(A post I've been mulling over for some time but finally took the time to type it out!)
One of the joys of home schooling your children is watching their little light bulbs light up when they finally grasp a concept. One of the frustrations, of course, is watching that light flicker, fade, flicker, fade, flicker…
But in this case I don’t blame the children, and honestly, I can’t really blame the teacher. I blame that which we trying to grasp, understand, and master. Our challenge…the English language!
When we first embarked on our journey we spent a fair amount of time learning the alphabet, recognizing that letters have names. Then we had to learn that those letters make sounds, which in some cases is the same as their name, but not always. This we mastered with little difficulty although the sound /a/ makes in “bag” is quite different than it makes in “can”, but we were able to adjust.
Then we had to learn that some letters make more than one sound, but once we understood that vowels say their names when they have a vowel partner or if the word ends in /e/ we were good to go. We were even able to master the hard and soft sounds of /c/ and /g/. I thought we were almost there. (Guess I should have noticed we were only on lesson 84 of 226 in their reading program! 2/3 left to go!)
Lesson 87 – break, grey, veil; What?!? Lesson 91 – read, and read? wind and wind? Can you tell which words follow the rules and which ones are outlaws? What about do and go? field and pie? All along remembering that it is strongly encouraged not to teach your children to sight read! /ow/ changes in now and snow. /ou/ changes in you and out. And /ea/ really messed them up going from pea to great to dead!!!
Then my brother sent me the following in an e-mail:
Don't delete this just because it looks weird. Believe it or not, you can read it.
I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsa ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
GREAT!!!! Now I was really convinced we should switch our mother tongue to Korean…the most phonetically correct language in the world!
But we've plugged away, and through much reading aloud (snuggled on the couch, under Grandma's afghan...my FAVOURITE part) the boys have progressed quite well.
