Strategies for Improving Reading, Writing and Creative Expression in Children (Year 1 – 4)

I developed the following for the mum of one of my daughter's (school-educated) friends. Although incredibly bright, they were repeatedly being told that he wasn't "working to potential" or "achieving" what he could. However, they were not being given any strategies to improve the situation. Here are my thoughts:

General Principles

1. Start Right. This means being well-exercised, well-fed, having used the toilet, not being too tired, and having “full love tanks”. Children are developing rapidly, and pushing their abilities on a daily basis. It is not surprising that if they are to do their best, they must start right.
2. When in doubt, split it up. For every subject, you will find that there are ways of splitting up the required elements of a subject to make sub-categories. If you can tease apart the separate skills, develop them in isolation, and gradually put them back together again, you will achieve far more than by attempting to force your way through with the subject as a whole. It is far easier to catch the small errors in an individual sub-category, than to notice these same errors when working at a larger scale. For example, a child who is having problems with their penmanship may fail to produce the required three sentences for a writing exercise given in Year 1 for science within the allotted time period. It may be presumed that the child does not have a grasp of the subject matter, that they have used their time inefficiently, or any number of reasons. Because success at the basic skill (penmanship) has been tied to the overall success in the subject (science), any evaluation of science skills will therefore be tainted by the child’s challenges with their penmanship. And the same could be said for a child struggling with reading, basic numeracy, etc.
3. True success breeds confidence, confidence the willingness to take risks, and the willingness to risk will enable further success. Without this cycle, we all loose our focus and willingness to tackle new things. This can be especially damaging, though, for a young child. Therefore, if by isolating skills you can reward successes on an individual basis, and provide assistance for skills that the child is struggling with, you can enable the child to walk – to run – to dance – and to soar!
4. Always look forward to the next baby step. It is very easy to get bogged down in the problem a child appears to be having. Sometimes – not always, but sometimes – the real problem is that the child is bored! J If you can bring in the next step, or put a challenge to it, you can often excite the child to work towards the next challenge – and succeed! Equally, this mentality helps the teacher/parent to keep in their mind where they are heading, and more importantly why the skill in question is (or perhaps is not?) important in the grand scheme of things.

Improving Reading

1. Choose interesting books. More than anything else, I think that the choice of books is the number one point in determining whether a child will be interested enough and self-motivated enough to overcome the challenges of learning to read fluently and extensively later in life. A good choice is a book that:
1. Pushes towards the next step (and sometimes skips a boring step!)
2. Is interesting to the child in question
3. Encourages thought (fluff is fine for fun, but I am hesitant to use fluff for ‘real’ reading, except on rare occasions)
4. That is non-fiction or fiction, and includes a wide range of subject matter
5. That may be co-read, or read with assistance from a parent or tutor
2. Read daily.
3. Reward every page, but only when the book is done. We keep a running reading log, which includes the date we read the book, the title, the name of the author, the number of pages for each book, and a running tally of total number of pages. When we first began this process in Reception, we rewarded every 100 pages read with a sticker. When the child read 1000 pages, they had the right to have a book purchased for them from the store within certain parameters – there was a maximum price set for the book, and the book had to meet the requirements of an “interesting book” (as defined above). This system worked shockingly well, and I soon had to extend the number of pages required for a new book to be purchased! Even now, in Year 2, we continue to keep a reading log. We no longer give out separate prizes for number of pages read – the tally itself has become a testament to the achievement and now serves as an effective record of success.
4. Read to excite, captivate and interest. Sometimes to get a child started on an “interesting book” their imagination needs to be captivated by the characters, the prose, the adventure or the subject matter. Often reading the first few chapters and leaving the book on a cliff-hanger can be enough to encourage the child to pick it up and read the rest for themselves. Regardless, instilling a love of books needs to be considered a separate sub-category of improving reading to having the mechanical knowledge of how to read. And the best way to instil a love of reading is to read to your child from a wide selection of interesting books – classics, fairy tales, children’s poetry, ancient oral histories (such as the Gilgamesh Epic) and from non-fiction books above your child’s reading level on subjects that will interest them.
5. Separate reading and comprehension skills. As with a love of books, comprehension skills need to be separated from mechanical reading skills. To begin with, a child needs to learn to comprehend a story that is read to them at a separate time and place from the opportunity to decode words. As they progress, the two activities can slowly be integrated, but need not be rushed. Furthermore, comprehension skills need to be separated from writing skills (which almost always lag behind reading and comprehension skills). Dictation exercises, as described below, can be an excellent solution to this problem.
6. Include poetry in your reading program. Reading regular selections of poetry together and even memorising a poem once a week or once a month together as a family or class will help develop skills across communication disciplines. It will develop reading skills (rhythm, phonetic awareness, enunciation, pronunciation, word recognition, etc.), writing skills (by building available vocabulary and expanding literary experiences) and communication and memorisation skills, both critical to fluency in English and success in school. Furthermore, confidence can be built in reading through this activity, even for a child who cannot read the poem – because they WILL be able to “read” it once they have it memorised. Finally, it can be used as an excellent “copywork exercise” for developing writing skills (see below.)

Improving Writing

1. Write daily. Even if it is just a sentence, just like reading, it should be practiced regularly. Consider changing what is being written to be as appropriate as possible to the child’s interests – perhaps copying out a recipe the child wants to try from a library book, writing a letter to Grandma, keeping a journal, or leaving a note for daddy when he’s due home late one night.
2. Copy other people’s work. Once a child has the basics of letter formation, it is very tedious to go over individual letters repetitively. However, as further practice is vitally important – both for letter formation, and for developing vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure and fluency – copying out well-written poetry or prose is a far more interesting use of time, and achieves the purpose well. This is especially true with cursive or joined up writing. The student should be strongly encouraged to use their best handwriting for this exercise.
3. Separate spelling from writing. Make sure the child knows when their first priority is to focus on handwriting by taking the task of spelling consciously out of writing through copywork. Provide spellings when focusing on creative expression. Conversely, spend specific time focused on spelling words, building slowly towards the goal of fluency.
4. Practice dictation. Dictation is the practice of one person speaking for someone else to write down. It can be used both to develop spelling, to determine comprehension (in reading and in other subjects) and for creative writing.
1. For Spelling. It is one thing to spell words in a list that has been studied all week. It is another to have a sentence read out to you and need to remember spellings as you write. Therefore, practice combining spelling into writing through the practice of dictation can aid in developing this skill. Start with small sentences (The dog and the cat sat on a mat.) and eventually work up to paragraphs from classic prose. Always try to make these sentences as interesting as possible based on the child’s abilities.
2. For Comprehension and Creative Writing. The ideas for stories (not to mention answers to questions for other subjects) can be readily forgotten in the process of trying to remember the mechanics of writing. If, however, the child tells you the story (etc.) and you write it down for them, it may prove that their stories are more interesting and their answers more thorough than previously encountered. TWO POINTS TO KEEP IN MIND:

i. It is vital that you use your best handwriting – in whatever font you are teaching – for this exercise, as the child needs excellence demonstrated at all times.

ii. Once written out, the child can come back and copy out their words in their own writing. This enables the child to succeed separately at two challenging tasks, without the manipulation of one task interfering with the success of the other.

5. Spur creativity at every opportunity. Read creative works of fiction and poetry, tell stories as you drive, make up translations for animals sounds and behaviour, play with puppets, and add new vocabulary regularly, encouraging good pronunciation and explaining the meaning of the words clearly and carefully.
6. Develop fine motor skills through other activities. Whether it be small-piece building work, art, music, cookery, manipulation of tools, all of these skills will encourage hand-eye coordination, necessary for the mechanics of writing, but in a far more interesting and less stressful way, while expanding the mind and the wealth of experiences to draw on to facilitate reading, writing and creativity.

The Heart of Science

For the last two years I have been trying to follow the Well-Trained Mind's guide as a starting point, and have been gradually fine-tuning it to suit our family.

Recently we've taken another look at the Science curriculum, and found that it didn't go far enough for my physicist husband. Here's some of his thoughts on the subject:

Education is not the accumulation of facts, but learning to think.

• Empiricism is at the heart of the scientific method.
• There may be many areas of human knowledge that are not empirical, but they cannot be classified as science. (e.g. we have no absolute scale on which we can measure, say, 'beauty'.)
• So in many ways 'science' is only concerned with a fairly small chunk of human experience - that which can be measured and quantified.
• Another key value for a scientist is the concept of 'falsifiability.' In short, any hypothesis that I come up with is only valuable if I can also propose an experiment that would disprove it. If I propose "All swans are white", then I can then add "and seeing a black swan would disprove this hypothesis.". Hypotheses that withstand rigorous testing may be upgraded to 'theories.'
• If we're going to teach our kids science, then first and foremost we need to teach them to be good empiricists, and to know the tools of measurement, to be familiar with the ruler, the clock, the scales, the thermometer, the voltmeter.
• Science also expects repeatability - if I measure the length of a piece of string and you measure it too, our answers should agree. If they don't, then something is wrong.
• A good scientist must hold on to a healthy degree of humility, because no matter how cherished his beliefs, a single experiment, or even a few lines of math, may prove him wrong. In 2004, Steven Hawking made the headlines for reversing a position he'd held strongly for 30 years, and lost a bet with a friend in the process. Interestingly, it was his own work that had disproved his earlier position!
• Summary: Teach our kids how to measure. Teach them how to test ideas. Teach them how to distinguish between testable and non-testable hypotheses. Science education cannot be about 'this is true because I say so,' or 'this is true because the textbook says so,' but 'this is true because we can observe and test it.'

Heather's Top Ten Requirements for Successful Homeschooling

What does it take to succeed at home schooling? Here are my top ten requirements for homeschooling parents.

1. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to engage fully with the process. You can't leave your brain at the door in this business.
2. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to be a lifelong learner - they must make a careful study of their child, of the basic pedagogical methods, of the available curriculum, and then they must craft for themselves the best approach for their family as a whole and each individual child.
3. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to take the time to translate long-term objectives (Read Shakespeare in grade nine) to short-term objectives (master basic phonics and develop pre-reading abilities) and daily tasks ("M" says "mmmm" "M-m-m-m0mmy").
   
4. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to investigate the opportunities their community affords for extension and enrichment activities, and then commit themselves to involving their child(ren) in age- and interest-appropriate activities each week.
5. A successful homeschooling parent must have a place where they and the children can work each day - preferably a place that doesn't need to be cleared to eat the lunch; and a place to store the books, papers, pens, etc. that every classroom, no matter how small, may generate.
   
6. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to provide structure for their children's daily life, because children need to know what to expect.
7. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to throw the lesson plan out the window today, because sometimes real people and real life trump lessons.
8. A successful homeschooling parent must have a back-up -- preferably their spouse -- who believes in the project, reminds them of the long-term plan, problem solves when things get challenging, and plays the role of the principal.
9. A successful homeschooling parent must always refuse to play the comparison game -- must believe in themselves and their child sufficiently that they do not fall prey to what is a devastatingly frequent experience at any homeschooling event or activity ("Well, you know, when Jonny was two he could spell all the names of everyone in our family - evenGrandfather Methuselah." ) can have you doubting everything you've ever done when your seven-year-old is still working out how to sit still long enough to read the word "cat" never mind spell it.
10. A successful homeschooling parent must be willing to make appropriate mid-course corrections. The curriculum you thought you loved in September may just not be working -- but if you catch on to that by the middle of October, you will save much pain and anguish, and may well have successfully accomplished the underlying principle by June because of your change in approach.

Homeschooling Critique #2 - Quality of Education

Critique number two is often a question of whether the adults involved have the education and skills necessary to educate their children as well or better than an institutional setting. I suspect that if you were to suddenly disband the institutional education setting over night and ask all parents to home educate it would be an impossible disaster. Home schooling is not for everyone. It wouldn't work financially, it wouldn't work with people's priorities and values and time, it wouldn't work with people's attitudes towards their own education. For these and so many other reasons, home educating is only ever going to be a viable option for some.

The sad thing is that not every parent who wants to home educate, or tries to home educate is successful. Now, this is a very unusual statement to read on any homeschooling blog/website/book, but I think its a very valuable statement. My conversations with teachers on the subject of homeschooling often goes along something like this: "I had a child come back to school after being homeschooled for several years, and it was very difficult - they were behind in so many things, really far ahead in others, they couldn't wait their turn, they always wanted to be right on top of me when I was doing the demonstration, etc."

Not all home schooled children are better off at home -- but unfortunately the only homeschooled children that my teaching friends have had the opportunity to encounter were those for whom everyone had obviously agreed homeschooling wasn't working out for. They had not had the opportunity to see those for whom homeschooling was a success.

I don't think there can be any hard and fast proof for this one, but the increased value top Universities such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc., are putting on actively recruiting (and frequently giving full-ride scholarships to) home educated young people says something to me about the success of a large number of homeschooling families to adequately and effectively educate their children -- not just to be "average" but to shine in the midst of the brightest of company.

Homeschooling Critique #1 - Socialisation

The biggest critique of home educated/homeschooled children is that they are poorly socialised - a fact which is unfortunately sometimes true. But it is my observation that often those children who are poorly socialised (or perhaps differently socialised might be a better term) come from families where everyone is a bit different. And my observation of children in school is that those who are poorly socialised come from families where everyone is a bit different. I suspect the main difference is that there is probably a higher proportion of differently-socialised families homeschooling than there are in the average school system.

Every homeschooled child is different. Some may well have turned out more poorly socialised if they went to school than if they stayed home, some the other way around. My personal belief is that socialisation is something you learn first and foremost at home. So if you want your children to have good social skills than the best thing you can possibly do is interact regularly with people in a multitude of social settings, with people from a multitude of ages and cultures. By doing so in front of your children, you will model positive socialisation to your children and have ample opportunities to teach and encourage their efforts towards positive socialisation themselves.

Defining Canadian Classical Homeschooling

What does it mean to be Canadian? The key to being Canadian, as far as I'm concerned, is being a part of a rich, multicultural society. To be Canadian is really to be international - our culture, our country, our language, our heritage is full of the strands of the people of the world. My thesis? That if you understand the world, its cultures, religions and histories, than you will understand Canada.

Classical education is a term that has been revived in the last 90 years by educators who hark back to the medieval system of the trivium. It has been laid over the 20th century model of a twelve-year education system as follows:

Grammar Stage: Years 1 - 4; students are expected to learn the grammar or facts of the various courses of study.
Logic Stage: Years 5 - 8; students learn formal logic, and begin to ask questions about the facts of each subject.
Rhetoric Stage: Years 9 - 12; students focus on expression of ideas, building on the facts and logic study of the previous eight years.

Classical education is often based heavily on the historical cycle, and therefore focuses its energy each year on a given period of history and a related discipline of science.

Ancient History ~ Biology
Medieval History ~ Earth Science
Early Modern History ~ Chemistry
Modern History ~ Physics/Computer Science

This four year cycle is then repeated for each stage of the trivium.

Homeschooling, or home educating as it is called in England, is simply educating a child outside of the normal structure of institutional schooling. Home schooled children may be educated in small groups (a "co-op" approach), or at their kitchen table. They have the potential advantages of a small class size and education tailored to their learning styles, strengths, weaknesses and interests. Their schedules can be flexible enough to fit around other social activities (such as skating or orchestra, Girl Guides or family time), and their social interactions can readily include multi-age and even multi-generational options.

You Have to Know Your Child

When a baby is first born, it (mostly) cannot hold its head up. The muscles in its neck simply aren't strong enough to manage this task. I was watching someone recently with their four-week-old. They were holding him on their lap, facing them but in a sitting position, and helping their son practice holding his head up. He wasn't really trying, but I know that in a couple of weeks, he'll be picking his head up off his mum's shoulder and watching his brothers and sister run around playing, and he'll be thrilled at his new-found skill.

Which is to say that you have to think ahead when you're teaching. Lets face it, our board books were well loved before we actually got to read through an entire one from start to finish in one sitting, but now the girls can't find books to satiate their appetite for words. A toddler needs introduced to the idea of building a block tower, and encouraged to practice his hand/eye co-ordination by trying it long before they can do anything but knock it down, but the lego structures my seven-year-old nephew can create now rival his dad's. We had to sing the alphabet song and trip over the magnetic alphabet pieces for a long time before our daughter started asking what the letters were, and unless we took her finger and helped her to trace each shape as we clean them up together for the #*&^! time today, she would still be working out the process of deciphering one from another. It takes mental effort to think ahead, but it is a necessary step for any educator, if they want to keep their students engaged and working to their fullest potential.

Furthermore, teaching "at age level" as a solution to this will rarely work. A boisterous seven-year-old boy may well need to be working on advanced soccer dribbling techniques, but may still be struggling with his alphabet - mostly because its too difficult to sit down and complete the official work in the official way. A five-year-old girl, on the other hand, may well enjoy having the entirety of a high school world history textbook (I recommend the Usbourne History of the World!) read to her over the course of her kindergarten year ... and you'll be amazed at how much of the information she retains. My almost four-year-old is learning to read (she even let Grandma and Grandpa listen last night!) but is steadfastly wed to her diapers and can't really understand why mommy thinks the toilet would be preferable.

All this is to set the stage for the following: as a parent, you knew when to encourage your child to take their first tentative steps - sometime between 8 - 18 months. You knew when to encourage their first words, when to encourage them to use a ride-on toy, when to first have food directly off your plate, whatever it was. And I would suspect that it wasn't the exact same day as the other kids in your pre-natal class were ready for it. And the same is true in education. Each and every child is unique. I firmly believe that there is no possible way an off-the-shelf-curriculum, bought based on age-level, could possibly be appropriate in every subject for every child (or in fact any subject, for any child!!)

The bottom line? You know your child best. Observe them. Watch what they're interested in. Figure out the next step. Make sure that you and your spouse are clear on your really long-term goals (by 18, they should be able to live independently on their own and have the opportunity to go towards whatever post-secondary experience they are interested in, for example). Look through curriculum, consider the general course of study suggested, get the major points and make sure you cover them on your child's own pace. Always be a couple of steps ahead of yourself - so that you know where you're trying to get to and are ready with the next challenge when the 'teachable moment' appears. If you can get your child through the terrible twos, then you can certainly teach them to read, write and 'rith - you just have to know your child.