A lot of what we do, we have figured out as we went along, trying ideas and tweaking them here and there.
Take phonics practice. For a long time, we all assumed that it really only works well to teach phonics one-on-one. Of course, we never had any two kids reading at exactly the same level; and reading instruction, done right, requires a parent or teacher to pay close attention to a child's steps and mis-steps, providing feedback exactly as needed. So for a long time we did reading practice separately -- each child with his own parent.
This worked okay for a while, but at one point we got very tired of splitting everyone up all the time. We were seeking a way to teach, not side-by-side, but together. And so we tried some different ways of putting the learning readers together. Even though they were not at exactly the same level, and even though we knew that they were each responding very differently to reading instruction, all of them were at the point of learning which sounds were spelled by which graphemes (letter combinations), and all of them could blend words made of the graphemes they already knew.
We tried sitting them around the same table, each with his or her own sheet of reading. Then they took turns each reading one line of the sheet. That worked a little better for keeping everyone feeling together, but the wait between turns was just too long; while one child was painfully sounding out the words and letter combinations on the sheet, the others would start to squirm, and by the time we were back to the first child again, he'd forgotten where he was (if he hadn't managed to escape to the back yard when we weren't looking).
We tried alternating reading with a related language activity, like copywork. Each of the children would receive a sheet of copywork for handwriting practice. Then, one would read under our watchful eyes while the others would copy, more or less independently. When the first child finished reading, she would start on her copywork, and the second child would interrupt his copywork to begin working through his reading sheet with one of us. And so on. This went okay, except that we would really rather the children spent more time reading than they did on copywork. And there would always be sleeve-tugging on the part of the copiers, with one question or another, and so it was hard to pay close attention to the reader. Still, it was an improvement.
What to do?
Well, understand that each of the children got some form of direct reading instruction on the other days of the week, when they weren't all together. So what we were doing on co-schooling days didn't have to stand alone as the only reading instruction they got. It only has to complement it. So... enter simple word and sentence reading drills.
A few years ago, when I was teaching my first child to read, I compiled a lot of "common word" lists. Word lists along the line of this:
- UI spells the sound /oo/: bruise, cruise, fruit, juice, nuisance, pursuit, suit
- UE spells the sound /oo/: blue, clue, cruel, due, glue, pursue, statue, sue, tissue, true, Tuesday, virtue
- OU spells the sound /oo/: bouquet, cougar, coupon, group, mousse, routine, soup, wound, you, youth...
and so on. I wasn't starting from scratch, mind you. I was building on a huge body of work that had already been done by a friend and her husband who are writing a comprehensive reading program. Anyway, I had already made these word lists in the process of teaching my first child to read, and I had saved them. Mostly I taught my kids to read one word at a time, drawing from the lists for combinations I had already taught them.
But when Hannah got a hold of them, she looked at the word lists and they turned into sentences, some little stories even.
The miner climbs into the icy cave.
She cannot make a single error with her ice axe.
I don't know why you are frightened when my wildcat only bites a little.
So she started writing out sentences that the children could read, many of them very fun sentences. She wrote them, mostly, on lap-sized dry erase boards. She has more boards to write on than children to teach. So one way she does it is this: each child gets a board with a different sentence on it. They all read the boards, and don't pay much attention to each other. Hannah listens and helps them as necessary. Then when they're all done, hopefully at approximately the same time, they trade boards. She might give them 6 to 10 sentences in a session.
She mixes it up a bit with single-word drill and practice with flashcards. Recently she tried something that seemed to work pretty well: holding up a single long sentence and having the kids take turns reading one word at a time; after the last word is read, the next child in line has to re-read the whole sentence. That seemed to work great, because they all had to pay attention to the reading so as not to lose their place.
This group of emergent readers is really almost done with needing intensive phonics drill, and will soon graduate to reading a variety of texts for "reading practice." We think we'll start phasing out reading and phasing in Latin in the same time slot. Meanwhile, there's a younger cohort coming up right behind them who, we hope, will reap the benefit of our experience,
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