Letters to a New Homeschooler

Dear T —,

I suppose now is a good time to talk about what kinds of lessons you’ll be doing with the boys every day. Typically I tend to make sure we’re covering the 3 R’s first, (Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic) and then I think about content.

Let’s start with reading. There are three basic components of learning to read: decoding, fluency, and comprehension.

Decoding is the first step we tend to think about when we first start lessons. Without knowing the sounds the letters make we can’t really begin to put words together. There are lots of resources out there for teaching kids how to decode, and it’s a good idea to work on that every day until fluency is achieved. How do we know when fluency is achieved? Have them read aloud to you and pay attention to how easily they can identify individual words (are they still sounding out letter by letter or can they look and quickly say the word without sounding it out?), how smoothly they can read each sentence (do they have to stop after each word? Are there awkward pauses that make it difficult to follow the author’s thought?), and how well they are able to express the meaning of the text.

Once the boys are reading on their own, be sure not only to continue reading aloud to them, but to have them continue reading aloud to you. Their reading aloud doesn’t necessarily need to be happening as frequently as their silent reading, but reading aloud clearly and intelligibly without awkward pauses or stumbling over words is a skill well worth practicing, and it’s becoming a rarer ability than it used to be.

The third piece, comprehension, is naturally quite important. After all, there would be no point in reading in the first place if we weren’t able to understand what we read! This is yet another reason why reading aloud to our children is so important. When we read to them books that have rich language and complex sentences and meaty ideas, we are doing things like expanding their vocabulary and training their ears to recognize beautiful language and introducing them to the incredible depth and richness of the English language.

Yet another advantage of establishing a family culture of reading aloud is that the boys will have already caught on to the fact that the written word not only contains interesting and exciting ideas but is also an effective way by which we can communicate those exciting ideas to others.

And this is where narration comes in. There have been entire books written on the topic of narration, so I’ll only be brief here. The general idea is to read a book (or a short segment of a longer book) and tell it back in your own words. The telling back can take many forms, but the most straightforward way to teach this skill is to start by reading a book to E— and asking him to tell you one thing he remembers or that he liked from the story. Eventually he will be able to tell you more than one thing, but start there. You can model narration yourself by taking a turn to tell something that stood out to you, and you can even get the whole family involved1 by having everyone take turns.

Narration also serves as a precursor to writing/composition and helps to establish that oh-so-important habit of attention. Narration builds logical habits of thought and teaches communication skills. The fact that when we narrate we have to choose what to say as well as what not to say means that we are learning the basics of how to arrange ideas in order to communicate them effectively.

Narration, in our house, takes the place of worksheets and comprehension questions. It is a skill — an art, really — that can be used in all the different areas of content we want to spread before our children as they partake of the feast of ideas from history to science to literature to art to math to geography, etc, etc, etc. Name any subject you want and I’ll show you that narration will work to help you learn about it just as, if not more, efficiently and more thoroughly than the best workbooks and test questions out there.

Narration is essentially the art that brings ideas together, gives them meaning, and makes something beautiful out of them in such a way that they can be shared with others.

Love,

Lisa