As I mentioned a while ago, I'm now reading the Narnia books to Liam. We've got through two so far (The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe and The Magician's Nephew, in that order), because we have been interspersing them with The Spiderwick Chronicles, which Liam borrowed from a friend, and some Magic Treehouse Books, which my sister just gave Liam last week as a late Christmas present.
As I said, I am really enjoying reading the Narnia books out loud. The language and even the stories are so much richer than many of the modern kids books we've been reading, which I guess are designed to be easily read and digested by primary school kids, with their short sentences and relatively simple language and plots lines.
We had a parent-teacher night at school the other day (not individual interviews, just a general session with all the parents to talk about 'the class two child' and the curriculum for this year etc.), and Liam's teacher, Margie, gave us a handout about the art of reading.
In the Steiner curriculum the kids are taught to read and write rather differently and more slowly than in the mainstream in Australia. They started writing last year, in class one, first learning their letters, then starting to write out sentences (copying from the board) from the stories Margie tells them each day. They are building up a list of 'words we know' (starting with things like 'and' 'in' 'the'), but at this stage they are still only reading what they themselves have written. They won't get their first 'reader' until later in the year, and that will consist of poems and stories which they already know.
This fits in not only with Steiner teachings, but also with the research that shows that starting all children in reading and writing at five means that those who are not ready at can become frustrated and stunted and often never really catch up or learn to enjoy reading, while children who start at seven have caught up with their earlier starting peers by about the age of ten, while avoiding the problems for those who weren't ready earlier. (know I should really look up a reference here, but I'm bound to run out of time anyway, so just google if you are interested).
Anyway, the problem this does present is when children, and/or their parents, start to feel worried that some of their (non-Steiner) friends can read, and they can't. We tried to avoid having this issue with Liam by explaining up front that in lots of schools they start reading and writing in kindy, rather than having so much outdoor (and indoor for that matter) play time. Since outdoor playtime was always his favourite part of the day, he considered it a fair trade. We didn't even need to point out that he could french knit and knit and sew etc whereas those other kids (mostly) couldn't - he'd probably give all that the flick in exchange for more outdoor play time!
But, we also have had it pretty easy since he has taught himself to read - by word recognition - far ahead of the curve as far as his own school goes. I guess just the amount that we have always read to him, plus maybe a genetic pre-disposition (he probably could hardly help it with such bookish parents), helped with this.*
So Margie handed out this article partly in response to some parents reporting their children's anxiety. It's for the parents, not the children, but the parents need to have the faith first, I think, that we are doing the right thing for our kids. But the article made me feel even better about reading the Narnia books, and also about me reading it to him, rather than the other way around. Last year we were doing a lot of him reading to me (because he wanted to), but this year it's now mostly me reading to him (not just in the case of the CS Lewis books either), and a part of me had started worrying that I wasn't encouraging him in his own reading enough, especially now school's back and light's out is a bit earlier - so not as much reading on his own in bed either.
It's called The Winged Horse: An essay on the Art of Reading, by Henry Barnes. I guess the gist of the article is in this paragraph
"When had this boy first started to learn to read? It was not in his reading lessons, when he first struggled to spell out words, but when he listened to the stories which were told and read aloud to him, into which he entered with his whole being. For reading is an art—the art of entering with one's whole soul into an experience outside of oneself. It is a gleaning of the sunlight hidden in the hard kernal of the word...The technique of reading the printed word is a specialized branch of the reading process and should no more be confused with it than the technique of raising and lowering the fingers should be confused with the art of the pianist."
Barnes goes on to compare the teaching of reading to that of swimming - just as the first step in swimming is to get children comfortable in the water, not to teach techniques, the first step in learning to read is to give them a "love and enjoyment of the great stories and poems which are the element in which the reader swims." He adds
"Learning new words, practicing work families, sounding out syllables, all of this necessary work belongs in special lessons which parallel the reading lessons, but are not allowed to destroy the germinating, imaginative process of reading itself."
But the part of the article that really got me?
Quoting Nathanial Hawthorne in his 1851 introduction to his Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales:
"In performing this pleasant task... the author has not always thought it necessary to write downward in order to meet the comprehension of children. He has generally suffered the them to soar, whenever such was its tendency, and when he himself was buoyant enough to follow without effort."
And Barnes adds in what I consider the 'money quote':
"It is not the poverty-stricken renderings of obvious and ordinary events which we should give children as their first experiences in reading. Let us have the courage to do what our forefathers did... let us give them the truly great stories, fairy tales, and poems, told by the masters of the language... with the right guidance, the difficulties of the vocabulary will prove no stumbling block and the beauty of the language will itself prove a most potent educational force. Let us have confidence in the bouyancy of language, as we do in water, for language is one of the great creative powers of the race. And let us not fail to value the educative power of what is half-understood in what the children read. This strange word, often beautiful in sounds, placed like an emerald in its native rock, stirs the imagination and allows the child's soul to surmise a shadowy world which it will one day understand but which is now veiled in mystery. Isn't this reaching out to grasp what cannot yet be fully understood an important part of every growth?"
___________
*Having said that, I should add that his writing is nowhere near at the standard of his reading. He is probably among the slower in the class at this, as at most fine motor skill activities, like knitting and sewing (bit like his mother in this area too!). I talked to Margie about this too, but that's another post.
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