It’s been ten days since I’ve blogged. We’ve been doing things pretty much as normal with visits to friends, family, home ed groups, shops and library.
A couple of things I really wanted to note were Master Rs drawing and Ms Rs reading:
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A few days ago Master R wanted to draw his face, he drew a circle shape and then drew an ear each side, he put a squiggley dot in the middle for a nose and then got distracted. A few minutes later he went back to it and drew two smaller circles for eyes, admittedly they were below the nose but it was still very clearly a toddler drawn face. He added a smile that went right across the whole paper and a line across the top of the head for hair. It’s a beautiful picture and quite clearly meant to be a face (he says it’s a picture of him). I’m not sure what age other childrens drawing start to be recognisable but I don’t think Ms R started drawing smiley faces until she was four. He is still two.
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The other night as I was reading Ms R a chapter of her book she was muttering away to herself with her nose buried in a Peter and Jane book so I put the book down and asked if she wanted to read her book instead. She seemed quite pleased with that idea, as though it was something I might not normally allow. I asked if she was going to start at the beginning but she turned the first few pages over saying she’d already done those ones, and then she read. The story was along the lines of playing in a boat and she surprised me by knowing words like ‘play’ and ‘boat’. She didn’t know ‘please’ so I told her the first time and then she knew the next time she came across it. Interestingly she only read the first two sentences on each page. Now I could see at a glance that all the words are used once in the first couple of sentences and then repeated in different combinations through the rest of that page, I’m not sure if this is why she only read the first bit or if it was because she was eager to get on to the next page. It’s amazing to think that she can pick up a book and read some of it without having to have painstakingly worked through the whole reading scheme page by page, day by day. It sort of feels like she should have done x amount of lessons and reading practice (out loud to a prompting adult) to be able to do what she can do. It’s not really surprising to me that when she is looking at a book she is recognising words and letter patterns and managing to decipher whole sentences but must sound quite unbelievable to people who think children need to be ‘made to learn’. It’s also enlightening to think that she can do ‘reading practice’ without having to read out loud, already I can see that it means I’ll never have to endure listening to her stumble across words that she’s not interested in reading. I think reading the younger books to Master R first really helps her with recognising and remembering words as the writing is larger and less per page which makes it easier for her to follow. With some of the more repetitive books she reads on through my pause-for-effect moments which infuriate Master R. She is still four.