Reading BY Osmosis

We are still working on Jared's reading. He is making progress, but he is a lot like his older brother Justin, in that he seems to need a little slower pace. I thought Justin would NEVER learn to read. And actually I thought I just was this horrible teacher. HOWEVER I found out one of the most IMPORTANT truths about teaching reading with my first child.

NO ONE LEARNS THE SAME STUFF AT THE SAME TIME

This is ONE of my biggest reasons why I homeschool. If your not learning where the rest of the class is..you get left behind and labeled as slow. THANK GOD THAT I HOMESCHOOLED MY CHILDREN. Justin would have been labeled slow. You see, he had trouble getting the blending of the words. He could not hear the individual sounds and struggled with putting them together. In fact after we had taught all the of the letter sounds it was time that he was reading and my friend Louise, her little girl Hannah had already started reading and was taking off. You can imagine the feelings of inadequacy I was having. BUT I told myself 2 things..1. I have a boy 2. Every one learns differently and this is why I am teaching.

So you know what I did? I had 4 months left of school but we had finished all our books except for our reading. So..I put it all away. YEP I DID! Then we just had FUN for 4 months and 3 months of summer. NO stress..we went to the park, we went to people's houses, we looked at nature. Gosh we had so much fun! I read to the boys we had NO stress. Want to know what happened the next year..(1st grade) I bought some beginning readers and started him in the first book and the most amazing thing happened. With in 2 weeks he was reading! I mean..he was taking off like a rocket through his books. He may have been slow at reading outloud..but he would devour books. Its so funny because once he started reading he never stopped.

With the next two boys..they were both very different. Jason was reading very early but has NEVER had the love for reading like Justin has. I wonder if I should have waited..even though he was "able" to read early. Jacob took even longer than Justin to learn to read. See Jacob is left handed. Not that I think it matters but he really does think differently. It's those little things you know. When Jacob was learning to read he would forget with in hours what the letter sounds were. It was so frustrating because he wanted to read but it was a struggle. I took time off with him. When he did learn to read he caught up VERY quickly.

So after those experiences you know what I did when I had Jessica. NOTHING. We bought her some leap frog phonics toys, the one she loved was the phonics desk. She would play with that thing over and over and over. She was reading 3 letter words and writing them down well before I ever taught her a thing. She would point out letters in a book and tell me the sound of them as I was reading. She was my easiest to teach..hmm wonder why? So with these last kiddo's we do a lot of phonics games and Starfall and just fun. Its time for Jared to start reading and I know it is paying off . I know in just a few months he will have his reading leap and I will think..why in the world did I even worry. There is something to be said for waiting till the child is ready to learn. It seems to all click when you wait till they are ready.