Thinking of starting your own homeschool co-op? Not sure how to find other people to participate? Not sure how to outline expectations? Here’s where we started…

We were really excited about the idea of homeschool co-ops long before Ana ever started one. But there were a couple of things we weren’t really sure about, like when we should do it and how to find other people who were interested. It had always been in the back of our minds, but was always one of those things we thought we’d get to sooner or later. We really started talking seriously about it when other moms in Pea’s loose-knit play group started asking about where/when she’d be attending pre-school. Our answer was always, “we’re homeschooling”, and since we sort of believe that education starts at birth, she was already “in” school as far as we were concerned.

We were discussing it one night, and Ana mentioned jumping right in and starting up a co-op for preschoolers. Why not? The beauty of a preschool co-op would be that even parents who planned on sending their kids to a traditional school later on but were currently staying home with them may want to participate. We also thought it would be a good time for us personally to shift Pea’s educational experience a little by exposing her to different teachers and other students. Playing the part of mommy and teacher at the same time didn’t always work out as planned for Ana.

Ana jumped online and went to our local MomsLikeMe site and wrote up a quick post, just to gauge interest, and the response was great. Actually, the response was a little overwhelming. There were a lot more people interested than we’d anticipated. We figured the ideal class size would be 6 or 7 kids, but there were way more initial responses.

A meet and greet was set up so that the moms and kids could get to know each other a little. This was one of the most important steps of organizing the co-op. Of course, not every family who responded showed up for the meeting. Not a problem–if you aren’t interested enough to come to the first meeting, you probably aren’t that interested long-term. The meetup also provided a chance to lay out all the things that would be involved in a co-op. Supplies and curricula cost money, so there would obviously be a financial commitment. More importantly, there needed to be a commitment to being heavily involved with teaching classes and providing care for younger siblings while their moms were instructing.

Most of all, there needed to be a real commitment to participate every day to help the kids establish a steady group dynamic in their school. Sure, kids get sick and scheduling conflicts come up, that’s understandable. But the kids needed the stable group and each mom’s unique creativity and perspective.

Miss Annette Teaching Math

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I wouldn’t go so far as to say anyone was scared off, but if anyone expected this to be just another playgroup or a chance for moms to get together and gossip while the kids played with letter blocks, their eyes were opened to a very different idea. The group of moms that decided to continue on with the project was fully committed, and the results have been great. The kids are now getting a variety of classes taught by different moms, and they are having a blast with it.

I’d say the commitment of the families involved, and that especially means the MOMS, is the single most important factor in the co-op’s success so far. If you are thinking of starting a co-op, don’t feel bad about being selective and laying out firm expectations from the very beginning.

It’s that time of year again…the time to celebrate Banned Book Week. Held every year on the last week of September, BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or to create books that may sometimes be viewed unorthodox or controversial by some. Their goal is to promote intellectual freedom.

I remember one year in Florida there was a lot of buzz about a certain book that was being banned in all schools county by county. Guess what happened? EVERYONE wanted to read it…and just about everyone did. It’s still one of my favorites! It’s funny how banning books has that effect, no?

So go check out what it’s all about and also to see what titles are creating buzz this year. Enjoy your freedom!

One of the issues we’re already concerned about is setting a good reading example for our kids. We feel like it’s important to not only read to them, but for them to see us reading on our own as well. Ana is much more apt to read books than I am. I’ve always been a pretty voracious reader. I’m constantly reading, but 90% of my reading now occurs online. I feel like I need to make a conscious effort to read books when little ones are around because I’m afraid they’ll associate a computer as some type of toy and won’t understand that what I do with the computer is actually reading. But even if they realize that I’m reading, is that the kind of reading kids need?

Yesterday’s New York Times has an excellent article discussing the changing face of reading and how it affects literacy. Reading online is increasingly popular with young people, and the experience of reading online resembles more of a zig-zag-bob-and-weave than the linear beginning, middle, end type reading most of us grew up doing in books, magazines, and newspapers. When I was a kid, I was big fan of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books because they offered a little bit of control over the story, and the story could change. One of the reasons I love reading online is because the experience is similar, and it offers many more tangents. The difference is that those books I loved so much still had a beginning, middle, and end to their stories.

From my own experience, I think the big issue with reading online is that I don’t tend to get as much granularity as I would from a book. I use my online reading as more of a macro view of a subject. Although I can get many more vantage points on a subject, I tend to miss out on the details. I tend to use what I read online as a guide to what I want to read more about in a book; the overview that I get online helps me decide what I’d like to learn about in detail. But, just as the article suggests, I think the way my brain works has definitely been changed by the availability of information we now enjoy.

I think it’s interesting that for kids born in the last ten years or so, this way of getting information is perfectly normal, and for the generation before mine (at least a large number of them), they haven’t really transitioned to life online the way many in my generation have. It’s definitely a strange spot to be in, having experience “extreme reading” both before and after the presence of the web.

Still, I tend to agree with this statement from the article:

Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. “I think they need it all.”

What do you guys think? Does reading online really count as reading?

The other day I happened to run into Gavin Baker of Abunga.com at an informal entrepreneur’s meetup. Abunga is a family friendly online media store that actually uses the input of its community to decide what they should sell. Abunga isn’t Amazon, and they aren’t trying to be either. They are built around the idea of not only providing family friendly products at great prices, but they also have a program that donates money back to worthy causes.

Gavin and I had a really good conversation about the directions they’d like to go with Abunga and new services they have in the works to enhance the experience of their user community. We talked part technology, part marketing, and part “you know what would be cool”. I don’t want to give away any of their plans for the future, but those guys are working feverishly to add more and more to Abunga.

Check them out if you have a chance. We’re constantly looking for cool things like this in the community (especially our local community) that are good resources for parents and kids!

I admit it. I’m a TV junkie. I like to think I watch in moderation, but I probably watch too much. I know that fact may seem to contradict what we’re advocating here, but I can’t help it. And I actually noticed something helpful about television a few weeks ago when Ana was explaining a reading strategy to me. The strategy we were discussing is summarizing. I’m not the reading expert, so I’ll let her take you through the specifics of summarizing, why it’s important, and how to employ it, but I quickly realized that it is a strategy used in television all the time.

Most of my favorite shows are running series like Lost that develop characters and stories over weeks and years. One thing every episode of these shows has in common is that they all begin with a “Previously on…” segment that summarizes what has happened so far. As Ana points out in her article on summarizing, there’s a very good reason for this–it gives us a chance to get caught up very quickly so we can pay attention and absorb the new material.

Again, I’ll leave the coaching of this strategy to Ana, but I thought I’d point out a way that this strategy is commonly used in another medium. I’ve always appreciated the “Previously on…” segments of television shows. Besides reminding me of what has happened in previous episodes, they’re also effective in setting the mood for what I’m about to watch. Whenever I pick up a book I’m working on, especially if it’s fiction, I almost always skim a few paragraphs I covered in my last reading session just to give myself a quick reminder of where I was and to get my mind back into story.

Better known as The Five Components of Reading, the Fab Five are the crucial instruments that research has shown kids need in order to become successful readers. Research is great . . . but are these really so important and are they necessary? My answer to both questions is a big resounding YES! Each one is important and they are absolutely necessary to teach so that your kids not only build a strong foundation of skills, but also continue to develop them in order to become accomplished readers that go on to do well in other subject areas.

Before I break down each of the Fab Five, it’s important to note that these components are not “steps to reading”. They are not meant to be introduced one at a time and mastered before moving on to the other. While it’s true that children will have to learn parts of some components before they can work on others, they are meant to work together throughout the process of learning to read. This means that you will be working on different aspects of the five components as your child’s skills grow. For example: Your child may need to work on some phonemic awareness skills before he/she can work on phonics. Yet another child can be working on vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension all at once in the same story. It may sound confusing at first, but you’ll get the hang of it once you see examples in the teaching methods and lesson ideas!

Phonemic Awareness: Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the different sounds of our language (phonemes). Often confused/used interchangeably with phonological awareness, this component is actually a subpart of phonological awareness.

• Not the same as phonics and does not involve print because this component is auditory
• Critical in laying the foundation for later letter-sound correspondence
• Example: (first sound isolation) What’s the first sound in the word sun?

Phonics: Developing an ability to correspond sounds (phonemes) with letters (graphemes).

• Leads to an understanding that there are predictable relationships between sounds and letters
• Readers use the relationships to recognize familiar words and to decode unfamiliar ones
• One main difference between good and poor readers is the ability to use letter-sound correspondence to identify words

Vocabulary: The ability to understand and use words in our language in order to communicate through speech and writing. There are four different types of vocabulary:

• Listening vocabulary – the words needed to understand what is heard
• Speaking vocabulary – the words used when speaking
• Reading vocabulary – the words needed to understand what is read
• Writing vocabulary – the words used in writing

Fluency: The ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with prosody (with stress and intonation in your voice – not monotone).

• Should be automatic and effortless
• Acts as a bridge between recognizing words and comprehension
• Fluent readers use less mental energy on decoding (figuring words out) and more on comprehension (understanding what they read)

Comprehension: The cognitive ability to process and understand text that is read. It’s the ultimate goal and purpose of reading.

• Should be intentional and active
• Thinking strategies can be taught to improve comprehension

Fluency … the great bridge. Fluency acts as the bridge between decoding words and comprehending what they mean. But what does fluency mean? Here’s the National Reading Panel’s official definition:

Fluency: The ability to read text quickly, accurately, and with proper expression.

Fluent reading should be effortless and sound as natural as speech. This can be difficult for many children when they lack the ability to recognize words quickly enough to make them flow. This can lead to problems that affect a child’s comprehension of a text because when a child spends too much energy and attention on trying to figure out what a word says they don’t have much energy left for figuring out its meaning. Below is a list of characteristics that less fluent readers share:

• often read word by word
• may sometimes skip or repeat words
• group words together in a way that doesn’t sound like natural speech so they sound choppy
• reading aloud is slow, labored, and often times monotone
• comprehension is usually not there

Why don’t some children learn to be fluent readers? Here are some possible reasons:

• they don’t fully understand or have a handle on connecting sounds and letters
• they lack the ability to automatically decode words due to lack of practice
• they may lack phonemic awareness (awareness of the sounds in our language)
• poor vocabulary
• not enough practice reading text

This is why phonics instruction is so important – phonics provides your child with the ability and tools to decode words. But fluency isn’t just about reading words and passages quickly – it’s not something that you start to work on or worry about once your child starts reading books or is in third grade. Fluency practice should begin when you’re first teaching your child to recognize/name letters and to learn their sounds. They should learn to do this quickly and accurately so that they can later read words and thus books as effectively. So what can you do to teach your child to read fluently? There are several ways you can do this – and the more fun you have with reading, the more interested they’ll be in participating!

Read Aloud

I can’t stress enough how beneficial this simple act is for your children! You can read detailed info on reading aloud here, but for now we’ll just focus on how it affects fluency. Your read alouds act as a model for good reading. It’s where your child hears how reading is supposed to sound: quick, without mistakes, and full of expression. You should read books with plenty of emotion and try changing up your voice for different characters. Not only does this make it more fun for your child, it also motivates them to read and to want to sound like you do when they try it. You should also point out to your child the fact that your voice changes when you read and show them how different (and boring) you would sound if you read it monotone. Have them practice changing up their own voice while reading so they can feel and hear the difference for themselves.

Tons of Practice

Practice, practice, practice! To pactice means to continually work on something in order to improve. This shouldn’t be surprising as this fits with almost anything in life! So in reading this means to do repeated readings. Repeated readings of the same text has been shown by research to greatly improve fluency. Here are some findings on repeated readings:

• children get multiple exposure to words and spelling patterns
• can help increase reading rate
• kids can practice their reading strategies to improve comprehension
• reinforces decoding skills
• can be really motivating because kids can see that they get better with each reading
• works with older kids as well as younger ones

It’s a good thing kids love to read the same books over and over again. Now you can take comfort in the fact that they’re learning lots – not just memorizing- when they ask you to read them that book again.

Read A Different Way

Ok, so even the most fun book can be become boring when you read it the same way every time. That’s why changing up the way you or your child reads a book can really help. Here are some different ways you can try reading:

• Partner read: take turns reading sections or pages
• Choral Reading: read it at the same time so that your child can practice keeping up with you
• Echo Reading: (this works best with young kids and easy books but can be tried by all) You read a sentence (with lots of emotion) then they repeat after you trying to copy your tone and expression
• Read along with a tape: another way to listen to good models of reading
• Reader’s Theater: (this can work well if you are part of a co-op or your child has friends to do this with) you can use poetry, speeches, plays, or your child can write a play based on a story they have read

Changing up the way your child reads a story can be an easy way to sneak in some repeated reading for kids who don’t enjoy reading the same selection more than once. Have fun with it!

Check out more ideas for teaching Fluency in our Lesson Ideas page!

References

Unless you’re like my sister (an aerospace engineer at NASA), chances are that you are not a rocket scientist. Yet according to Louisa Moats, one of the leading researchers on the process of learning to read, teaching reading is rocket science. Huh? How is teaching a child the ABC’s and picture books rocket science?

Well, that’s exactly it – there’s A LOT more to teaching reading than just making sure your kids know the ABC’s, letter sounds, and words in books. I’m going to highlight some of the findings from her and other researchers’ work for you in the hopes that you’ll truly understand what a great task you undertake when teaching your child to read.

• Learning to read is not natural or easy for most children because it is an acquired skill.
• The difficulty of teaching reading has been underestimated. Not only does it mean a lot of work on the child’s part, but the teacher/parent must be very knowledgeable about the process of learning to read and what methods work best
• Skilled reading happens too fast and is too automatic for us to really understand what is happening in our brains. First, we must recognize and connect the right sounds with the right letters and make those into words. Next, we put a bunch of words together into sentences, paragraphs, pages, etc. Then, we have to be thinking at the same time so that we can make sense of what just read. Wow! That’s a lot to do all at once!
• Readers who struggle with connecting sounds to the right letter to make words have no mental energy or attention to think about what the words mean – so their comprehension really suffers! This is where explicit (with a purpose) teaching of phonics helps – kids learn to automatically connect those sounds with letters into words. When those skills are automatic, attention can then be paid to meaning.
• When adults (some teachers included) were tested on their knowledge of our language, they showed very weak familiarity with the concepts of our written system. Their knowledge was not enough to be an effective reading teacher. This is why it is SO important for you to learn as much as possible about our language and writing system so that you can be prepared to thoroughly teach your child to read!
• Without good knowledge about how kids learn how to read, you will most likely not be able to identify problems as they arise. You may be able to tell that your child is having difficulty with something, but you may not know with what or how to help them improve.
• Today’s popular reading programs are full of great literature, pictures, thematic units, and motivational strategies for kids, but they’re very weak in helping the teacher/parent learn about how to teach reading and how children learn.

Most of these findings are also used to propose better teacher training programs in colleges around the country. The author repeatedly stress the importance that it takes more than just knowing how to read and how to teach to be a reading instructor. I think this applies to anyone attempting to teach a child to read -whether you’re a teacher at a school or a caring parent who home schools or helps their child after school. You have to know the ins and outs of how to teach reading for kids to become masters at learning to read so they can read to learn . . . for life!

Become a rocket scientist yourself by learning the specifics of teaching reading! For more detailed info on the ins and outs, please visit our tutorial section entitled Reading Fundamentals.

Sources:

Moats, L. Teaching Reading Is Rocket Science

]]> http://readingcoachonline.com/i%e2%80%99m-no-rocket-scientist-yet/feed/ 0 http://readingcoachonline.com/karla-reading-doesnt-come-naturally-for-everyone/ http://readingcoachonline.com/karla-reading-doesnt-come-naturally-for-everyone/#comments Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:14:37 +0000 Ana http://readingcoachonline.com/karla-reading-doesnt-come-naturally-for-everyone/

I have read several accounts of parents whose kids have learned how to read on their own. Some of these children began reading slowly while others took off quickly. As impressive as it may seem, I don’t believe that reading truly came as a natural ability for them. I absolutely believe that these parents feel that their kids learned how to read naturally, however, I don’t think they realize how much of a role they played in their children’s learning. While they may not have explicitly taught their kids to read, they certainly taught them implicitly. What I mean is that everything these parents did for their kids (some from the time they were born) helped to build a foundation that would later translate into them becoming literate. Many of these parents share how they would read books to their kids daily, track words while reading, discuss books, provide books and experiences with literature at home, model reading, take them to the library, and many other wonderful activities that expose children to the world of reading. Just because these parents didn’t sit down and provide their kids with formal lessons on reading doesn’t mean that they didn’t teach them how to read. These parents did amazing things for their children even if they don’t realize it! It is this type of parent that is often found behind a child that has learned how to read “naturally”. These kids are one extreme.

Let me give you an example of the other extreme, because some kids aren’t as lucky. I had the opportunity to work with a little girl that convinced me that reading does not occur naturally for everyone. She was an eleven year old girl that was raised by her illiterate grandmother in a small Central American country. Having never attended school, she came to me knowing nothing academically, and had absolutely no knowledge of the alphabet or numbers. Other than that, she was of average intelligence – she just lacked education. She never had anyone that read to her and had never even seen a book until moving to the US. She didn’t even grasp the concept that writing was a representation of the words we speak – she had no idea what those “black and white scribbles” were. Needless to say, she was a very challenging case.

Now most kids fall somewhere in between these two extremes. They probably have parents who read to them occasionally, are exposed to literature, and are aware of why the ability to read is important. Yet their daily modeling of reading may only include functional reading – such as reading menus, tv guides, signs, or other things that simply get people through the day. They may not have someone who emphasizes the importance of learning new things or who encourages them to read nonfiction just to learn about things that interest them. In my opinion, these kids would probably not be able to learn to read if left to their own devices.

I’ll assume that if you’ve made it this far in this article then you’re someone who enjoys reading for the sake of learning. If your kids are in the room while you read this, you are modeling for them right now. Congratulations! You are already taking steps to ensure that your children learn to read and will later read to learn!

Comprehension is THE ultimate goal of reading! Everything we teach our kids in reading is so that they will end up having comprehension, or an understanding of what they read. We spend so much time learning how to read just to get to the point where we can read to learn. Comprehension = knowledge. But just because comprehension is our ultimate goal doesn’t mean that you need to wait till your kids are older or have “mastered” everything else in reading before you teach it.

Some people tend to think that comprehension is something that’s focused on only in later grades – not so! You can start teaching comprehension as soon as your child is able to talk about what you read to him/her. Having said that, I’d like to clear something up before we dive into the how-to’s of comprehension. It’s very common to pick up a piece of reading curriculum that has questions written at the end of the text/selection and get excited because it “covers comprehension”. Asking questions during and/or after a reading is fine and very useful in gauging comprehension, but it is NOT the same as teaching it. Teaching comprehension is a process that involves more than just asking questions about the characters, plot, or main idea of a book or story. I’m going to break down the basics of teaching comprehesion for you in the following sections – you can get specific lessons in the Comprehension section of Lesson Ideas.

Pre-, During, and Post Reading Activities:

• Prior Knowledge: Take a minute to think about the books that you read as an adult. You probably tend to pick out books that are about things you like or that have been recommended to you by a friend. Combine that with about 20, 30, or more years of prior knowledge that living life has offered you and you probably go into a book already knowing a fair amount about the content that may be found inside its pages. Our kids oftentimes don’t have this luxury, so we have to help them out by providing them with knowledge about a topic before reading about it. This is known as “building background knowledge”. For example you wouldn’t want to read Anne Frank’s Diary to your child without first going over some facts about the The Holocaust (discussing it, watching a video, visiting a museum, etc.). This isn’t to say that you will cover everything about the given topic – you definitely want to leave much of the learning about something for the reading of the selection/book. You just want to make sure that you give them a starting point so they’re not totally lost when reading about it.

• Asking Questions: This is an obvious one that most people know to do during and after a reading. But many don’t know about the usefulness of asking questions before you read a book. This can really help them maintain a focus as it sets a purpose for them to read. For example: before reading The True Story About The Three Little Pigs, you may ask your child “I wonder how this is different than the regular book? What do you think we’ll learn is true in this story? (let them make some guesses) Let’s see if you can find out what the truth is.” Taking a couple of minutes to do this pre -read questioning will go a long way because your child will have a goal in their head and they have to “hunt” for the answers. This works especially well when you give them the chance to choose the book they want to read – the motivation will be there from the beginning!

• Picture Preview (if applicable): Kids love to look at the pictures in a book before they read. It’s their version of how we check out the back cover of a book before reading to see if it catches our interest. It’s also another way to get them thinking about what they will read about and/or get some pre-reading questions in. Here’s a simple rule for picture previews: Fictional books … let them explore the pictures and pages (without reading the text) up to a certain point so they won’t spoil a possible surprise ending. For non-fiction … let them see all of it.

• Discussions: Have you ever seen a movie and not quite gotten it or felt like you missed something important? But then while talking about it with a friend, they point out something someone said or did and you suddenly “got it”. And then maybe when you watched it again you picked up on stuff you missed the first time. That’s what discussions after a reading do for our kids. Now by discussion, I don’t mean for you to ask them a bunch of questions, I mean talk about it – what happened and why, what the characters were like, what would you have done in their position(s), did you like the ending, etc.. That’s not to say you can’t ask questions, just try to use them to lead into a discussion rather than having a question/answer session. Not only can this be really fun (they come up with the wildest things), but you can really use it to gauge your child’s progress and to let you know what you should focus on during the next reading to help them “get it” better.

Skill and Strategy Instruction These make up the “meat and potatoes” part of teaching comprehension. It’s important to know that skills and strategies are not the same and that they are both important to teach so that your child can maximize their comprehension of a story, article or book. There are 11 skills and 7 seven strategies that have been shown by research to be very effective in improving children’s comprehension. You want to focus your attention of skill and strategy instruction both during and after a reading, but you don’t want to do too much at once. So here’s an example of how you can break them up into different readings per story/book : First Read: Might include reading it together and taking turns, or you reading aloud to them as they follow along – Choose 2-3 strategies to focus on and model them throughout the reading. Second Read: Choose 1 skill to focus on. Introduce/review the skill before the read. Have them try reading the selection aloud to you pausing to practice the skill when the opportunity is right. Discuss and practice the skill after the read. Third Read: For extra fluency practice – If they can, have them read it independently or you can try a new way of reading like I discussed in the Fluency article. (Note: this suggestion works best with stories, articles and short books – if reading chapters books, you can alternate skill/strategy instruction by chapter depending on the content)

Skills: These can be defined as the things kids need to know in order to connect with and understand what an author is trying to say in a book, story, or article. They help kids organize the information in a text so they can connect with the author’s message and comprehend it. Focused mostly on after a reading (depending on the skill).

• Main Idea and Details
• Author’s Purpose
• Cause and Effect
• Fantasy vs Reality
• Classifying and Categorizing
• Author’s Point of View
• Drawing Conclusions
• Making Inferences
• Sequencing
• Comparing and Contrasting
• Fact and Opinion

Strategies: These are the tools that we use in our heads while we’re reading that help us make sense of things and/or help us read better. The thing is that most of us aren’t even aware that we do these things so we don’t think to teach them. To teach these you basically have to pretend that you’re opening up your mind so that your child can “see” how you think. The idea here is to model the way you think and understand things and show your child how to do the same so that he/she can eventually do this on his/her own. The following strategies were written by the authors of SRA’s Open Court Reading Program and were based on research about how kids learn to read and comprehend.

• Summarizing
• Predicting
• Monitoring and Clarifying
• Visualizing
• Asking Questions
• Monitoring and Adjusting Reading Speed
• Making Connections

Comprehension isn’t something that just happens over night, it’s something that’s developed with time and purposeful practice. Be sure to check out the Comprehension section of Lesson Ideas for more detailed ideas on these comprehension activities, skills, and strategies!

References