Since I believe my children will benefit from Charlotte Mason's approach to education, I set out to find what she had to say about learning to read. Her book Home Education, the first of her series, offers a method of teaching reading. The description begins near page 207.
When a child begins to read, he is already familiar with real books and reading because his parents have read to him daily from the time he was very small. He already knows the names of the letters and the sounds they make. He has been exposed to “letter squares”; modern-day equivalents would be letter blocks, foam bath letters, and letter magnets. He also has a very large vocabulary. Finally, he understands that letters make up words and that written words have meanings just as spoken words do.
The actual teaching is a combination of phonics and sight reading. It begins by choosing a short, repetitive piece, a nursery rhyme or a page from a children’s book. His mother gives a lesson, made up of different games.
· She writes the words for him.
· He studies each word and names the letters in it.
· He forms the words from letters.
· He finds the words in a “word bank” made up of all the words in the selection, written on slips of paper.
· He finds the words in the selection.
In this way, for each phrase or set of a few words, he learns the entire selection. After he knows all the words by sight, his mother can begin another set of games.
· She dictates the entire selection as he finds the words in his “bank”.
· He assembles the entire rhyme, line by line, from the words written on slips of paper.
· He reads the entire rhyme himself.
Later his mother can make a simple phonics lesson on word-building, based on the words he has learned in the selection. If he learned the nursery rhyme “Jack and Jill”, from the word pail she can use loose letters to form snail, mail, tail, fail, etc.
This lesson doesn’t have to be done all at once! Charlotte Mason believed that lessons should be short, and if the child’s attention started to wander, it should immediately be put away. If your child is wiggling out of his seat after only one phrase, stop! Go outside and play for 15 minutes. Come back to it later. Let him get muddy and then review the three words he did learn with foam letters in the tub. Plan to spend an entire week on one nursery rhyme if you think that’s reasonable.
You could buy a thick Mother Goose volume, a set of bath letters, and some cardstock, scissors, and a Sharpie (to make the word banks) to form an entire reading curriculum. If your Mother Goose contains 52 rhymes and you only learned one per week plus the word building game after each lesson, your child would be a capable reader at the end of the year. If he’s learning to write too, show him how to write the letters as you come across them in your rhymes.
· Write in pencil and let him trace in crayon.
· Write them hand-over-hand.
· Type out the poem in a large font, print and slide it into a page protector, and let him trace with a dry-erase marker. It wipes right off! There are even fonts available for download that include guide arrows to help him form the letters correctly, and free worksheet generator sites where you can type in what you want the sheet to say. Gray printed words and a black marker would probably make it easiest to see how well he’s tracing.
· When he’s confident of the letters, write a word at the top of a page and have him copy on the lines below. Those worksheet generators are great for this too.
There is your low-cost, customized Charlotte Mason reading and writing curriculum!
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