Reading materials-and resumption of Home ed meetings · Friday August 31, 2007 by Ann
We have been down the caravan for a few days again-making the most of this last bit of summer-whilst it lasts, but confess we are looking forward to having the pool to ourselves again after Monday! We took step grand daughter Nancy with us, Laura, a home ed friend of Lucy’s who is staying here for a couple of weeks, Lucy’s cousins, Madeline and Claire and a close friend and her two small children. We have had lots of fun-the children have been in the pool for simply hours and we have been for long walks up and down the river. Yesterday we picked loads of blackberries and found an apple tree on common land, that I have never noticed before and we scrumped some apples. Then of course, all of the children made blackberry and apple crumble-good job we picked lots of fruit!
Tomorrow Lucy has a singing lesson and then Lucy and Laura will be travelling with Alice up to a home ed friend’s fancy dress birthday party. Lucy and Laura have sewn their own costumes and tomorrow have to shop for the last few bits they need to complete their outfits and for a present for their friend, before meeting Alice from work. Then they will all travel up to Staffordshire for the party together, staying overnight.
David has gone off to Sheffield for the weekend, staying with other HE friends. I’ll probably blog again after they all get back.
This next bit was prompted by a none home friend asking questions and I have been meaning to post about it again for ages-but just got distracted.
After Lucy was diagnosed with such severe dyslexia (whilst still at school) we tried all of the recommended routes of reading materials and tried many reading schemes (including Toe by Toe and Reading reflex) as she simply could not read a word aged 8+.
Each time we ended up with her panicking and crying hysterically-even if I out the timer on to do just two minutes of reading work.
Luckily we found out about home education not long after that initial diagnosis-and it was such a relief to find out about it. I think I have said before that as David and Alice had such difficulty in the middle school, it was clear that Lucy simply would not cope there as her difficulties were so much more severe than theirs.
As David was expressing that he no longer wanted his life anymore, and Alice beginning to mix with the ‘wrong’ crowd as she struggle I was frantically searching for alternatives-thank goodness, somewhere I had heard the term “Education Otherwise” and that is what I put into the search engine-as I explored the results, I knew I had found the answer-and the rest is history.
Someone asked me recently, what reading materials we had used, if Lucy was so upset by the dyslexia reading schemes.
The answer of course is -just about everything else that Lucy has been interested in! For a long, long time, I (and her dad and anyone else willing to help) have read whatever she wanted, out loud to her. We took all of the pressure off her, allowing a love of words and of stories to develop. We have commented before on the use of the Calibre Audio Library
and Lucy also chose all sorts of glossy magazines, a tarot card book, Barrington Stokes books , television pages in magazines-and lately newspapers.
Overwhelmingly though the best resource has been the computer-she looks up songs she wants to learn, listens to them and then googles for the lyrics. She is on MSN, My Space and Bebo- and wants to be able to read and write there without any help from us-and now she has got there.
Most days she can read really well indeed-and we are now seeing gigantic leaps forward in her independence in all aspects of life. I found her tackling the latest Harry Potter book the other day.
I’m finding it difficult to blog about ‘educational items’ -it is so difficult to define what is educational-maybe it is because it has been the summer holidays-and so our routine home ed meetings, activities and workshops have not been happening-but despite this I am constantly interested in what she seems to have learned over the last few weeks.
I have just booked for us to go to a free National Schools Film Week showing -we have chosen a film about the situation in South Africa in the 80’s. The film will be introduced by someone from Amnesty International and there will be a discussion about the film afterwards.
On the same day as I booked this viewing, there was the unveiling of the Nelson Mandela statue in Parliament Square. Lucy stunned me with the amount of information she knew about South Africa and Apartheid-and about Amnesty International. It didn’t stop her asking many more questions though! She also requested that the next time we go off to London to watch a musical, (travelling as always by Megabus ) that we go to Parliament Square to see this statue. She also asked a load of questions about Abraham Lincoln, whose statue also graces the same square, according to the news broadcast. This of course prompted a lot of interest in slavery and the Union of states and then the US civil war.
And so our home education goes on. We are almost at the end of our second go at blogging here. After I blog about Lucy’s first sailing lesson on Monday it will be someone else’s turn to take over.
Lucy has almost decided on which OU course to apply for, she has decided to return to choir and to start ballet classes at Birmingham Dance Xchange. She now wants guitar lessons and is talking about piano lessons (where will I put a piano???). Besides sailing, we are also looking forward to a resumption of drama classes, and all the other home ed meetings -including team games and the philosophy debates.
