Save time and simplify
your homeschooling life...
Learn from experienced
homeschoolers how to write your own curriculum.
It really is that easy!
Use this website with Beverley Paine's Getting Started with Home Schooling - Practical Considerations to help you develop your own educational curriculum to suit your family situation, beliefs and lifestyle. The checklists can help you identify your children's current educational skill level in each subject area, as well as find any 'gaps' in their learning, plan what they need to cover or keep track of what has been learned. As you can appreciate this website is continuously under development... It's our aim to add pages on a regular basis in all curriculum areas: check back frequently. Feedback and comments welcome. We hope you enjoy the articles and activities and find the links and recommended resources useful. Over the next year we will be working our way through each subject area and writing fresh, new content which will also be reproduced in a reasonably priced handy reference booklet from our Practical Homeschooling Series. |
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'Read' the World: the beginning of reading comprehension
© Beverley Paine, 2004
When a child looks at a picture and can tell you something about what's happening in the picture, they are reading. If we learn to see 'stories' in everything we do we encourage our children to be readers. Decoding squiggles on a page isn't the act of reading; reading is the act of deriving meaning from those squiggles. The alphabet is a complex code that allows us to build potent images in our minds that have meaning, in a personal and shared sense. In ancient times we drew pictures, now we write. It's faster and more efficient and makes books easier to carry around!
I've always told my children that they are readers, even when they were toddlers. I've encouraged them to tell me 'stories' about what they see, respecting their versions and refusing to judge their words as right, wrong, correct or incorrect... We'd talk about the subject and I'd tell them they had 'read' the picture or the scene unfolding before them.
You may have been lucky to have been taught by a teacher who understood that reading is about working out how one stands in relation to a text, what it means personally, how the words and ideas enlarges your world and point of view... There is no reason why you can't do this with your own children from the very beginning. As they grow older they will 'read' everything in their lives in this way, growing strong, assertive and confident, with a level of self and community awareness that astounds their peers.
In primary schools they call the above process the development of reading comprehension skills... It's much easier to develop comprehension skills reading for information. "How many cups of flour does it say?" I might ask. Or "Am I putting the model together correctly?" and we'd both read the instructions to check. We're convinced that Roger learned to read by studying Lego catalogues for hours on end... Thomas did the same thing with computer ad magazines. Eventually the squiggles on the page began to make sense. It wasn't overnight, as I've seen happen with some children. It was a long, no-fuss, gradual process, taken in their own time, and on their own terms.
Reading comprehension skills come easy to children whose parents naturally engage them in conversation about what is being read. You can read to a child for pleasure or information, but if you enrich that experience by talking about what you've read, you are encouraging your child to make meaning, his own personal meaning, from the text. That's what I call learning!
You don't have to pepper your child with questions. Begin a conversation with a reflective comment or a question directed at no-one in particular, or perhaps even yourself: "I don't understand what that paragraph says. I wonder what the author means." You may get some interesting interpretations. No one has to be 'right' or 'wrong'; it's simply a stepping stone to an interesting and informing conversation. You and your child will be sitting alongside the author, making meaning from his or her words, extending the text into your world. As an author of fiction and non-fiction myself, nothing is more gratifying than this process!
on this website is of a general
nature only and is not intended as
personal or professional advice.
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Thank you for visiting!
Pioneering members of the home education movement in Australia,
Beverley and Robin Paine
are passionate advocates of true educational choice for families.
They began homeschooling in 1986 and three years later started the
South Australian Home Based Learners
network. Beverley continues to write for homeschooling newsletters
and magazines as well as hosting several websites dedicated to promoting
and supporting home education in Australia. Her aim is to demystify the
education process and make it accessible to all parents. Enjoy Beverley's
wealth of practical knowledge, homeschooling and unschooling tips and
ideas through articles and books and online at
www.homeschoolaustralia.com.
Since the late 1990s Robin and Beverley have been building their home education
publishing business - Always Learning Books - from home with the help of their son Thomas.
"Education is not a preparation for life. Education is life itself." John Dewey
Please note that the opinions and articles included in the suite of Homeschool Australia websites are not necessarily those of Beverley and Robin Paine, nor do we endorse or necessarily recommend products (other than our own) listed in contributed articles, pages, or advertisements.
Please visit the following websites for information on homeschooling in Australia:
Homeschool Australia : SAHEN : Australian HS Curriculum : About the Paine Family
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