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Learn from experienced
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Use this website with Beverley Paine's Getting Started with Home Schooling - Practical Considerations to help you develop your own educational curriculum to suit your family situation, beliefs and lifestyle. The checklists can help you identify your children's current educational skill level in each subject area, as well as find any 'gaps' in their learning, plan what they need to cover or keep track of what has been learned. As you can appreciate this website is continuously under development... It's our aim to add pages on a regular basis in all curriculum areas: check back frequently. We hope you enjoy the articles and activities and find the links and recommended resources useful. Over the next year we will be working our way through each subject area and writing fresh, new content. |
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"Thank you so much for your wonderful website! I was getting quiet frustrated with finding appropriate information on homeschooling - thanks to your website we are now on the right track... Using your checklists for reassurance helped me to have the confidence to come up with my own programme that suits our needs." Rachael "I'm a frequent visitor to your website... I gain valuable knowledge from your website, luckily recommended in the very early stages of our homeschooling journey." Geradine "I checked out your website today and was incredibly impressed by it. I can tell it will be a great resource for our family for many years. THANKS for all the hard work that has gone into making homeschooling easier and much less isolating for families like us." Cynthia |
Should I Let Children Learn to Read at Their Own Pace?
© Beverley Paine
A young homeschooling mother wrote and told me about her son who had just caught the reading bug. He was picking it quite easily and his confidence had grown to the point that he thinks he can read books that his mother considered too ambitious for him. At this point he would become frustrated, but refuse help with reading, or to have the book read to him. The mother was worried she would destroy the child's confidence if she pushed...
Let him do what he wants at his pace. Roger spent an hour one day looking a page I definitely knew he couldn't read when he was six. It didn't do him any harm. Just make sure your son has access to lots of different types of reading matter at all levels.
I learned never to underestimate what's going on a person's head. We can't begin to know what your son is doing when he's looking at a page. Even he won't know all the processes going on. If he feels compelled to have a go, let him, but let him know that often you tackle things that you're not quite ready for and sometimes you feel disappointed you can't do what you want to right now, but it's good to know that simply trying is part of the journey to eventual accomplishment.
Think of some examples to help him understand and cope better with his frustration: for me, it is being impatient learning how to different computer programs. I want to use the program now, rather than wait until I know how to. Knowing how to use it takes time, usually doing tedious things I don't want, such as letting others help me with bits I don't understand. Accepting help graciously will get me to my goal faster.
John Dewey, educator and researcher wrote: "Give the pupils something to do, not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand thinking; learning naturally results."
Your son has chosen this task or reading above his ability level as something to do - trust in Dewey's words. Learning will naturally result.
I love the way children naturally test their emerging abilities. If left alone to experiment and test without pressure to perform to another's expectation or arbitrary schedule all will be right.
The Practical Homeschooling Series booklet Learning to Love Reading is useful and reassuring inexpensive guide to the early learning to read years.
on this website is of a general
nature only and is not intended as
personal or professional advice.
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Beverley's books will be available through her website Homeschool Australia until sold out. It is not anticipated at this stage that further editions or reprints of her books will be made.
Getting Started Manual
Unschooling Books
Educational Games
Natural Learning
Practical HS Booklet Series
Curriculum
Reports/Portfolios
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Conference DVD
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