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Free Reading Selections, Limit them?
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It’s happening!! My Year 1 is figuring out that he can read on his own and is picking up books and reading them out loud every available moment the past few days!!! Yaaaaay! Here’s my only concern… upon looking over his shoulder I noticed that the level of some of the books he chooses are a little above his and instead of sounding out the words he doesn’t know, he just skips them or inserts whatever he thinks the word would be by context… do I let him keep doing that? will that work itself out in time as we’re still doing our reading curriculum and such together? My thought is that I don’t want to completely stifle this early stage of learning to love reading by controlling what he reads too strictly… Thanks for sharing your experiences!
At times I’ve set up a book basket for them. They still have a choice of books, but I can find ones that will be at their level (or below). They also love the I-spy books at that age since there isn’t as much reading involved and they can work with their other siblings.
When we go to the library, I try to direct them to the early reader section so they can pick out some books to read on their own.
I had the same situation happening with my boys when they were in that age 6-9 range. Like you, I didn’t want to stifle the enthusiasm for reading and the hunger for great literature. I thought about it long and hard, and in the end, I decided that I didn’t want to limit them to books at their level. I had invested time and money to stock my home with shelves upon shelves of good books – I used the SCM list, the AO lists and other “great literature lists” – and I just figured that since we had it all available, I should let my boys go loose. It seemed a CM wise thing to do.
Fast forward four years:
The good news: they both become voracious readers. They ADORE books. Fiction, non-fiction, adventure, history, science, biographies, research data – even an encyclopedia – they love it all. Reading is, today, among the things they love best in the world. AND, they love to talk about what they read. They can carry on intelligent conversations (with me, family friends, fellow homeschoolers, adults at our church – you name it) about a multitude of subjects. I will listen in and sometimes I am truly blown away by how much they have come to learn and embrace through their own reading.
The bad news: the habit of skipping words and inserting their own inventions for unknown words continued, continued and continued. And now, years later, we are still struggling to break the habit. Word skipping seems to be very much ingrained in the way they read (granted my eldest son does it more than my second son, but both are definitely doing it)
It’s a tough call. We started with light phonics to get reading going and quickly got into “real” books. During the “early” years, I had them reading to me daily in a session we called oral reading. During these one-on-one sessions, they would make the effort to figure out words (sound out, figure out through context or whatever) – and often do well. But given that here on the SCM curriculum plan (and many others) the task of child reading aloud (reading instruction) is supposed to end around grade 3, we reduced this daily oral reading session routine significantly by late grade 3/early grade 4.
I figured it would all be okay – I was reading aloud to them constantly (and still am). We use the technique of them following along with an audio book a great deal so that they are often hearing and seeing words together. But unfortunately in their independent reading, word skipping and reading SUPER quickly was/is the norm.
Now, having said this, if I weren’t digging a little to figure out how much they skip and how much they skip over, perhaps I would never even notice. But knowing that it is their habit, I keep an eye on it from time to time. Out of the blue I’ll be looking over a shoulder, point to a word say, “hey, that’s a pretty heavy duty word…do you know it?” And most often, they do not – but they skipped it SO many times that they don’t even notice.
As of now – grade 6 and 7 – we are back to having them read aloud to me 1-2x per week from a graded reader (circa 1950s) that has an enormous amount of unusual/less commonly used words. This is allowing me to easily put forth an exercise where they are faced with an unknown word and have to figure it out while I observe (or help).
Not sure if I’ve helped, but wanted to let you know that you may want to plan your own decision carefully. If you do decide to let your child loose on books above his/her level, perhaps just keep up a good effort of monitoring exactly HOW he/she is decoding unknown words. As you may have guessed I will most certainly be doing things a bit differently with my next two children. And the most important thing I will do is encourage, encourage, encourage them to ASK me when they come to a word they don’t know. There will be no “just a minute!” (or making them feel like they’re troubling me in any way) because I really want my next two kids to be comfortable STOPPING their reading to figure out an unknown word!
Phew! That was probably more than you wanted – but sometimes writing it all down in a post even helps ME to see the situation better.
Blessings,
Angie
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