Throwing Marshmallows

I had forgotten that I had taken this test a little while ago and found it remarkably accurate for an online test. I also find it amusing that I am not borderline in any of my characteristics! No doubt where I fall.

My multiple intelligences results did not reveal any big surprises either. Interpersonal and verbal/linguistics are definitely my strong points.

Learning styles, personality types and multiple intelligences are fascinating to me. Guess that is one reason why I am so strong in interpersonal skills!

Go check it out!

Cindy over at Apple Stars has a thought provoking post about Creating Value for the Right Brained Learner. In it she talks about how many of the things that you read about r-b learners, while acknowledging their strengths are still geared towards somehow “fixing” them:

Right-brainers are not broken! If there are left-brained learners and right-brained learners, why isn’t there a plethora of negative labels for the left-brained learner? Each type of learner should be valued for what it offers. Each learner should be allowed to flourish in the environment that supports their timeframe and process. Just because the left-brained value system is so prolific in our society and culture doesn’t mean it is superior. It means it is accepted, which means the supports are in place, which means it is easier to value what already exists.

I really want to write more about this, but it is too late right now. But I will say that I had the same initial reaction when I started reading A Global View of Strategies for Visual Spatial Learners. I actually did not make it past the first page, because some of the characterizations really bothered me…I was in a bad mood when I was reading, so I chalked it up to that. But when I came back this evening, I had the same gut reaction.

In the first paragraph, Kay Pittelkow states:

The model proposes some gifted children show the characteristics of a gifted visual spatial learner but have problems that prevent them from being good auditory sequential learners.

Problems that prevent? Must every child be a “good” auditory sequential learner? Is that the goal to which all children must aspire? Where are the articles that talk about the gifted auditory sequential learner that has visual spatial problems? (They do exist…I am one of them!)

She goes on to list list the characteristics of the “auditory limited spatial learner” and while the list includes many strengths of a r-b learner, it also list things such as

• poor at phonics, needs a sight word approach
• may be inattentive in class
• poor at spelling, needs to visualize words
• poor handwriting, should use keyboard
• poor at timed tests
• may be disorganized
• struggles with easy work

And so on. Out of the 22 characteristics, 10 were negative (such as those listed above) and 2 could be seen as negative or positive depending on your point of view (prefers to develop own methods of problem solving and arrives at correct solution without taking steps).

Now…are those negative characteristics true of r-b learners? Technically, yes. R-b kids are not phonics readers, come later into writing, do not perform well on timed tests. So what’s the problem? The problem is that it takes the perspective that the l-b learning style is “correct” and the r-b learning style is “incorrect”.

It assumes that phonics is the correct way to learn to read and if you don’t learn by phonics at age 6 or 7, then you are “poor at reading” i.e., something is “wrong”. Yet, r-b kids, if not forced to try to read before they are ready or in a manner which is contrary to their learning style are NOT poor readers. They are not even “late” readers. They are “right on time readers” for them. It is only the system that labels them “poor” or makes them feel “less than”.

R-b kids are “poor at rote memorization” and have trouble memorizing their math facts. They are good at mathematical reasoning. L-b kids are better at memorizing their math facts, but are not so great at getting the mathematical reasoning…but this is not seen as a “problem”. It is not considered age appropriate for a child to add and subtract negative numbers in 1st or 2nd grade. Why not? Jason could. And I bet a whole lot of r-b kids could probably pick up those concepts as well if presented in the right way. But when they do it, they are seen as “advanced” in math concepts. Well, why can’t l-b kids be considered “poor” in math concepts? Or why can’t l-b kids be considered “ahead” in learning to memorize their math facts?

Now I am not saying that we should label kids who don’t get higher math concepts at earlier ages as “behind” or “poor”. We most definitely should not. It would be just as unfair to the l-b kids as what happens now to r-b kids. Different kids learn things at different times. The question that I have is why is the l-b learning style considered the “norm” and r-b kids are measured as either “ahead” or “behind” based on that?

Homeschooling luckily takes the “competition” part out of learning (for the most part anyways…many of us are somehow accountable to system in some way). There does not have to be an “ahead” or “behind”. There does not have to be an “advanced” or “slow”. You do not have an “advantage” by being an l-b or an r-b learner. You just learn the way that you are supposed to learn on the time frame that is right for you.

The article went on to say:

Recurring ear infections during the first two years of life were identified by Silverman to be the most likely ailment contributing to the development of a gifted VSL.

I remember reading this in Upside-down Brilliance and it bothered me there too. This implies that the reason that kids are r-b is that there is something wrong with them…they were damaged in their early years. That being r-b is something that needs to be overcome.

Please. Jason has had one ear infection his whole life (when he was four months old). You don’t “catch” being an r-b learner. They are not damaged goods. They do not need to be fixed. They need to be taught in a way that honors and values their learning style.

Yes, they may have challenges in certain areas. But so do l-b learners! If you want a good laugh, come over and watch me try to put together a complex lego model from those danged picture directions I can never get. Don’t ask me to build anything (when I built our guinea pig cage I had the liner cut too short because I forgot that in order to have a 5 inch lip, I needed to add 10 inches to my measurements (5 inches for both sides). Ask me why I have a navigation system in my car (I can not find my way out of a paper bag) and even though I made it through 2 years of 5-hour calculus in college, I could not explain what an integral or even a limit represents…I could do the calculations pretty well, but did not always understand why or what I was doing.

OK, I said that I was not going to write anything because it was late, and now here it is even later! Ah well. And I do feel bad ranting about something I have not been able to read completely through. (Yes, I got all this from the first page!)

But this really is not about the article. It is about the system/society in which we live that does not see how damaging it can be for our r-b kids to be told over and over again that there is something wrong with them because they do not fit the current standards of “normal”. What we need to do is to let them know that “normal” is not their normal. And that is OK and even great!
So yes, Cindy. I get it. You are not alone.

~Stephanie

Steph left this comment on my last post:

 The human brain is incredibly complicated. We categorize things because that enables us to understand them. But as Christine mentioned (in the first comment) no one fits tidily into a box.

I agree! And that is why I don’t think that we should get really totally hung up on “is my child xyz” or putting a label on our kids. Yet, here I am talking constantly about visual-spatial kids…what gives?

The reason for me is because learning about the v-s learning style has drastically opened my view about how kids learn…it has expanded my options and has given me a new way of approaching learning with Jason. So in this way, finding a “label” has helped me break out of the traditional box.

Some labels can be used to limit. Others can be used to more fully understand. Reading about v-s learners has given me more tools to use and has enabled me to better understand how Jason learns. It also has given me information that has allowed me to become more relaxed (usually anways!) as I have learned that things like “late” reading and being slower to memorize math facts is “normal”. And it has made a difference to Jason as well…he is more aware of how he learns and is getting better at knowing what works and does not work well for him. Which can only be a good thing.

So for us, finding a label and a “box” to put Jason in has actually resulted in expanding our world and increasing our options.

So that is why I keep talking about v-s learners so much…in the hopes that someone else might recognize their child and see them in a different light…it is all about perspective and the perspective we have on our children makes the biggest difference in their lives. If we see them as progressing normal for them, we won’t see their progression as a problem that needs to be fixed.

And for those of you who are not sure where your child falls…reading about v-s learners will still give you additional ideas to try…maybe they will work, maybe they won’t. But having more options and different points of view is a good thing. And you will learn more about your child, even if they are not v-s…I know that I have learned so much about my own left-brained approach and gained quite a bit of insight into my own way of learning by reading about v-s learners.

So labels can be freeing and labels can be restricting. It is all what you do with the information gained from that label. Many people do just fine and don’t need any labels to figure out what their kids need. And that is great! In my case, a label was what I needed for me to figure out what my son needed. And I am eternally grateful to Cindy for pointing me in the right direction.

~Stephanie

This seems to be a question that comes up often, mainly, I think, because the term “auditory-sequential” is used as the “opposite” of visual-spatial. Which seems to imply that visual-spatial kids do not have strong auditory skills. In fact, there was a comment on Willa’s post about Visual-spatial Learners - Traits:

 Your discussion of your son who has really strong spatial abilities is especially interesting as mine does also - amazingly so, to me (give me written directions anytime - a map and I’m lost!). His memory is quite powerful - not just visual memory, though, he has a huge memory for written and spoken language. Trying to figure out where this places him as a visual/spatial learner or an auditory/sequential.

I think that the term auditory-sequential can be mis-leading. Many (although not all) visual-spatial learners have strong auditory skills. Jason is one of them. His strong visualization skills allow him to hear something and remember it easily.

We recently listened to The Tale of Despareaux. I had read this to Jason when he was probably around 5. I asked him if he remembered it and he said no. However, when the first line was read, it instantly all came back to him and he was remembering details that I could not even remember….he basically was reciting the entire plot line.

And it is conversely true that auditory-sequential folks do not always have strong auditory skills. I am one of them. In order for me to remember something I have to see it written down.

In school, I had to take copious notes or there was no way I could remember a lecture (Cindy has a great story about how when she tried to help her oldest learn how to take notes it became abundantly clear that note-taking interfered with his ability to remember the lecture and that he actually had better recall without taking notes).

I enjoy audio books but if I want to remember anything about it, I really have to read it. I have been known to listen to an audio book, enjoy it a lot and then have a need to actually sit down and read it. If I have a choice, I always pick reading the actual book over the audio book (I do love audio books in the car however…it helps me stay awake).

And recently I participated in a telephone survey and found it really difficult to remember the questions (they would ask a question and then I had to pick from about 5 different options each time). I wound up asking her to wait a minute so I could get some paper because there was no way that I could listen to the question and remember all the options from which I had to choose without seeing them written down.

So don’t let the term auditory confuse the issue. Visual-spatial kids can have very strong auditory skills. If your child has traits that mostly fall under the visual-spatial category (you can see a list of traits here) and also has strong auditory skills, then he is most likely a v-s learner with strong auditory skills.

I believe that Linda Silverman talks about this in Upside-Down Brilliance. It is the v-s kids without strong auditory skills that suffer the most in school because of the mis-match in the teaching style with their needs. If a v-s learner has strong auditory skills, they can use those skills to compensate.
The other thing to keep in mind is that each child is unique and will have some traits that are stronger then others and will have some traits from both sides. I know that for Jason, and myself, it became very clear which learning style was predominent for each of us. But we each still have some “opposite” traits…I love history which is often prefered by v-s folks and I am also very disorganized (wouldn’t you know, the one left brained trait that I don’t have!) although I do like sorting and categorizing things. So it is not an all or nothing kind of thing. Bottom line is does your child think in words or in pictures?

My advice is if you see your child in some of the traits listed for v-s learners, read some of the books and see if it makes sense. I know that for me it was like a light bulb went off and so many things made sense.

And luckily at home, the approach can be tailored to the child and they don’t have to compensate!

~Stephanie

But not from me! Oh no, I am way to busy trying to survive the holidays. In December I just try to hunker down and make it through (I don’t do the holidays well for a variety of reasons).

Luckily for me, Steph over at Room of My Own and Cindy over at Apple Stars have been doing some great writing/thinking/blogging about right-brained/visual-spatial learners, so I can just point you over there and you can tell me (or them) what you think.

Steph has been reading Upside Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner and recording her notes and thoughts about how it relates to her kids. Lots and lots of great observations and something that I wish that I had the time to do! I actually have a lot of comments based on her comments and only wish that I had the time to write about them here. Hopefully soon when I can carve out some dedicated blogging time. In the meantime, check out Steph’s posts…you can get a really good idea of what all this right-brained/visual-spatial stuff is all about.

And Cindy has been taking the time to talk about writing and the right-brained learner and how it does not always follow a traditional path (so what else is new!). And how important it is to place value on these non-traditional writing paths.

So enjoy…I am completely fascinated with how kids/people learn and how different that can look for some of our kids. And I hope to be back to writing about it myself soon.

~Stephanie

Cindy has a post up over at Life Without School called Unschooling Goes to College about her oldest son, Eric’s first experience with community college classes after being unschooled. I love to read about older homeschoolers…gives me reassurances that this homeschooling thing can and does work (yes, I can see every day that it is working but it is still nice to see!)

I especially love to read about Eric because it was reading descriptions of him that first led me to learning about visual-spatial kids. Eric and Jason have a lot of similar traits and so it has been fun for me to learn more about him and his learning journey. I can so see an older Jason having a similar transition as Cindy describes in this article.

~Stephanie

For various reasons, I did not do much for dinner tonight and as such was asking Jason what he wanted. He (as usual) asked what we had. I started listing things (not too hard, as he is a very picky eater and this limits his choices). When I got to the end of the list, he blankly looked at me and asked me again, what we had.

This happens quite a bit and I can find it frustrating (mild understatement here). Before I could tell him to go look in the pantry and find something himself, he started telling me what had happened and why he did not hear me.

Turns out that when I mentioned grilled cheese, he started thinking about how he was not in the mood for grilled cheese and that it might make him feel sick. This led him to thinking about how one of his neopets gets the measles everytime he eats dairy. Which got him thinking about playing neopets and how he hasn’t in awhile. By that time I was pretty much through my list and he had not heard anything past grilled cheese.

I just had to laugh. He was so sincere…he honestly did not mean to not hear me, but his mind just starts making these connections and goes from there. I did ask him if I was supposed to know what was going on in his mind…he said, no and that it would be scary if I did!

I do love it when I get these glimpses into it though!

~Steph

Oh, we ended up having frozen pizza. Which Kyle then decided that he not want to eat, but so goes my life.

The boys and I were playing Cinq-o today which was a lot of fun and reassured me that Jason’s adding and multiplication facts are still progressing. Jason was leading at first with me really far behind. Then I got a great score and the tables were turned. Kyle wound up winning, we me coming in second and Jason third.

After the game, Jason was asking me why he always seemed to loose at dice and card games. We talked a bit about how he did not always loose, but how it could seem that way. And how with most card and dice games it was all about luck. There usually was very little skill involved.

Jason said that he much prefered board games like Risk and card games like Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh, which after thinking about it, makes perfect sense. He has more control over these games…there is some element of luck in the games (dice rolls and draws of a card) but there is also a lot of strategy in them.  Same with his video games. He can practice and work at it and get better/faster/smarter. He can improve his game and work towards winning. In a game like Cinq-o it is all about luck. Luck of the roll or luck of the draw.

Funny thing is that I prefer card games and dice games rather then complex strategy games. I like how the playing field is level…younger players have the same chance as older of winning. I also don’t have to work quite so hard…I don’t have to think 5 plays ahead. They are more straightforward and thus more fun for me.

I am sure that there is a right-brained/left-brained parallel in there…actually it does make sense from that point-of-view. Dice games and card games are more sequential. More straight forward. Strategy games (including video games) require you to see the whole picture…to take into consideration many variables and to see how a move you make now affects the play down the road.

I think that strategy games also play to a right-brained learners’ sense of fairness…after all, if you work harder you will become better and that is only fair. With games of luck, there is no rhyme or reason to who wins really…which is very frustrating to Jason! Mainly because he is just as likely to loose as he is to win. And of course at this point in time, winning is everything. (Although I will say he is much better at loosing now…no getting upset or mad. He just started loosing interest towards the end of the game when he thought he had no chance to win. But he did not ask to stop playing! Big improvement!)

~Steph

Every so often a discussion comes up on one of my homeschool email list about things that kids must learn. I find these discussions very interesting. Recently, on Homeschooling Creatively, talk turned to the learning of multiplication tables. One mom wrote “I think those tables are pretty darn important. You just can’t get through the math without knowing them.” I thought about this a little bit and on the surface it seemed to make a lot of sense. After all, much of higher math depends on knowing your times tables.

But then I started thinking…but what if you can get by? It is challenging assumptions like this that has helped free my thinking so that I can look at what might work best for Jason. If I think that a skill is critical and must be learned, then we are stuck and can not move forward, when moving forward might be just what we need to do. What if moving forward actually gives him the reason to learn the critical skill? Or what if putting it aside lets him have the time to mature to where he can grasp it?

Right brained kids definitely need to see the why, the whole part, where they are going…so maybe Jason will find the motivation to learn multiplication when he wants to determine the area of something (or wants to know how much money I owe him for 10 weeks of overdue allowances). Or like my friend’s son when he realized that multiplication was way faster then adding to figure things out.

For me, letting go of things that my kids must learn is critical. When I realized that if all else failed, Jason could always use a calculator to do his math facts when he got older, it let me relax. I don’t feel as much pressure to “get him to learn”. This allows me to take the time to look for ways that make sense to him and let him learn it on his schedule.

Does this mean that I think that multiplication facts aren’t important? No. Knowing them definitely (in my mind) makes a lot of things easier. And we do work on them. I just try not to stress over how fast he is learning them and we do not make learning them our sole focus in math. He definitely understands the concept which in my mind is much more important then being able to spout off a memorized answer.

Realizing that if he never learned them, he could still manage to have a productive, successful life has let me back off and give him the space and time that he needs. I have to trust that he will pick them up over time. He still does not really know all his addition facts either and still needs to calculate what 6+7 or 8+5 is (he does this by figuring out that 6+4=10, 7-4=3 and 10+3=13, and he does this pretty danged fast - pretty neat for this left-brained girl!) But I have seen these too gradually come easier and easier for him.

A friend of mine just shared her son’s reading story on a local list. He has CAPD and she tried just about every known reading program including individual tutoring. At 12 (!) he still could not read. At that point, she decided that if he never learned to read that would be ok with her and she backed off trying to teach him. She just started focusing on his strengths and would read whatever he needed read. 6 months later, he picked up a manga book and read it cover to cover. Then he read the instruction manual for a video game he was really into. Now at 14 you would never know that he was not reading 2 years ago.

This set off a storm of posts about how can you say that it is ok if he never learned to read! How can you survive in this world if you can’t read! I think that they missed the point of her story. She was not saying that a parent should not help their child to read if they need help. She was not saying that she did not want her child to ever learn to read and that not being able to read is a good thing. She was saying that no matter what a parent does, if the child is not ready, that child will not be able to read. The child has to be ready. And I would add to that, a child needs to get information in a way that makes sense to him/her.

The biggest thing that I get from her story (and something I try to always keep in mind) is that sometimes you have to let go and trust that your child will learn what they need to learn.

~Steph

Also published in Unschooling Voices #1. 

I have wanted to pull all my right-brained/visual-spatial learners resources onto one page so that I can easily refer to them and I did! Check it out:

Right-brained/Visual-spatial Learner Resources

This is a good place to start if you think that you might have a visual-spatial learner…these are the articles, books and (of course) email lists that have helped me along the way. Hope that they help you!

~Steph

I am constantly learning lessons during this homeschooling journey we are on (probably more so then the boys!). Often I end up re-learning those lessons many times. But it is good to get a reminder every once in awhile. Really good.

A couple of days ago, the boys decided that it was time to go toy shopping. Between Jason’s birthday, Christmas and over two months of untouched allowances, they each had a bit of money burning their pockets and I had been putting them off for awhile. My only condition was that Jason needed to figure out how much money he had to spend.

Some background…a few years ago I started acting as bank for the boys, mainly because we tend to forget to give them their allowances. This way we have a written record of when we give them their allowance. When they get Christmas or Birthday money they can either keep it in their banks or “deposit” it with me. Then if they are out and want to spend their money, we deduct it from their “account” when we get home.

It had been a while since we had updated their balance, so we needed to add in Christmas money, Birthday money, 10 weeks of allowance (!) as well as deduct for money spent on snacks after swimming and few miscellaneous purchases.

I have to say that I was duly impressed. Jason did adding and subtracting (much of it involving carrying) in his head without missing a beat. No hemming, no “I can’t do this”, no “this is too hard”. He just did it. Because it was real and it would give him an answer to something that he really wanted to know. And that is the lesson that I need to remember.

Jason has a love/hate relationship with math. He is very instinctual and can completely get math concepts but he HATES remembering math facts. My challenge has been to balance these two sides. As he gets better at remembering the math facts, he gets more confidant at figuring things out on his own. But he does need a push now and then. So we do “do math” but not tons of drill and I try to throw in enough “fun math” (he likes the Marilyn Burns books like The I Hate Mathematics Book which focus more on the fun math concepts).

Now that we have started multiplication, we have been having lots of conversations about not seeing why he needs to know math. Part of this I realize is that I tended to do most of the everyday math for him. The idea being that he would see how I used math and start wanting to do it on his own (please don’t laugh…it is working great this way for Kyle! He is constantly telling me to stop so he can figure out things on his own.) But Jason has no problem with letting people do things for him…not because he is lazy, but because he is a perfectionist. If someone can do something easier/better/faster then he can he prefers to let that person do it.

So I now make a point of letting him do the everyday math we come across. It has become a running joke between us and I think that he is seeing that there is a point in knowing his math facts. In fact I think that I scored some points when we talked about how mulitplication would have been a much faster way of calculating how much allowance he was due (he manually added up his allowance 10 times rather then multiplying by 10).

But it is times like these where he does math pretty much effortlessly that help ease my worries that math computation will never be easy for him. It will be. I know that. I just have to remember it. And if all else fails he can use a calculator….

Also published in the 4th Homeschooling Country Fair.

Also published on Life Without School.

As I have mentioned before, Jason is a right brained learner (also known as a visual/spatial learner). The realization of this was a huge turning point in our homeschooling journey. It totally changed (for the better) the way that I approach things with him and has helped me understand him and where he is coming from. I have also learned a lot about myself (as I am a left brained learner but never realized it). I have realized that I am not a visual person, but rather a feeling/relationship person, which is kind of a cool thing to know about myself. (I always wondered why I could never relax while picturing myself on a secluded beach…it wasn’t until I focused on how I felt (or would feel) while on that beach that it actually worked…but I digress…).

Since I seem to constantly be talking about right brained learners, I figured that I would list some of the resources that helped me. An online friend Cindy was the person who pointed me in the right direction and I am eternally grateful to her for that. She started an email list called Homeschooling Creatively to talk about homeschooling these creative kids. The list can be quiet, but over all it is a great place to talk about and appreciate these awesome kids and Cindy is a wonderful resource.

If you are wondering if your kid is a right brained learner, there is a good article that gives an overview of how these kids think as well as a great list of right brained traits. If you see your child in this description, then check out Linda Kreger Silverman’s book Upside-Down Brilliance: The Visual-Spatial Learner. A very good overview of visual/spatial learners and how they learn differently then what is traditionally taught in schools. This book gave me a lot of insight into Jason’s learning style. The only thing that I didn’t like about the book is the emphasis she puts on IQ testing…even though she admits that testing does not always give good results with right brained kids! She also focuses on highly gifted kids and that can be intimidating (especially if your kid was not making maps of the neighborhood at age 2!) But that is where she is coming from so she spends a fair amount of time on the subject. There is definitely enough good info in the book to make it worth reading though.

Another good book with practical suggestions for helping right brained learners learn is Right-Brained Children in a Left-Brained World: Unlocking the Potential of Your ADD Child by Jeffrey Freed. Although it is subtitled Unlocking the Potential of Your ADD Child, this is more of a book about right brained kids then it is about ADD (Freed makes the point that most ADD kids are right brained and that is the type of kid he worked most often with). Jason does not have ADD but I found much that was applicable to him in this book. It really helped me better understand how Jason thinks.

I had always thought that right brained people were more traditionally creative types like musicians, artists, dancers, etc. None of which I really identified with Jason. He has never really been drawn towards any kind of musical instrument, he has fine motor issues and hates writing/drawing/coloring and does not really like painting or other art. Yet, once I started looking into it, I recognized a lot of Jason in the descriptions. Since then I have realized that there are many ways to be creative…although Jason has shown no interest in playing an instrument (yet), he is actually extremely musical. He notices music and often makes comments on how it makes him feel. He will go into the extras on his video games and play the different music themes and pick his favorite (it drives Kyle crazy when he does this!) He has a definite sense of rhythm and likes music with a strong beat. He notices the music in movies and how it is used to make you feel…our favorites happen to be Star Wars. There are other things that I have noticed, now that I am paying attention and I am seeing that creativity can take very many forms.

Learning about this right brained/left brained thing has really expanded my outlook on so many things.

OK…So being a right brained learner, Jason is not good with rote memorization. It just is not one of his strengths and it frustrates him. So I have been looking for ways to help him with his math facts. He does fine with the smaller numbers (e.g., 2+4, 5-3 etc) but gets stuck with the higher numbers (e.g., 8+7, 14-6 etc). He has no problem understanding math concepts (like adding/subtracting negative numbers) but when it comes to remembering his math facts he struggles. We have continued on with math, but not knowing these facts slows him down and also has started him thinking that he is “bad” at math. I tried showing him different ways to figure them out, including grouping by 10s (e.g., figuring out 14+7 by adding 3+7 to get 10 and then adding 10+11 to get 21), but nothing seemed to really stick. I had just gotten the Home Educator’s Guide for the Singapore Math program that we have been using and one of the first things that it had was an overview of the many different ways of adding/subtracting (counting up, number line, grouping to ten etc). I figured that it could not hurt, so I showed Jason…not sure what it was (probably that they broke it down somehow more graphically) but it clicked. He totally gets it now. It is so cool…instead of looking at a problem and trying to guess what the answer is, he has a method he can use to figure it out. What is great about this approach is that it utilizes his strengths (puzzle solving and logic) rather then his weakness, memorization.

For example…to figure out 14-8 he subtracts 8-4 to get 4 and then subtracts 10-4 to get 6. I will have to ask him for more examples, because I can’t really remember how he does half of it. LOL! But what counts is he knows! Basically he breaks the equation down into smaller equations that he can do easier. And he is completely able to follow it. There have been a time or two when I really could not follow what exactly he was doing (he still talks out loud as he figures it) but I kept quiet and he came up with the right answer.

I found previously that a similar approach worked when it came to adding double and triple digit numbers. Breaking things down into 10s and 1s really helped. For example, to add 34+55, he breaks it down into 30+50 and 4+5 to get 89. And we actually realized that he understands negative numbers because he would solve a problem like 54-26 as 50-20 and 4-6 to get 30-2 or 28.

The neat thing is that I can see that the light is back on…he sees that he can do this stuff now. He sees it more as a puzzle then this mysterious thing where he was just supposed to know/remember the answer. I can see him manipulating the numbers in his head and he is getting getting faster at it each day.

I have to say…I am not big on formal “curriculum” but Singapore Math has really been a wonderful resource for us. It is really great for explaining concepts to him in a way that he understands. One of the reasons that it works for Jason is that it is very visual…it starts with the “real life” concept…pictures of objects and talks in English about combining them (they call them number stories). It shows several different ways of figuring out an answer and then gradually introduces the symbolic notation. It also seems to be able to explain things in a way that makes sense to him much better then I can! I swear, when it comes to math, we speak two totally different languages and Singapore seems to be able to bridge the gap. I know that I learned this stuff by rote memorization (which luckily I am good at, but even now I still count on my fingers periodically to double check myself). I am so glad to learn that there is a way besides flash cards to figure this stuff out.

And actually I have been starting to use some of these “tricks” myself lately instead of using my fingers….

When Jason was younger, I never really set out to “teach him to read”. But he has always liked books and being read to so we did that a lot. He loved board books starting at around 6 months. We moved on to Dr Suess and short picture books. At around 2 he would easily sit through Cat and the Hat and longer picture books. Around 3 or so we started on chapter books…Thomas the Tank and Winnie the Pooh (AA Milne not Disney). He loved them! During that time we also played around a lot with letters…had the refrig magnets and read alphabet books (Dr Suess again was a fav).

Jason loved anything that rhymed. We would play rhyming games in the car…I would call out a word and he would give me something that rhymed…sometimes a real word sometimes a goofy made up word. He knew the names of letters somewhere around 3 (maybe 4??) or so. That, coupled, with his love of books led me to believe that he would be reading “on time” if not early. I was in no rush though (I have always believed in letting kids do things in their own time) and in my research into homeschooling had learned that kids can and do learn to read without being pushed or formally taught. So I continued to read to Jason and we played around with words (he was really interested in how words that sound the same can be spelled differently or how words that are spelled the same can have different meanings). He slowly started picking up sight words..his first being stop (from seeing stop signs) followed later by play and exit (from his computer games). Occasionally I would try playing a game from Games for Reading by Peggy Kaye, but he pretty much was never interested and I never forced the issue.

Sometime around 5, we were talking and he told me that he was afraid to try to learn how to read because he thought that it might be too hard. I reassured him that when he was ready, he would learn just fine and that everyone became ready at different times. He has very perfectionistic tendencies so I did not push the issue (not to mention he was only 5!).
So I kept reading to him and talking about letters and letter sounds and words etc. At 5 he was thoroughly infatuated with Harry Potter and the Redwall series. Jason also picks up words incredibly easily…he has always had an awesome vocabulary…if he hears a word in a story it becomes his and he will go on to use it appropriately (my favorite was telling me that his little brother “cut a comical figure” when he was 5 and my mom loves to tell the story of how at 2.5 he told her that the puddle had evaporated!).

So we pretty much went on in this manner for the next year or so. I continued to read to him (and he also LOVES audio books…we go through so many of these..thank goodness for the library). He gradually picked up more and more sight words. I would talk about/point out letter sounds and sometimes try to show him how to break down words into phonics but it never seemed to click and he honestly was resistant to hearing it. I could tell that he was not ready. I will admit though when he was 7 I started worrying about if he would ever be ready! Luckily I had heard many stories on homeschool email lists about kids who read “late” and caught up quickly so I just kept doing what we were doing. One nice thing about homeschooling is that his not being able to read did not stop him from learning…I just kept reading to him about the subjects he was interested in and we also watched a lot of discovery/science channel shows. Not reading did not slow his learning down but I do know that it bothered him to not be able to read…he was very aware that other kids his age and younger could read. We had lots of conversations about kids being ready to do things at different ages.

Somewhere around 7.5 I realized that he actually had amassed a pretty large number of sight words that he could read…mostly from seeing them in books we read and from seeing them in video games. He did not consider this reading, however, even though I did. I also realized that he seemed to not quite understand that there were rules for figuring out how to sound out words (despite my talking about and showing him phonics informally throughout the past years). He seemed to be struggling a bit at pulling the whole thing together. At this point I thought that he could benefit from something that explained phonics in a more structured way. At first I checked out Phonics Pathways from the library. It was an utter disaster…it focused very much on letter sounds and letter blends. Jason hated it and did not see the point…he did not want to sound out letters…he wanted to read words! We did not stick with it very long.

I then decided to check out Teach Your Child to Read in 100EZ Lessons. I was a bit turned off by the strange notations they used and the directions to the teacher that said that I had to read the text exactly as written or it would not work! Needless to say we ignored that. Actually we ignored a lot of the directions and just took what we needed from it…we did not do the writing section, I stopped doing the reading comprehension questions after the first couple of ones when it became clear that Jason had no problems understanding what he was reading. We did not do the number of repetitions they recommended either because Jason did not need them (and had no patience for them). Basically we used it to explain the basic phonics rules and as practice in reading words and sentences. It got him reading words in the first lesson or so and sentences very quickly so he could see results while still giving him the phonics info. It also turns out that since he is such a visual kid, the strange notations they used were just what he needed and he progressed naturally from needing the visual cues to reading normal text.

I would say that his reading has really clicked only in the past year or so since he turned 8. But now that it has clicked he has be progressing very fast. He still is not reading books for pleasure but that is because his reading comprehension is well above his reading level. He wants to be reading Star Wars, The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, the Spiderwick Chronicles, Redwall, and Harry Potter, not “easy readers”. One easy reader that we have found that he enjoys is the Commander Toad series by Jane Yolen. He has absolutely no problems reading his video games now and he is constantly catching me off guard by reading something that I know just a few months ago he could not (menus, signs, posters etc). I have no doubt that he will in time become a voracious reader…he loves books too much not to. He goes through audio books like water…I just brought about 10 home from the library which will probably last us a bit over a week.

One thing that I notice also is that even though he does know phonics, it is NOT his reading method of choice. He very quickly stores sight words (as opposed to me who has to sound out an unfamiliar word many times before “knowing” it) and is awesome at using the context and look of the word to figure out what it is saying. He is a visual/spatial learner ( also know as a right brained learner) and as I read more about his learning style, his journey towards reading makes more and more sense. He sees things in pictures, not words. So he needed more time to be able to recognize and make sense of words (in the beginning I noticed that the words he had the most trouble with remembering were words with which he could not associate an image…the, and, what, here etc) Basically he is a big picture/concept break down type of learner (as opposed to a learn the individual parts and build up learner). He needed a large number of sight words in order for phonics to make sense to him. Traditional phonics made no sense to him until he had a context in which to put it into…learning the “building blocks” made no sense until he knew what he was building. But even now that he knows the building blocks, he still prefers not to use them! And it is not holding him back. I am amazed at how quickly he adds to the words he knows by sight…there are many words I know that I have never shown him that he has just picked up from the context of things that he has read.

It has been a very interesting journey and I am not sure who has learned more…him or me! Although he did not follow a traditional path when it came to learning to read, he followed the one that works best for him. And knowing him, I am sure this won’t be the last time he takes a different route to get where he is going!

Also published on Life Without School.