One of the homeschooling questions I am asked most frequently is "What do you use to teach your kids to read?"

I usually explain that I haven’t yet had to do any formal reading instruction with any of my kids. I have three fluent, eager readers now, and every one of them learned pretty much the same way:

1) (And so very important, it should be numbers 1-50.) Lots and lots and lots of read-alouds from the time they are teeny tiny. Poetry, picture books, novels, magazine articles, fairy tales, biographies, all sorts of very good, high-quality, literary writing. We read and read and read and read.

51) When at some point I notice the child is beginning to recognize her name and other simple, common words, I pull out our trusty Bob Books.

Read-alouds and Bob, that’s how we’ve done it three times in a row.

The Bob Books, if you don’t know them, come in sets of twelve: a dozen small paperback booklings (I just made that up; it means more than a booklet but smaller than a regular book), each focusing on a phonetic sound. Each book in the series builds on the sounds mastered in the one before. But "mastered" makes it sound so formal. We haven’t used them in a formal "now you will learn to read" manner at all. We’ve just read the books together, and it’s like the kids can’t help but start decoding the text. The format makes sense.

Jane was reading at a crazy-early age, but you have to remember that she spent her toddler years in a hospital bed. We read all day long, for weeks and months on end. Couldn’t take her to the playground, not with her low platelet and white cell counts. Couldn’t go much of anywhere. But by golly, we could read. Scott would come home from work to find a stack of picture books as high as the sofa we were curled up on: the evidence of what we’d done that day. Lucky for Jane I had connections in the children’s publishing world…I don’t know how we’d have fed our habit otherwise.

Rose took off at around 4 1/2. Same process: a bajillion read-alouds, and then, in a casual, relaxed manner, the Bob Books. She loved Bob and his pals: that wacky Mac who sometimes sat on Sam for reasons impossible to explain in one-syllable words. And later, the cat and the dog, and that pig! What was her name? Jig? Man, we giggled over that pig.

My mom bought Beanie a whole new set of Bob Books when her turn came around, because Rose had scattered the others. They’re such a nice comfy size for tucking into little purses, you know.

Beanie was, I think, about the same age when she got into Bob: four going on five. She was reading quite well by last summer (whew, just in time for the cross-country trip), so that would have been age 5 1/2.

That really is all I’ve done: read-alouds and Bob. The Bob Books have been the bridge for all three of my girls, an easy, friendly bridge with funny, quaint pictures and silly storylines. They didn’t know they were learning phonics. We didn’t do any writing or spelling or workbooks at all. We just read the Bob Books together. First I read them to the child, then she read them to me.

It’s been so exciting, every time! The thinking behind the concept is that a child builds confidence by being able to read a "real book" all by himself. This has absolutely been the case for my three girls. "Daddy, I read a book all by myself!" Beanie said, I recall, sounding like a commercial. I probably sound like a commercial myself, but I’m being sincere. The amount of text on a page, the number of pages in a book—they were the perfect stepping stones for my kids.

So there you go, that’s my answer. We read, read, read, read: read really good books, not Disney fluff. Beautifully written books, books you’d think were over their heads. As long as there was good story in those noble words, the kids have gulped them down.

And then, when the time felt right—which is to say, when it felt fun, not stressful to the child in any way, with no sense of expectation to make them feel anxious or pressured—I introduced them to Bob.

I was visiting Becca’s lovely blog, And Together We Learn, and saw there a mention of a game I wrote about at Bonny Glen almost two years ago. I’d totally forgotten about the post, but the game is alive and well—it’s still one of the girls’ favorite car pastimes. Thanks, Becca! (And I sure do hope your gang is enjoying the read-aloud! Hee.)

The Purple Cow Hula-Hooped Boisterously

This
is a game we played in the car yesterday, all the way to town and back.
I assigned each of the girls a part of speech: noun, verb, adjective,
adverb (one girl had to take two parts in each round). From there it
went something like this:

Me:  Miss Noun, what is it?

Beanie: A giraffe!

Me:  Miss Adjective, what kind of giraffe?

Jane: A hungry giraffe.

Me:  Miss Verb, what did the hungry giraffe do?

Rose: It bounced!

Me:  Miss Adverb, how did the hungry giraffe bounce?

Jane: Enthusiastically!

All together:  THE HUNGRY GIRAFFE BOUNCED ENTHUSIASTICALLY!

Wonderboy:  Huh?

In Becca’s post, she shares her own car game, which sounds like fun.

While driving we played an animal classification game where they had
to tell me if something was a mammal, bird, reptile or amphibian. We
talked about the qualities of each class, and did a little with some of
the different orders—mostly primate and marsupial. The girls loved
this one. We’ll have to make this a car time staple.

I’m passing along the latest Bravewriter newsletter for anyone who may be interested in some fun writing and book discussion opportunities:

The Arrow and the Boomerang are now enabled for automatic monthly deductions.

Brave Writer language arts programs are for busy moms who want to execute
their best intentions, but don’t have time to craft lessons that tie
together dictation, copywork, grammar, spelling, vocabulary, literary
style and literature into a neat bow. We use passages from classic
novels to teach things like dialog punctuation, spelling rules (and
exceptions), the power of an opening hook, the beauty of a well-crafted
description, new vocabulary words and grammar conventions.

Language
arts shouldn’t require a slog through artificially created sentences to
"teach a point." Rather, there should be some way to maximize the
novels you enjoy to do that teaching for you. An editor I admire once
said that the only way to grow in writing syntax (how we put words
together) is to sit in a parlor chatting with great writers. I like to
picture E.B. White, Ernest Hemingway, Sandra Cisneros, Jane Austen,
Laura Ingalls Wilder, William Shakespeare, Bette Bao Lord, Lois Lowry
and Charles Dickens all sipping tea together, with me in the center of
the group. Unfortunately, most of them are dead. The next best thing is
to hang out with their writing… consistently pondering it, copying
it, reading it, discussing it.

That’s what the Brave Writer Language Arts Subscription programs aim to do!

The Arrow (4th – 6th grade) book list is brand new this year. A sample issue can be viewed here. It’s yours to print and use, if you like.

The Boomerang
automatically subscribes you to both a forum for the book
discussions and the monthly issue, as most of you have indicated that
you prefer. (However, for those who wish to receive the digital monthly issue
only, you may order these for a reduced rate without participating in
the book discussions.)

The Boomerang
offers dictation passages, notes and "think piece" questions to help
your kids explore the novels in greater depth. Once they’ve read the
books, students come to a specially created forum for kids just like
themselves to discuss the "think piece" questions. That discussion is
led by me, Julie.

A sample issue of the Boomerang can be viewed here.

The Boomerang’s first book for August is The House on Mango Street. We begin discussion on August 13. If you subscribe to the monthly payment plan between now and the 13th, we’ll rebate $9.95 of your first month’s $24.95 subscription price!

Live honestly, write bravely,

Julie

P.S. The Arrow and Boomerang are now open for registration and subscription. Check out the Arrow (4th-6th) and Boomerang (7th-9th) for more details on year-long enrollment. For monthly subscription information, go to our order page.

The Platinum Package offers The Writer’s Jungle and your choice of the Arrow or the Boomerang for a savings of $27.00! Check it out.

Via Elizabeth at Charlottesville Words: The Eggcorn Database.

The word eggcorn was coined collectively by the linguists who write at the excellent group blog Language Log.
Linguists collect usage examples. Unlike language teachers or the often
self-styled grammar experts who complain in the press about the decay
of English, they are not picky: the actual, real-life use is what
counts, and the most interesting bits — those that might reveal
something about how real people apprehend their language — often
stretch the received rules of correctness.

In September 2003, Mark Liberman reported (Egg corns: folk etymology, malapropism, mondegreen, ???)
an incorrect yet particularly suggestive creation: someone had written
“egg corn” instead of “acorn”. It turned out that there was no
established label for this type of non-standard reshaping. Erroneous as
it may be, the substitution involved more than just ignorance: an acorn
is more or less shaped like an egg; and it is a seed, just like grains
of corn. So if you don’t know how acorn is spelled, egg corn actually makes sense.

Other examples of eggcorns are:

"for all intensive purposes"

"just desserts"

"here, here" (instead of "hear, hear")

"coming down the pipe"

The aforementioned Elizabeth gets credit for spotting a new eggcorn in common usage, and it is now included in the dictionary: "half-hazard."

Eggcorns are different from malapropisms, which can also be fun to watch for. A malapropism is a word used in place of the correct word, where the substitution sounds similar to the intended word but means something vastly different, often resulting in quite comical sentences. A famous example is the line uttered by Curly of the Three Stooges: "I resemble that remark!"

(The link takes you to WikiPedia, where there are many more examples of malapropisms and eggcorns, including a malapropism that made me laugh out loud: "New Scientist also reported the first-ever malapropism for
"malapropism", when, having become aware of his error, the office
worker apologized, saying he had committed a "Miss Marple-ism."  No doubt he was thinking of Mrs. Malaprop, the character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play, The Rivals, whose comical linguistic errors gave rise to the term.)

So a malapropism is a wrong word used in place of a word that sounds similar, but not identical, and has a totally different meaning. An eggcorn is a substitution that sounds the same or almost the same as a word or phrase—so similar, and making just enough sense, that it often passes into common usage: "blatantly obvious" instead of "patently obvious."

Don’t you just love the English language?

Calling all young wordsmiths! Children’s book author Tabatha Yeatts is holding a writing contest for kids. Can you tell the story behind the picture at that link? Entries due April 1, 2007.

And how cool does Tabatha’s book on forensics sound??

Kristie asks:

One quick question…
Language arts…looking at your day, do your kids write, do dictation, read etc. or is this in tides (besides the reading, it is obvious that is the lifestyle in homes where literature is loved..)

I can tell you what we do, but I’m not sure I’m the best person to go to for advice on this subject because I think Scott and I tend to take a lot for granted when it comes to helping our children become good writers. Writing is a way of life around here. The kids see us writing, read our writing at various stages of completion, and hear a lot of talk about story structure, characterization, and revision. It’s difficult for me to parse out exactly what they’re learning. It’s like trying to pick onions out of your soup: they’ve already imparted their flavor to the broth.

So that’s the disclaimer, but here are some things we have done. First and by far the most important: the reading aloud. I absolutely cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of reading aloud, lots and lots and lots, even after the child is a fluent and eager reader herself. Just keep picking books a little beyond her reading ability; keep stretching her powers of comprehension. This is how to expand the vocabulary and instill a sense of what ‘sounds right,’ which takes one a long way toward the mastery of correct grammar.

Next most important (in my opinion): Narration. Even at my unschooliest, I am an advocate of gently eliciting narrations from your children. Get them to tell a story back to you after you’ve read it aloud, or after a child has read it to himself. “Tell me what you remember,” “Tell me everything you know about volcanoes,” “What happened to Tintin after he got on the boat?” Narration improves the memory and accustoms the speaker to putting events and ideas into words.

Charlotte Mason recommends waiting until age ten or so to begin asking the child for written narrations. Until that point, all narration is oral. When Jane was little, I did (as many homeschooling moms do) a lot of transcribing the narrations she dictated to me; I printed them out, got her to illustrate them, put them together in a notebook. I know this works beautifully for a lot of people, and I don’t want to discourage anyone from doing it if it brings joy to you and your child. But I’ll say this: don’t feel obligated to write down your child’s oral narrations. Don’t feel like you have to make a notebook or else you’re not doing it properly. After a year or two of compiling Jane’s narration notebook, I realized the whole process had become for us an exercise in creating a product. Jane was beginning to be proud of her notebook, or perhaps “prideful” is a better word; she had seen me show it off enough times that she too began to view her work as something to be shown off, something done for the purposes of impressing one’s friends and relations. I was horrified by this little epiphany. Of course it was completely my fault. I ditched the habit of typing out her oral narrations; for a time, I ditched narrating altogether. When we returned to it, it was to the simple Charlotte Mason method of asking the child to “tell it back”—no notebook, no product to display.

What I found that was that in addition to curing our little show-off problem, this took away the pressure that had turned narration into a burden. No longer was it necessary for me to be prepared to scribble down her words as fast as she said them: I could listen to her narrate with a baby in my arms. And instead of the type—print—illustrate—bind production line, narration could lead to discussion. The whole experience became warmer, richer, and her narrations improved. Her memory improved; her appetite for ideas increased. I’d read aloud, she’d tell it back, we’d chat about the people in the stories and the problems they encountered.

So this is how narration works in our house today. Rose is narrating now, too, and Beanie frequently chimes in, unsolicited. When Jane turned ten I began asking for occasional written narrations. Currently she is writing two or three a week. I give her something to read, a chapter of Famous Men of Rome, perhaps, and ask her to read it only once, carefully, and then write out everything she can remember. We go over any spelling or grammatical errors together.

I don’t use spelling or grammar curricula; I simply keep an eye on what sort of mistakes the children make and offer bits of instruction as indicated. (And of course grammar comes up in our Latin and ASL studies.) Rose, however, is one of those workbook-loving kids, so I keep a spelling workbook on hand to satisfy her occasional cravings for nice little blanks to fill in.

We go through spells of doing copywork, all of us: if the children see me taking the trouble to copy out quotes into my commonplace book, they become interested in doing it themselves. I encourage them to record their favorite poems, but I very seldom require it. I find that supplying them with nice notebooks and enticing gel pens is incentive enough.

As for writing curricula, I have reviewed many of them and have disliked most. Scripted writing exercises leave me cold. The program I do like is BraveWriter; you can read my thoughts on that here. I have just received a copy of Classical Writing (the Homer book) and will talk more about it after I’ve had a chance to read it (and work with it) a bit.

Last thing: we are big fans of word games around here! Mad Libs, Scrabble, crossword puzzles, riddles, and so on. And Schoolhouse Rock!

Capital Community College Foundation offers a sentence diagramming tutorial on its website, including an extremely cool Power Point presentation you can download. For free. Diagramming never made my heart go pitty-pat before, but I think I’ve just been swept off my feet.

Classical Home has compiled a list of blogs dedicated to grammar and punctuation gaffes. Funny stuff!