If you would ask my dear daughter (DD) how she learned to read, she would tell you that I taught her to. But that is not entirely true. I cannot take credit for it because I barely taught her how to read.
I think she learned to read intuitively, all by herself.
My DD was (and still is) a bright child, and I say this with all humility and modesty. When she learned to speak at 2 years old, she spoke in complete sentences, not merely phrases. She hardly went through a babbling stage, articulating and pronouncing words correctly.
I was so surprised and couldn’t believe that she could say supercalifragilisticexpialidocious straight and without error when she was asked to repeat it the first time at two. (My dear son couldn’t do it even at four).
Because I was keen on homeschooling following Charlotte Mason‘s (CM) educational philosophies, which prescribes no formal academics before six, I felt no pressure to teach her how to read early on.
Learning her ABC
But that didn’t stop me to let our (me and my late husband’s) friends teach my DD the alphabet when she was about 3 to 4 years old, because CM didn’t really prohibit a child from learning to read early as long as it was done in an informal playful way, not forced.
So our friends were the ones who actually taught my DD the alphabet as I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember teaching her her ABCs.
I do remember, however, a time when she once asked me how to spell her name in a magnetic alphabet board given to her as a gift. I showed her how to do it, once, and with a new-found skill, my DD would spell out her name repeatedly on the board. I might have taught her a few other words to spell, but the most I could remember were “dog” and “cat”.
Thinking about it now, maybe that’s where she got the idea that letters form words and combining their sounds is how you say/read them.
We also have several hand-me-down First Words picture books which she would “read” by pointing to and identifying the pictures. And maybe it also helped her because the picture had labels and she may have probably discerned the words and remembered them. I don’t know, I am just speculating.
Eventually, my DD would attempt to read and sometimes would casually ask her Tatay (back when he was still alive) how to read a word she would randomly see on, for example, a shirt or a billboard. But such instances were very few.
And from there, I think my DD just learned to read by herself.
Which may not really be surprising at all because there are research that proves kids do learn to read by themselves, given the right opportunity and environment. But there are also research that says otherwise, that kids need to be formally taught to read. But I think it doesn’t matter how a child learns to read at all. What matters is that a child learns to read.
But come to think of it, if we would ask ourselves, we would barely remember how we learned to read, don’t we? So I think there must be an element of a natural process in learning to read.
So a few weeks before my DD formally started Kindergarten, to check if she really knows her ABCs, I casually asked her over lunch to write out each letter in the air with big arm movements.
After that (in a separate session), I asked her to make the sound of each letter of the alphabet. Here was where I taught her a bit, either correcting her for the sounds she got mistaken, or teaching her the other sounds in addition to the one she already knows for a given letter, e.g., the different sounds for letter C, G.
I did this for maybe a couple of sessions.
When I was sure that she knows her alphabet by heart, I picked a book, opened it, and asked her to read it, which she did. Very slowly at first, of course.
I just corrected her when she got a word wrong.
How Charlotte Mason taught reading
CM actually approached reading lessons a bit differently.
While there is an element of phonics in her method, she actually prescribed that children be taught to read by sight (“sight reading”), by this she meant that a child should know that a specific combination of letters is a “symbol” for a particular word, pretty much how we learn or know that a particular flag represents a particular country, or that a swoosh is Nike.
So if, for example, we see a combination of the letters d-o-g, we should know that it is a representation of the word “dog”.
That is one way CM proposed how children should learn to read, in addition to a variation of phonics. This is how I understand CM’s approach to reading.
Since I have no experience teaching reading the CM way, I cannot vouch for its effectiveness. And I also cannot explain it in detail. But if you want to know and learn her step-by-step instruction, you can refer to her first volume, Home Education, on pages 199-222, and read about it.
But as I said, I think it does not matter how a child learns to read, as long as s/he learns to read. So go with the method you think would be most effective for your child.
What to read
I came up with my list of reading exercise books for my Kindergartener by taking into consideration CM’s guidelines.
…he may just as well learn his reading exercises, both prose and poetry, as recitation lessons. Little poems suitable to be learned in this way will suggest themselves at once; but perhaps prose is better… Short fables, and such graceful, simple prose… as we have in Mrs Gatty’s Parables from Nature, and, still better, in Mrs Barbauld’s prose poems, are very suitable.
Volume 1, pages 204-205
…so soon as the child can read at all, he should read for himself, and to himself, history, legends, fairy tales, and other suitable manner.
Volume 1, page 227
He should have practice, too, in reading aloud, for the most part, in the books he is using for his term’s work. This should include a good deal of poetry…
Volume 1, page 227
Lesson duration
…reading lessons must be short; ten minutes or a quarter of an hour of fixed attention is enough…
Volume 1, page 230
So we spend five minutes each for Filipino and English, totalling 10 minutes of reading practice daily.
Reading resources/Book list
So here are the books we used for my DD’s reading exercises.
Filipino
- Aklat Adarna 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Books used for Poetry
- Mga Pabula: Unang Aklat
- Filipino Bible parables
English
- Nursery tales used in Literature
- Books used for Poetry
- The Fables of Aesop
- Bible parables
We practice reading Poetry twice a week and the rest of the literature genre once a week.
I didn’t use Parables from Nature for reading practice because it is not yet a school book (it’s scheduled for Year 1) so I used Bible parables instead following a list I found in the Internet and which is linked above.
For parables, we used a diglot (bilingual) English-Tagalog Bible with the former in KJV and the latter an Ang Biblia translation.
Reading exercise samples
I have a lot of pics and videos during my DD’s Kindergarten year since she was enrolled in a homeschool service provider and was, therefore, required to submit a portfolio. But to be honest, I’m so lazy when it comes to documenting our homeschool so in the succeeding years I barely have anything to show.
So enjoy the pics and videos while it lasts.
That’s it.
In my next post I share how my DD did Copywork during her Kindergarten year so stay tuned.
Featured image by Debby Hudson on Unsplash.