Lines and Circles

We live in a highly literate world, the written word is everywhere, you need to be able to read to engage in society fully.  I love reading, I always have a book on the go.  Cameron loves reading too, he used to leave a trail of books around the house so I could tell where he had been.  We both started our reading learning at around the age of five, Alice turned 11 a month or so ago and reading is still very much a work in progress for her. 

It has been a long, slow, learning journey for her and for me, one that we are still working at.  I love that my children learn in completely different ways, that they are interested in completely different things, but Alice's difficulties in learning to read has laid bare to me that sometimes these difficulties are made so much harder when they are trying to gain a skill that we place a lot of value on in our society.  I am always so saddened when I hear about children who are not given the support that they really need to learn this skill that we place so much emphasis on.  Learning to read later than the 'required' age, which should not even be a thing. should not be seen as a negative, we all learn in our own way and given that reading is a skill that we place such importance on, we should be encouraging children and helping them to learn to read by considering their needs and how they learn.

I remember when Alice was about five she asked me to help her to learn to read.  It was the first thing she had ever asked help with learning, looking back, hindsight always makes things seem obvious, I should have realised by the way that she was asking that she was frustrated that she couldn't work it out, working things out was something she had been for some time, and still is, exceptionally good at.

I want you to imagine, for a moment, that you come across an object that you are not familiar with what might you do to work out what it is?  Might you pick it up and feel it, look at it from all sides.  Might you leave it where it is and walk around it looking at it from all sides.  What if you could move it around in your head, seeing it from all sides without actually touching it or moving it?   You might think that is not possible and nor would I had I not read that this is a skill.  I should have realised that Alice had this skill when she played the game in the photo above.  It is aimed at age 8 +, she was five when she first played it with my brother and I.  We played it four times and she won every time, this wasn't us letting her win, between us we couldn't beat her.  She could hold one of those tiles in her hand and turn it round in her head, rather than moving it around in her hand, to work out where to put it, she also played with strategy which is a whole other post.  I wished I had realised at the time how key this skill was to her difficultly in being able to read.  The ability to move something round in your head is a wonderful skill if you are trying to build, make or design something, work out how something mechanical works or fix a problem, it is however hopeless if you do the same with words.  

After Alice's initial request I used some of the resources that I had put together for Cameron to support him when learning to read.  I soon realised that she was not ready for those yet and I needed to come up with a completely different method to help her.  Those resources relied on her knowing her letters which she had yet to master so I started with that.  I created a story for each letter and using a variety of resources we slowly made our way through the alphabet, she created her own alphabet book with words, pictures and stories that she dictated to me and I wrote out for her.  Once she had mastered those we started to put them together and that is when things started to get harder for the both of us.  I couldn't fathom how she could read a word fluently one day and then have no idea what it was the next.  It took me a long time to realise that she was reading words backwards or jumbling the letters up like a she was making anagrams with them as she was reading.  We needed another pause so that I could work out how to help her next and she could have a rest.  Reading was exhausting for her.

It was around this time that I started to wonder if she might be dyslexic.  I knew very little about it except that it was a label given to those that had reading issues.  I headed to my local library to see whether there were any books that I could educate myself on how to help Alice.  I was fortunate to find many and one in particular was so good that I bought a copy for our shelves.  It had a suggestion for a test that you could try and then an exercise based on the results of the test (none of which involved reading).  They sounded so far fetched to me that I wasn't sure they could possibly work, but I thought nothing ventured, nothing gained.  The exercise would give Alice a means to stop the letters in words dancing around when she reached a word she couldn't read.  This book had bought to my attention something that I had failed to notice that she would reach a word she didn't know, pause try to work it out and after that word she would have difficult continuing but she managed it at a slower pace, by the time she reached a second or third word that she could not read she would not be able to read anything else.  The book call this a threshold of confusion where disorientation has set in as the symbols/letters have become so distorted that they are no longer understandable.  

The book also suggested that she may have a picture for every word, in fact some dyslexics think in pictures instead of words.  Words such as house, dog, car, tree are easy to create pictures of in our heads, the, and, if, of, other, just and many more the picture is not quite so easy.  I have established that this is how Alice sees the world and how she reads words.  This also means that every time she comes across a new word it is a complete mystery to her until she has created her own picture for it.  Can you imagine that?  How difficult that makes reading?  How exhausting that would make reading?  It is hard for those of us that read to imagine this isn't it?

We are now at the stage where Alice will pick up books and read them to herself, they need to ones with a basic typeface, those really flowery typefaces are an absolute no no, and with few paragraphs on a page for now.  Her absolute preference for learning is through combined visual and audio, the internet has been a life saver.  We spend time together searching for things that she is interested in, which we usually watch together, as they are often of interest to me too.  She still loves being read to and it gives me such pleasure to read chapter books to her that would take her months if not years to read.  

I do hope there is time when she can read without getting exhausted, I feel sure that time will come at some point.  Throughout the six years since she asked me to help her learn to read, all her learning has been driven by her and I am always in awe of her determination to master this seemingly to her at times, impossible task.  She is not ashamed to admit that she cannot read that well and will always ask for help when she needs it, another really useful skill that I feel sure will be useful to her in the future.

When I started home education nearly eleven years ago, I had no idea where that would take us.  It has been a wonderful journey and I have learnt more than I could ever have imagined.  What more could I ask for?