How I Spent My Summer Vacation, Part Three

I said earlier that Faith got a summer vaction from homeschool due to Tommy's injury, but that isn't entirely true. After he had recovered enough from surgery for us to get into a routine-away-from-our-routine, we did an intensive summer session on addition and subtraction, which were murder for her to master. I tried all sorts of methods to make it make sense to her -- units and rods, number lines -- but she still didn't grasp anything beyond counting on her fingers with every equation. We spent the summer learning "tricks" from Two Plus Two Is Not Five, which has finally rendered her capable of going through a whole set of flashcards with only one or two mistakes when she forgets a trick. Even I can now remember that 5+7=12, which I always had to stop and think about before. (The Number-in-the-Middle trick, if you're wondering.)

In addition to our math escapades, I also used Faith's week of daycamp in June to begin teaching Eric how to read. I used the same book I used with Faith 3 years earlier, Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It's an effective method, but I certainly wouldn't call them "easy," on either pupil or teacher. You start out learning the sounds "m" and "s" and end up with the child reading a page-and-a-half-long story a day, with no pictures. Getting to see the picture is the reward your child gets for reading that whole thing through twice. (The second time through, he has to answer questions for reaading comprehension.) I don't know what the reward for the parent is for having to sit through the story being read at a snail's pace twice, other than the sense of celebration and relief when your youngest finishes the book and you realize you never have to go through that ordeal again.

Tedious, yes, but, as I said, it works. When your child completes the lessons, it gives a list of beginning-reader books to move on to, virtually all of which have less text and a heck of a lot more pictures than the stories he's been struggling through. That's the moment of pay-off, when the child finds that all the work he's been doing doesn't just qualify him to read the textbook stories but any of his favorite books as well. The picture below is Eric's "Helen Keller" moment in early November, when he realized that his lessons had enabled him to pick up a book and read. He ran to his room to get Green Eggs and Ham, sat down on the couch, and began to read it, all on his own.