Homeschooling Take Two
by Kate and Hamish Laird

• Kate & Hamish Laird spent the summer in Greenland aboard their 56' expedition charter boat, Seal. They have now come ashore for a few months, before heading to the Arctic again this summer (2006), and the Antarctic in late 2007.

In May 2005, I began homeschooling Helen, who was not quite five. For the most part, all my past comments stand true, now that we have been homeschooling for seven months, but I would like to take back all my criticisms of Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons by Siegfried Engelman, Phyllis Haddox, and Elaine Bruner. We are now on Lesson 96, and Helen can read very well.

Helen and Anna working at math.

Interestingly enough, the UK has just proposed a huge revision to the reading program in its schools. The new recommendations seem to follow the same ideas as in Teach Your Child to Read, with one crucial difference. The UK system recommends that children learn all the sounds of the language first, and then move on to reading. The marvelous thing about Teach Your Child to Read is that the stories begin almost immediately. By Lesson 13, they read, and by lesson 97 they are reading 250-word, full-page stories, with standard letters and punctuation.

We made two modifications to the system. For the first five or six lessons, I copied the letters (and words after the first few lessons) onto index cards, so that Helen didn't have to face the enormous book. By the time we opened the book, the format and routine were familiar, so the book didn't seem as threatening.

The other modification was doing written review. Every day, I'd make her a list of the vocabulary words from the previous lesson, and have her copy them, and then fold away my words, so she read them aloud from her own handwriting. This had the advantage of reviewing the words one more time, and also helping her understand why it's important to write neatly.

Storytime aboard Seal - while navigating by topo map through Prins Christiansen Sund (Greenland) in thick fog.

Anna is very anxious to start on the reading program. I am trying to hold her back for a bit, since she doesn't yet have the attention span for it, or the interest in doing schoolwork every day (she won't be four until March, so that's not surprising.) We've found with Helen that taking more than one day off between lessons really slows her down. On long passages we often stopped for a week or so, but it would take a day or two for her to get back into it.

Watch this space! It will be interesting to see if the same program works as well on Anna, who seems to have a very different learning style, and definitely has an entirely different personality from Helen.

You can learn more about the Lairds and SEAL at their website www.expeditionsail.com.