Yesterday at the Home Ed group meeting and on learning to read. · Sunday January 14, 2007 by Ann
Too tired to blog last night.
We had a wonderful day with our HE friends. There was a meeting in the south of the county, at a youth centre. One of the other mom’s organises it and we have a growing group meeting there.
Lucy and I love going, there is a drama session and we have watched the shyest of youngsters become confident performers. Then another room is used for music practice and across the hall there are folks of all ages getting on with all sorts of crafts. Lucy and I both had a go at weaving willow and came home clutching the results of our efforts, a sort of small twisted baskets, which we both think will look great hanging in the hall, perhaps holding candles.
We had to leave early to go and fetch Lucy’s friend Laura from Birmingham train station, so have agreed to contact Kate the organiser to arrange a meeting to discuss what to do with the funding for the drama group and to contact another parent to set up the philosophy group, both of which the teenagers are very interested in.
On the way to the station Lucy and I had our usual ‘purposeful conversations’-this time we began by covering the state of affairs in Iraq. We have a close friend who is an Iraqi refugee and we know that his family are still in Baghdad. We moved onto conservation and how we can make a difference to preventing global warming and finished of discussing human biology and the way that nerves transmit signals that make muscles move. I am often fascinated how far ranging her questions and comments are and how much we can cover in a short time. It is easy to see whether someone has understood when you are in a one to one situation-I don’t need her to write an essay explaining the points to me.
Then we went to dinner at the house of another home ed family we have become friends with. A very enjoyable evening was had by all and the possibility of another long sailing trip for Alice came up. A couple of summers ago she had the opportunity to go sailing with another family of home educators. Together they sailed up the west coast of Britain from south Wales, along northern England and up to Scotland. Then the winds sent them to Northern Ireland, Eire and the Isle of Man, before they returned to Scotland reaching the Isle of Arran before returning home. Alice acted in the ‘big sister’ role to the three boys and in return had the experience of a life time! Last summer she returned to the boat again for several weeks as they bought the boat down the east coast starting at Edinburgh. This fabulous experience is beyond anything we dreamed could happen for our children and certainly gave Alice a different aspect on learning than the one we thought she would get when she left school! We’ll keep our fingers crossed that another such trip might happen.
I feel very strongly that this type of autonomous education has been exactly right for all of our children. In particular it has allowed Lucy to have continued to get the education she requires whilst allowing reading and writing to catch up in it’s own time. In school her severe learning difficulties meant that she was hindered from getting information as reading was the main access to it-and the pressure to be able to learn to read at the same pace as everyone else left Lucy feeling more and more frustrated as she simply could not do it. The test at the Dyslexia Institute in the months before we deregistered Lucy proved that she actually had an IQ which put her in the top 10% of the population but that she had a reading ability comparable to the bottom 3%. Effectively though, the dyslexia had masked her intelligence and her intelligence had masked her dyslexia. The teachers at the very nice little school she attended, told me that she was just below average intelligence-they were very surprised to find this was not the case and that the DI actually recommended that she should be given a ‘statement of special educational needs’. Fortunately Worcestershire LEA refused to issue one until she had been at stage three of the register for one year, even though the Educational Psychologist that she then was seen by, agreed with the DI assessment, as this gave us time to find out about home education and get her out of school before a statement was issued.
On first leaving school we tried many of the reading schemes recognised as suitable for dyslexics and this merely put us through even more stress as Lucy screamed and cried her distress at them, even when we tried to do them for just a few minutes at a time. Eventually we began to listen to other home educators who were autonomous in the way they went about education for their children. I read the books on the subject and shut the workbooks and reading schemes and let Lucy get on with living life and learning as she went along. We ‘read’ books together whenever she wanted to read them (with me reading and Lucy trying to follow the words), we got audio tapes from Calibre.org.uk for people who have difficulty accessing the written word, as we felt that it was important for Lucy to grow to love books of all sorts. If she asked me what a word said I just told her-and then asked if she could now see that is what it said, which often meant explaining in detail the root of the word. I stopped asking-”what do you think it says?” or “you have a go and see what you think it says” and I stopped other people such as my mother doing that too. I danced down the corridor of the cinema the first time she read “Ladies” and we celebrated with every realisation that she had read some word or other maybe on a street sign or on a bus. So slowly she has made progress and yesterday she read the word ‘perception’ when we were reading the tarot cards and said “that was perceptive of me wasn’t it?” She now manages to use her computer almost entirely without me-coming and asking for the occasional spelling and mostly without the ‘Texthelp’ software we now have loaded onto the computers she uses at home. The software is there – as we are- to help when she is having a bad day or is very tired, when the dyslexia symptoms are more marked.
Lucy is a singer by nature and has it seems, a very good voice. She can sing Jazz, Opera, Musical Theatre and popular songs. She has now appeared at the Hesfes cabaret a couple of times and had her own slot last year and was very well received indeed. She has begun to appear at local festivals and go for auditions-with so far great success. Her singing teacher wants her to go for an audition for the junior section of the ‘Birmingham Conservatoire’ – which take place in April/May each year. This has given Lucy a self imposed deadline to meet as she wants to be able to be reading well by then. Her grandmother has been called in to help and Lucy goes to stay with her (when Grandma is not away on holiday, as she is at the moment) after dancing on a Wednesday night to play word games, something they love to do together. Here we continue to play other games to practise her reading and number skills – ‘Absolute Balderdash’ is even more hysterically funny when you have a family of dyslexics playing it! In fact having a family where it is normal to be dyslexic, makes life easier as everyone understands the mistakes you make or that sometimes you simply have a bad day. It must be very different for someone if they are the only one with such difficulties in a family.
Today has been a good day for us all. Alice was at work at a little family run business that sells natural soaps and shampoos etc. Her bosses tell me that they had loads of applicants for the Saturday job, but that Alice stood out “head and shoulders above the others” as she was so confident and articulate-I have lost count of the times I have heard that said about home educated teens. Sales have apparently grown in her favourite items such is her interest and enthusiasm for the subject of chemical free toiletries. Since coming home tonight she has been ‘chilling’ listening to jazz and playing her saxophone-which is lovely to hear.
David has been at home revising-and reading the fantasy novels he got for Christmas. He has gone out now with his bass guitar to practise with his friend.
Lucy and Laura went into town to buy a present for one of their friend’s birthdays-a bunch of their friends will be staying over as a birthday celebration tomorrow night, Since returning they have been playing card games and searching on the computer for information about their favourite band and they are now watching a ‘chick flick’ in Lucy’s room.
I read an article today in the newspaper, on how teenagers brains are a ‘development in progress’ and it really is true that they need to sleep more-going to bed later and getting up later than adults do – so I’ll act on that – as i would have done anyway and go off to bed leaving them to it!
Hibernating weather, but we got going eventually! Catching up
Will be looking up that newspaper article v. soon I suspect.
And so sorry to have missed that meeting…we were just too pooped and ended up with people here instead.
Tot phoned re traveller situation. He is completely up to speed and will be contacting Roma orgs rather than the TES who are very schoolie anyhow and usually linked to LAs.
Thanks for sorting this.
— Carlotta Jan 15, 08:35 am #