Learning to read without schooling

I've recently discovered Peter Gray's blog, Freedom to Learn, at Psychology Today and have found it excellent reading.  In one of his posts, he has asked for stories about self directed learning.  One of the topics suggested is learning to read without schooling, and I thought it Eldest's story was an appropriate example.

When Eldest was about 4 years old, she adamantly insisted that she did not want to learn how to read.  Ever.  I asked her how she would go about living life without learning to read, since there would be times when she would want to seek out information in books.  She answered that she would get me or Dh to read to her.  I did point out that we wouldn't always be available, but she still insisted she was not going to learn how to read.

Now, one thing I learned fairly quickly with Eldest is that she wasn't the sort you can sit down and "teach" things to.  Attempts to do so tended to backfire. (She's better able to tolerate it now that she's older, but it's still far from her ideal way to learn.)  She has always had high expectations of herself, and when she couldn't pick things up perfectly the first time she tried, she was by far the hardest on herself than anyone else.  One of my biggest challenges as a home schooling parent was to help her accept failure as a path to success, and that it's perfectly normal and acceptable to not get things right the first time.  There would be a great deal of anxiety, and she would immediately pull back from the topic, no matter how interesting she found it, or how motivated she started out.  I remember having similar feelings (still have them, actually), and I definitely remember the almost physical pain such feelings involved.  So the last thing I was going to do was make her learn how to read.  Nor was I going to give her a hard time about her proclamations about never learning how.  On the contrary, I knew that if she was going to learn how to read, the best thing I could do was just read a lot myself - either to her directly, or for my own pleasure in her vicinity.

Dh and I have always been bibliophiles, and even with all our moves, our homes have been filled with books.  It was the natural thing for us to get lots of books for our daughter.  One was the set, My First Steps to Reading, which we have since passed on.  Each book in the set followed a child who was Little "a" or Little "b" and so on through the alphabet.  On the inside covers was an image of all the little letter children in alphabetical order, with a few things near them with names starting with their letters.  We'd read these to her, starting out by singing through the alphabet, asking her if she could find the different children (each wore their letter on the front of their shirts), or some other object around them.  It was a fun game we had with her.

When Eldest was 5, she was still insisting that she didn't want to learn how to read, but every now and then, I would catch her teaching herself to both read and write.  I remember walking into a room and finding her with one of these First Steps books.  She was looking at the children in a row on the inside cover, then copying the letters on their shirts on her chalk board.  Thankfully, she never noticed me coming into the room, and I immediately backed out.  If she had seen me, she would have immediately stopped, and probably wouldn't have tried again for a long time, in the off chance I might walk in unexpectedly.  Other times, I would be busy with something or other and she would walk into the room with  book, asking me about a specific word.  I'd tell her what the word was, she'd thank me and leave.  I knew not to try the usual recommended suggestion of asking the child to sound a word out, think it through, etc.  If I'd done that, she would have stopped asking for help, and stopped trying to read. She didn't limit herself to children's books, either, and with the exception of some older, more fragile, books, we never restricted her access to any books we had. 

By the age of 6, Eldest was fully literate, no longer needing to write out the letters and words to figure them out, and reading well beyond her age level.  She was also a voracious reader, diligently working her way through our home library.  At age 10, one of her favorite books was a university Sociology textbook we picked up at a garage sale.  She rarely needed to ask me how to read a word, or what a word meant.  Today, she loves words, and her favorite books include dictionaries, a thesaurus, and Elements of Style.

Youngest is also largely a self taught reader.  It took her a bit longer, and she didn't develop an actual love of reading until a year or two ago when, during our weekly library trips, she discovered her love of mythology.  She's not the logophile her sister is, but few people are. ;-)  Her learning to read was so gradual, I really can't pinpoint any age when she went from being illiterate to literate, nor can I even succinctly explain how she learned to read.

I do, however, remember the day I myself became a reader.  We weren't big readers in my own home, though we had many books.  My parents didn't have time to sit and read to me, and if they did, it wouldn't have been in English, a language they still are not comfortable reading in.  I started school in first grade with absolutely no familial preparation for reading.  I remember sitting at my desk holding a book with a line drawing of a young girl.  The teacher asked me to read that page.  I told her I didn't know how to read.  She asked me to say, "Mary."

"Mary," I repeated.

"There," she told me.  "You just read that page."

The teacher then continued on with the class, but I remembered looking down at the page in awe.  Suddenly, that strange group of lines under the image of a girl was the name, "Mary."  Something had clicked in my mind, and it was like a revelation.  It wasn't long before I was able to delve into the world of books, and spent much of my school years nose deep into some novel.  I actually got into trouble for reading too much, and reading ahead of the class.  I didn't care.  Once that door in my mind opened, nothing else mattered.  Books had become a major part of my world. It saddens me when I think of people who leave school swearing never to read another book again, having been traumatized by being forced to read throughout their school years.  Reading, to them, was something painful, and they couldn't wait to get away from doing it.  How much better could it have been if, rather than forcing kids to read because it was decided that kids should be reading at specific levels based on their ages, they were allowed to learn to read at their own pace, based on their own initiative and interest.

Sure, they might not all have become bibliophiles, but at least reading wouldn't be something hated, and to be avoided for the rest of their lives!