Since I was last blogging, Flopsy has become a pretty fluent reader.  We used the highly recommended 5 step reading scheme that many other HEors recommended to us.  It goes like this:

1. Read to them

2. Read to them

3. Read to them

4. Read to them

5. Read to them

I’m aware she’s done it quite young for a child whose parents follow an autonomous learning route, but the very fact that it’s happened is what’s amazed and delighted us.  I’ve read lots about how children learn to read autonomously, and it’s so wonderful to see it unfolding before our eyes.  We’d heard that a child who decides to learn to read (at whatever age) will do so easily within the space of a few weeks and that’s exactly what’s happened.  I thought it might be interesting (or even helpful to other HEors) to blog the process as it unfolded for Flopsy. 

I think the reason she did it so young, btw, is because she has always, from very early on, been very ‘left-brained’ - analytical, perfectionist etc.  No matter what ‘they’ say about encouraging creativity to even the sides of the brain out, Flopsy is simply a left-brained person.  She’s always loved numbers and letters.  I hate labelling, but this has been such an obvious part of her personality that one can’t ignore its part in her learning to read.  She learnt the names of all the letters of the alphabet at a very young age.  We had a first words book that had the alphabet in capitals on the first page and we had to read it to her over and over again.  I thought this book was fab as I was reading One-to-One, which is inspired by Steiner education.  It says that if children want to learn letters, it’s best to teach capitals first.  However, Flopsy worked out pretty quickly from other books and games/jigsaws which lower-case letters corresponded to which upper-case ones and kind of took that side of it out of our hands!  I think she was only two by the time she knew the alphabet by heart.  I have an instinctive aversion to phonics being the first stage of reading, so we only ever told her the names of the letters, not the sounds they make - that came a lot later when she was asking for help with working out words.

Alongside the learning of the alphabet, she was also building on her love of books.  There’s a fab book called Read With Me: An Apprenticeship Approach to Reading, which my mum recommended to me and which I would thoroughly recommend to any other HEor if you can get hold of a copy - it’s sadly out of print now.  It really spoke to my heart as she says that reading should primarily be about enjoying books, not about decoding words and that the decoding will just come naturally if children spend their early years just being allowed to enjoy books.  I know many children whose enjoyment of books has been sadly hampered by being forced to learn how to decode words too young so I was determined that this wouldn’t happen to my children.  Flopsy, from a very young age, as well as being read to by us from birth, began to look at books on her own and then started to tell us the story in them.  She didn’t do this very much, though, as she likes to know she’s doing things just right, so preferred to only read us books that she knew by heart - we have some brilliant books for this, e.g. Brown Bear, Brown Bear and Red Hat, Blue Hat.  Mopsy will read us any book she can get her hands on, but she doesn’t mind if her words don’t match what she remembers us saying.  Flopsy’s love of books meant she would spend a huge amount of time with a pile beside her just looking through them one by one.  To me, that is reading.  I don’t know how many times I’ve traipsed upstairs wondering why she and Mopsy have been so quiet and concerned about what they’re up to, simply to find them both cuddled up in bed with piles of books around them.

The next stage was recognising words that are important to her, like her name.  I think she was coming up to three when she could consistently recognise her name.  It was at this time that I started to understand what people meant when they talked about children learning to read the ‘whole words’ way.  Mopsy’s real name is Alys, and one day, when we’d been writing on the chalk board together and some of the bits had been rubbed off, Flopsy saw the word ’says’ and told me that it said ‘Alys’.  She’d looked at the shape of the word, and made up her mind what it said based on that.  She’s continued her learning to read in this way.

As she slowly started to recognise more and more words, she began to gain a knowledge of what sounds the letters made.  She’s always enjoyed work books and those children’s magazines, and of course the tv and the cbeebies website, so she’s learnt a lot of letter sounds from those.  When she’s asked us what a word says, we’ve attempted to help her sound it out, but it’s never really helped her much - she just wasn’t seeing words in that way.  Gradually she learnt to recognise more and more words and we were fairly impressed at the number she knew.  But she wasn’t, and this turned out to be the key. 

By the time she was nearly five she knew so many words, but kept telling us that she couldn’t read.  I don’t know what the definition of ‘being able to read’ is, but we kept saying that she could read loads of words and was doing really well.  However, she didn’t really believe us and I think the problem was that she was comparing her reading to ours.  Her confidence was low because the only people whose reading ability she could compare hers to were adults.  I offered for her to do a reading age test with me, confident that she’d know enough words to come up with a high reading age and hopeful that it would prove to her that she was reading well for her age.  She said she wanted to and it came up as 6.75 - about 2 years ahead of her actual age.  When I told her, the affect was incredible.  She suddenly really got into reading to us.  Before this, she wouldn’t attempt to read things in front of us, and we suspected she knew far more than we realised. 

After doing the reading age test, DH bought her six of the level 1 books from the Ladybird Read It Yourself series.  They’re lovely books because they’re not based on phonics.  She’s looked at a few friends reading scheme books and not been very taken with them, but these ladybird books she loved.  They’re real stories - fairy tales - that are written very, very simply at level 1, and also very repetetively.  She took a while to get the confidence to try reading them to us and we read them to her a lot at first, but then she started to have a go herself and really took to them.  Because of reading the ‘whole words’ way, her reading voice really flowed and the story was more important than the words.  In other words, she didn’t have to spend time working out how to decode each sentence word by word.  She was very meticulous and didn’t move onto the next sentence until she’d decided that she’d got every word right.  We were careful never to correct her, and if she asked us what a word said, we told her outright after a short pause to give her a bit more chance to work it out herself.  We had to really resist teaching her how to sound these words out as it just annoyed her and made her stop reading!

After a few weeks, she decided she was good enough at the level 1 books for us to get her some level 2 books.  These took  her less time to get confident with and I think that within the space of  week she had moved onto level 3 and fairly immediately, level 4.  Alongside all this, we’ve frequently found her reading to her sisters and she often comes up to us with something and asked us if it says what she thinks it says.  It really has only taken a few weeks for her to become fluent and she’s clearly working out a lot of words for herself, simply based on her knowledge of the words she knows well already, and based on the context they’re in.  Her reading obsession has waned a little now she’s got there, but I’m not at all surprised after such an intense period of learning that she’s having a break for a while.  I’m intrigued to find out when she feels confident enough to be reading longer books to herself, but at the moment she’s very happy just reading any picture books that come to hand, and any signs or adult book titles or anything that she happens to see around.  It’s been such a delight to be a part of and I feel grateful every single day that she has learnt at home, rather than at school, so that I can share her joy with her and not worry about her being put off books by too much pushing.