Photo a Day: Reading

I actually took today’s photo (and posted it on Facebook) yesterday, not realizing that today’s subject was “Reading.” But it is so perfectly appropriate that I am going to use it anyway. My husband had a lunch date with a longtime friend of his father’s, so I brought my son along with me to my daughter’s dance class, and I had encouraged him to bring along one of the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” books that he got for Christmas to keep himself entertained. He has just begun to read silently to himself, and although at times he’s simply not in the mood, at others he will happily curl up with a book for an hour at a time. This was one of those latter times. And the fact that he was snuggling against my lap while he read was the icing on the cake.

The combination of snuggling with his sincere enjoyment of a pastime that is so dear to me touches my heart in that special way that seeing your own personality (particularly the most positive aspects of it) in your child does. Like me, my son is something of an introvert, and although we both enjoy spending time with friends in limited doses, we also both enjoy our solitude, and cultivate a rich, imaginative, inner life because of it. A voracious reader from the age of 4, I lived in many worlds discovered in my favorite books. I traveled to Wonderland, Narnia, Mars, the Big Woods, Prince Edward Island, space, the past, the future. I was an explorer, an author, a frontiersman, a queen, an orphan, a magician, a time traveler. I learned to be curious, to ask questions, to imagine “what if?”. I learned to think. And all because of reading. It was both an adventure and an anchor. It was a refuge and a release. It was – and is – a passion.

And if my son follows that same path, I can’t wait to see all the adventures he’ll have.

Reading.

What Is Homeschooling Like?

Even though I’m not “officially” homeschooling yet (my son misses the age cutoff and is not eligible for public kindergarten this year), I’m doing it formally enough that it occasionally comes up in conversation, and people often ask what it’s like to homeschool. Every homeschooler is different, so I can’t answer that question in the broadest sense, but I can share what homeschooling is like for us. Here’s an example of a typical homeschooling day for us.

My son is naturally very curious, so I try to develop lessons based on what he’s interested in. Instead of having a separate math lesson, reading lesson, writing practice, etc., I try to tie them all together using something that he’s interested in. So I based this lesson on a police car craft that I found on Pinterest. 

I began by carefully writing out step by step instructions:

1. Color the car blue.
2. Cut out 2 black circles.
3. Cut out 2 white squares.
4. Cut out 1 red rectangle.
5. Cut out 1 yellow star.

I gave him a paper plate that had been cut into the general shape of a car, a box of magic markers, a pair of scissors, a stack of construction paper with the appropriate shapes drawn on, and the page of directions. 

 In this single project, he had to 1) read, 2)  hold a marker properly, 3) follow sequential directions, 4) identify colors, 5) identify shapes, 6) master using scissors for both curved and straight cutting, and 7) use glue without making a big mess.

I followed this lesson by asking him to draw each of the shapes that he had cut out, and then had him figure out how to spell and write out the name of one of those shapes with help from alphabet flash cards.

From there we moved on to reading a library book about different kinds of vehicles (including police cars). As we read, we talked about the difference between nouns and verbs, figuring out which words were “things” (ambulance, policeman, siren, headlights) and which were “doing” words (drive, stop, help, fly). After that, we watched a “Schoolhouse Rock” DVD, starting with songs like “Verb: That’s What’s Happening” and “A Noun Is a Person, Place or Thing,” then we moved on to a little American history with “The Shot Heard ‘Round the World” and “The Great American Melting Pot” and a bit of math with “Elementary, My Dear” and “Figure Eight,” all with appropriate discussion as we went along. And then we finished off the lesson by practicing writing numbers with more help from flash cards and workbook pages.

The nicest part of home schooling is being able to set our own pace and our own schedule. We can take breaks whenever one of us needs one and plow through when we happen to be on a roll. If we find ourselves on an interesting tangent, we can go with it instead of having to steer back to the original topic. Sometimes we take a wiggle break because we feel like it; sometimes we skip a boring book and find one that’s more exciting at the moment; sometimes we scrap a lesson altogether and find something else that works for us. Sometimes we get much more in depth than I'd anticipated and go two or three lessons at a time. If one of us is having a crabby morning, we can work on fun projects like crafts or coloring or cooking, and work on the harder or less interesting stuff after lunch when we’ve both gotten our second wind. Sometimes we "double-dip" by thinking of different kinds of ocean animals while we're swimming or practice walking like different kinds of animals while we're having a stretch break. We can even do lessons after dinner or on weekends to make up for breaks we’ve taken during the day. 

Making our own schedule also means we can be inspired by anything and everything around us. At the grocery store, we talk about nutrition, how plants grow, and where different fruits come from. We read the signs at the end of each aisle and talk about why the foods are grouped together the way they are. While we’re making brownies, we talk about the different ways we can measure things and we practice reading and following directions. In the car the other day, my son saw someone smoking a cigarette and asked what it was, and it segued into a discussion of health, how we breathe, and the meaning of the word “consequences”.

To quote John Dewey, “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” And, in turn, life itself is education. 

Photo A Day, Day 15: I'm Reading This

I’ve always been an avid reader. My mom told me that I learned to read well before kindergarten, and I don’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t in the middle of some book or another (and often more than one at a time). I loved getting to know the characters in a book, and I was sad whenever I got to the end of a book, because there were no more adventures to be had with them. And then I discovered the joys of book SERIES. I didn’t have to abandon my friends at the end of the book, because there was another one to start in on right afterwards! Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, the Pevensie children, Trixie Belden, Anne Shirley, and Laura Ingalls kept having adventure after adventure, and I was right by their sides, eagerly awaiting each new installment.

So when my son began to read on his own recently, I began to think about the kind of books we could read together over the coming months and years. I looked back through the beloved books of my own childhood; I recalled the delightful new children’s books I discovered later in life through my mom, a children’s librarian; and I browsed through bookstores looking for interesting stories to share.

During all this research, I naturally pored over my own eclectic book collection, both my legion of hard copies and my growing Kindle collection. I leafed fondly through my boxed set of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia (my third set, having loved the first two to the point of disintegration), I pulled out my dog-eared copy of The Phantom Tollbooth, I set aside my copy of The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes for Easter reading. But the books I kept returning to, the ones I kept wondering impatiently when my son would be ready to read, were my Harry Potter collection.

I pulled one of the books off the shelf; it happened to be Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I meant to just read a few lines, yet once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. The beauty of re-reading old favorites, of course, is that you can jump in at any point and know exactly what’s happened so far. So it didn’t matter that the particular book I chose was in the middle of the series; I have read and loved these books so well that I might as well have read the preceding book the day before. I was merely rejoining old friends.

Not surprisingly, as soon as I finished re-reading that book, I couldn’t help but grab the next book in the series.

It is a sign of a well-written book that reading it is just as enjoyable when you already know what is about to happen as it is when the ending is a complete mystery. I know the fates of every character in the book; yet I eagerly turn each page, excited to let their story unfold before me yet again. It is like taking a journey on a familiar and well-used road; I know where I’m going and what I’ll see on the way, but I still like to watch the road going past, wondering if I might spy some little detail I’ve missed all the other times I’ve passed by. I never know what new delight I might discover when I’m reading this.