like his daddy, and opposites do attract.
Using The Salvation Army's Mission: Literacy materials, I have been introducing Johnny to both phonics and sight words, and was thrilled when he was able to read through book one with no problem.
The next night, at our family devotions after dinner, Johnny recited all three Bible verses that we've worked on throughout January.
Finally, at bed time, John came to get me in order to show off Johnny's truly amazing ability to memorize. Johnny has an entire early reading book about Transformers memorized word for word...which is wonderful...
Except that now I wonder if he knew how to read the book "In the Beginning," or if he just memorized it.
Thus, we have Challenge #1: How to evaluate the ability of our 4 year old to actually process and read words, as opposed to memorize them.
Challenge #2: How to evaluate this without discouraging him or creating a power struggle.
I once again turned to Mission Literacy materials and found a fun interactive game to test word recognition.
Using the words of the book itself, I made a sentence. I printed the words of the sentance in large font, cutting each one out on its own "card." I placed the cards on the floor, and Johnny had to read the word before stepping onto it.
He loved the game, and got some stuffed animals involved, too. We discovered that both Johnny and Puss in Boots are pretty good readers!
Thus I discovered the importance of MOTION to my child's learning style.
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At the same time, I have decided that Charlotte Mason is truly genius, and am going to review her methods of teaching children to read which I will post on as soon as I find the article...but in the mean time, I found the most brilliant quotes in her book, "Towards a Philosophy of Education."
"...The Desire of Knowledge (Curiosity) is the chief instrument of education..."
"Education is of the spirit and is not to be taken by the eye or effected by the hand; mind appeals to mind and thought begets thought and that is how we become educated. For this reason we owe it to every child to put him in communication with great minds that he may get at great thoughts; with the minds, that is, of those who have left us great works; and the only vital method of education appears to be that children should read worthy books, many worthy books."
"The mind can know nothing save what it can produce in the form of an answer to a question put to the mind by itself." (this is an anonymous axiom that Mason quotes)
As I look for the Mason model of literacy training that I read in December, I have already made some changes to my approach with Johnny based on these ideals.
Firstly, we walked to the library on Saturday and checked out books on whales and dolphins. We checked out 5 child-friendly books ranging from national geographic to a story book on blue whales.
Secondly, I let Johnny read the books himself until he wanted to know what they really said.
He is entralled with whales and dolphins right now...but my tactics of using his interests have changed. At first I asked him to ask 4 questions that we would look up in books, and then endeavored to find the answers with him...boring even for me.
Much more exciting is to read and let the reading inspire curious questions in numbers so large we will never be able to answer them all.
To add bonus to blessing, tonight we watched Veggie Tales Jonah movie. I didn't put together that this movie fit our whale theme, but Johnny asked so many questions, related and unrelated to whales... For example: he asked if the catepillar was just an actor in the movie, or if he was real in the Bible. So, Johnny and I read the entire book of Jonah from the NIV Bible - no pictures - before bed tonight, talking about mercy, compassion and how silly it is to be more concerned for a weed than a whole city of people.
At this point, I think I've learned more this month than Johnny has. What joy it brings me to make homeschooling my hobby.
While there are no pictures to go along with this post, and it is awefully rambly, I can't help but to take time and capture these AHA moments as we discover together how to educate and train our children in knowledge and righteousness.
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