Helping older homeschoolers learn to read

Having children who learn to read at a later age than is acceptable in school is a common feature of many home schools, particularly if you are following an unschooling or Waldorf approach. As Dr. Raymond Moore noted in his work in the seventies and eighties, and as Dr. Alan Thomas noted in his work in 2007, homeschooled children who are late readers learn to read quite well when they eventually do learn to read. Once they decide to learn to read, they learn quickly, catching up to their age-mates reading abilities in months, not years. Further, children who haven’t been forced to read by 3^rd grade also appear to read more for personal pleasure and information as they get older than do those who were forced to learn to read at a particular age.

However, if one is a pre-teen or a teenager learning to read from the types of beginning reading materials that are usually available it can be disappointing, since these materials are all too often geared to 3^rd graders. A good solution I found is to use adult literacy and English as a Second Language (ESL) reading materials with late readers who feel Dr. Seuss, controlled vocabulary fairy tales, and other story books are too juvenile for their learning situation. A good source for these materials is www.proliteracy.com.

Check out their News for You Online program. This is a web-based weekly newspaper that features current news stories written at 3^rd—6^th grade reading levels. It includes audio for all the stories so students can listen to the entire story or read along, sentence by sentence. Key words are defined at the point of use by rolling over a boldface word and seeing a pop-up.

They also sell a four-book series called Novel Scenes that increase in reading difficulty, going from Introductory to Low-Beginning, High-Beginning, and Low-Intermediate levels. Each book tells the story of a single character in a situation where events unfold chapter by chapter and themes include work, family, money and housing.

So if your late reader wants to crack the reading code but is embarrassed by the beginning reader books that are available to them, consider using adult literacy and ESL materials instead.

Unschooling the University

DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of High Education by Anya Kamenetz is a fantastic examination about how college has become so expensive and extremely over-rated, yet remains the ultimate goal for nine out of ten high school graduates. Armed with solid research and statistics (“…the United States has fallen from world leader to only tenth-most educated nation. The price of college tuition has increased more than any other good or service for the last twenty years. Almost half of U.S. college students don’t graduate; outstanding student loan debt totals $730 billion.”), Kamenetz marshals her arguments cogently to show not only how we got into this mess but provides ideas for how we can get out of it as well. 

I was pleased to see her use and cite the work of Holt and Illich, as they were early and vocal critics of the university but they are now remembered primarily as critics of K-12 education. One of my favorite photographs of John Holt is of him refusing an honorary degree. The Associated Press printed a photo of Holt with his fist pumped into the air on June 11, 1970 with this caption:

REFUSES HONORARY DEGREE. Author John Holt, critic of modern education, refused to accept an honorary degree as he spoke recently at Wesleyan University, saying that colleges are among “the chief enslaving institutions” in America.

Kamenetz is a lot less harsh in her comments about college than Holt and Illich were, but her call for change is as earnest as theirs.  After writing about the historical, social, and economic history of college in America she writes about several new directions higher education can take to transform itself. DIY U provides you with new technologies, Open Education programs, self-learning and other examples of college-level independent study that anyone can benefit from. Some of the insights she makes regarding the future of college are quite striking, such as this:

Brian Lamb, an educational technologist at the University of British Columbia, sketches out for me a potential vision: “ For universities, here’s the nightmare scenario. Imagine Google enters a partnership with two or three top educational publishers, builds on the existing open-educational resources already released, uses the reach of Google to coordinate discussion and peer-based networks and develops a series of tests that they also certify. What then?”

Teenage homeschoolers and unschoolers and their parents would benefit from reading DIY U in particular, if only to give them pause before going to college. After years of learning without attending elementary or high school, homeschoolers and unschoolers who decide to continue learning in their own unique ways without going to conventional college will find DIY U a valuable resource. Indeed, the last section of the book is a very useful resource guide for creating your personal Do It Yourself University. 

Visit Sweden To Help Homeschoolers There

Swedish homeschoolers are asking for support and help to keep homeschooling legal there. In particular, Jenny Lantz, one of the organizers I've been in touch with, has asked that the following letter be shared with American homeschoolers. I hope some who read it will be able to fly to Sweden and stand in solidarity with them. I am not able to attend in person, but I hope to make a virtual appearance via Skype to help rally the troops. Here is the letter:

Dear homeschoolers in America!

As you may already know, the Swedish Government is suggesting a school law that would effectively ban legal homeschooling in Sweden with increased penalties, including prison, creating a German-like homeschooling situation in Sweden. The current Swedish centre-right government is going in the opposite direction from the rest of the world where home education is growing. This is a dangerous development for all homeschooloers in Europe, as Sweden is often held as an example of the perfected social  state.

The Swedish Association for Home Education (Rohus) wants to stop this law. That possibility may only be four members of parliament away.  But we need your help. The Swedish Parliament will discuss the proposed law on June 21 and the vote will be made on June 22. We want to make those two days an international manifestation for the right to home school and also make it the start of a European Network of Home Education, which can bring the issue to a European level.

Swedish home educators are seasoned after years of struggle with today's permissive but extremely restricted-as-implemented school law. We go to court, fight fines and go in exile now and then. During the last year the Rohus board has lobbied for home education at the National Parliament level.  Politicians who meet with us get a whole different view of home education.
 
If we do not manage to stop the law in June, we believe we need to approach the European level, which requires us to form a network with other European Home Education Associations. If we win we still want to support this effort to make homeschooling permitted throughout the European Union, which is the best safe guard for all of us.

Please respond to our invitation if you can. We are working to find youth hostel-type living situations in Stockholm during June 20-23, so that you can help us meet our Members of Parliament with flyers, speeches and personal meetings throughout the two days and help form the European Network for Home Education.

Rohus is a politically and religiously unaffiliated organization, formed two years ago  when we realized political struggle was necessary; see our English  homepage:
http://www.rohus.nu/?English_information

Contact Jenny Lantz, adminstrative manager  for practical details about joining us in Sweden: jenny@rohus.nu or contact Jonas  Himmelstrand, President: jonas@rohus.nu

Warm regards

Jenny  Lantz, Rohus 

The Learning Revolution is already happening Sir Ken!

Sir Ken Robinson gave a popular talk at the TED conference in 2006 titled “Schools kill creativity.” He has just released his latest TED talk, “Bring on the learning revolution!”, and I have embedded it below for you to enjoy.

Sir Ken, an expert on creativity and the author of The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, is championing ideas that unschoolers, homeschoolers, and alternative schoolers have been acting upon for decades (I’ll refer to all these groups as “homeschoolers” for the rest of the article), as this summary indicates:

It’s not about scaling a new solution. It’s about creating a movement in education in which people develop their own solutions but with external support based on a personalized curriculum… technologies combined with the extraordinary talents of teachers provide an opportunity to revolutionize education and I urge you to get involved in it. Because it is vital not just to ourselves, but to the future of our children. But we have to change from an Industrial model to an agricultural model, where each school can be flourishing tomorrow; that’s where children experience life or at home if that’s where children choose to be educated with their family and their friends.

It is refreshing to hear someone with influence support homeschooling, even if ever so delicately, but this support is inevitable given Sir Ken’s thesis that personalized education is the coming revolution. After all, what can be a more personalized education than homeschooling? Every day, for decades now, many homeschoolers have developed their own solutions to create personalized curricula, often using external support; this external support is typically not a public school, but rather a fellow homeschooler, private business or for-profit school.

It is easy for me to be jaded about Sir Ken’s ideas: after all Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, John Holt, and many others I read or have known have said similar things in their works decades ago, and look how much more intense and unfulfilling school has become for children since they wrote. Indeed, I recall that the agricultural versus industrial metaphor was also used by Holt and others long ago, so why am I enthusiastic about Sir Ken’s version of this argument?

Because he is talking to a very influential and international audience of “thinkers and doers” who actually applaud his comments, rather than react with calls to further support conventional school by outlawing alternatives, such as homeschooling (see my posts about Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden to read how some countries are responding to “the learning revolution” in a negative fashion). As these ideas gain acceptance by elite social groups and businesses not only will homeschooling become a mainstream option for more families, but the entire concept of learning as something people willingly do throughout their lives, instead of learning as something we must compel young people to do, will also begin to take root for more people.



A Homeschooling Success Story

It was wonderful to meet old friends and make new friends at the book signing and talk I did last Friday at the Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Framingham, MA. I was particularly struck, as usual, by the variety of interests and pursuits I learned about from young people who aren't attending school. All too often we hear about homeschoolers who have the highest test scores, win spelling bees, or sail around the world on their own as examples that prove the success of homeschooling. However, I'm drawn to the less spectacular and conventional success stories, such as this one that I learned about Friday and whose success became apparent to all today.

Jazz vocalist Claire Dickson, age 13, has won the Downbeat Magazine Student Jazz Award for Junior High School jazz vocals. Claire’s award is announced in the current June issue of Downbeat magazine, and she was chosen from applicants all over the country. Claire will celebrate by performing a concert with her trio  at Ryles Jazz Club, Inman Square, Cambridge, on June 1 at 8:30.

Congratulations to Claire and her family!