This really resonates! I felt this in my bones before I could put it in words, and have had to fight real hard to keep the pressure off of my son, who sounds similar to yours - including make my own mama cry. It’s hard to do as a single parent with little unschooling support. But my kid made her cry again when overnight, he started to love writing - because he figured out he could write swear words 🤣
“Mom, look” *shows me a list he’s written of all the swear words he knows that he’s picked up mostly from my friends with colorful vocabularies*
“Ermmm… well…” *have a fight with myself in my head for a minute* “… that’s nice… by the way, fuck has a silent k at the end of it and asshole has an extra s to make the long a sound and a silent e at the end to make a short o sound.”
*writes the list again with correct spelling* “Thanks mom!”
First time I remember being thanked for giving any sort of instructions/corrections 😅
Feels like it’s perhaps his way of taking control of (and literally saying fuck you! to) what’s been forced on him. Do I keep leaning into this to help teach him meaning, context, and discernment, or am I setting him up to be the potty mouthed kid on the playground all the parents want their kids to avoid?
"fuck has a silen k" hahah this made me laugh. def not words anyone thinks they'll be saying as a parent! But hey - they will learn on their terms whether we like it or not!
Im also curious about the ASDE compendium and who you would recommend that for? I took a look at the link (and subscribe to their substack already). It looked incredibly interesting and I’d love to hear more about your perspective! Thank you!
So I think it depends on what you’re looking for and need support around. It’s going to be a really comprehensive collection of written and audio material, with several modules that cover things like what SDE can look like, parenting in partnership, building community and neurodivergence (and much more!) there will be live meet ups for each module and support along the way, which I think is cool, and a huge variety of voices which I think is what makes it unique. Let me know if you have more questions!
Thank you for such a full answer! Initially I was exploring alternative education options, but as I’ve learned more on SDE, and we’ve been “deschooling” ourselves, this seems like a better fit.
“not stressing that they are 7 or 8 or 9 and can’t read, and trusting it will happen…
The disclaimer to this statement is this: sometimes kids don’t want support but they perhaps have learning disabilities or challenges that require support.”
This can be a substantial challenge for parents, however. They often don’t know if a child has a learning disability. It’s actually quite common for kids with spiky profiles to go through multiple evaluations before they get accurate identifications.
I think the main thing for a parent with a “late” reading child is to educate themselves about dyslexia, try to offer a variety of multisensory learning options, and even focused tutoring as an option. All within the context of consent and recognizing the child’s sovereignty and right to prioritize other things.
Your L sounds SO much like my K - down to loving a good pun. It was nice reading about him and his journey as mine is still working toward basics with reading at 8 years old. I haven’t really been concerned as much as I would have thought given his timeline this far, but it is still nice to hear stories of similar kids and how they’ve grown in their literacy over time
This was a great read, Fran! I’ve got 3 very very different readers and 1 probably soon to be reader. I think thinking about literacy in a cultural / culturated context really makes sense. For our family, reading is a core part of both sides of the family, and is important to my husband and I. Not the skill, exactly but the worlds it opens and as a way to spend leisure time together but apart, if that makes sense. Only one of my children “struggled” with reading, but what he struggled with is exactly as you said - the emotional side, the confidence side, the willpower or whatever to keep going when it was hard and most importantly to want to keep going. What transformed his reading was audiobooks, as he fell in love with Roald Dahl on the Yoto and must have listened to some stories 50 or 100 times or more. To the extent he started talking like a Dahl character, however, that gave him the confidence to then hold a book and “read along” and then suddenly he was reading. He is in school, so had gotten a lot of phonics but found it “boring” and he still even with loads and loads of reading is never going to be a speller because he finds English illogical and spells phonetically, lol. But that hurdle of confidence was really all it took to launch him into reading and now he is my most prolific and voracious reader. Writing is…another story. But the patience I learned with reading had been instructive. One thing that has worked is…(because like your son he hated early reader books and definitely writing spelling sentences), we have recently started copying our paragraphs from books we read aloud (which is at the moment The Hobbit) and he is not loving it but not fighting it at all either because we get to talk about the story again and it’s somehow not as bad as writing some formulaic thing.
I love this!! I remember you were worried about your 'struggling' reader.. it's so amazing to hear how he latched onto it and finally gave it a go. And that audiobooks were a way in. I remember worrying that L had found audiobooks and he wasn't gonna bother with reading haha.. but for us too, it turned out to be the opposite. Plus, audiobooks are totally reading ;)
This really resonates! I felt this in my bones before I could put it in words, and have had to fight real hard to keep the pressure off of my son, who sounds similar to yours - including make my own mama cry. It’s hard to do as a single parent with little unschooling support. But my kid made her cry again when overnight, he started to love writing - because he figured out he could write swear words 🤣
“Mom, look” *shows me a list he’s written of all the swear words he knows that he’s picked up mostly from my friends with colorful vocabularies*
“Ermmm… well…” *have a fight with myself in my head for a minute* “… that’s nice… by the way, fuck has a silent k at the end of it and asshole has an extra s to make the long a sound and a silent e at the end to make a short o sound.”
*writes the list again with correct spelling* “Thanks mom!”
First time I remember being thanked for giving any sort of instructions/corrections 😅
Feels like it’s perhaps his way of taking control of (and literally saying fuck you! to) what’s been forced on him. Do I keep leaning into this to help teach him meaning, context, and discernment, or am I setting him up to be the potty mouthed kid on the playground all the parents want their kids to avoid?
"fuck has a silen k" hahah this made me laugh. def not words anyone thinks they'll be saying as a parent! But hey - they will learn on their terms whether we like it or not!
Fran, thank you so much for this article! Mine are 4, and we are just exploring home/unschooling. This reads like a helpful map
I’m so glad it helped!
Im also curious about the ASDE compendium and who you would recommend that for? I took a look at the link (and subscribe to their substack already). It looked incredibly interesting and I’d love to hear more about your perspective! Thank you!
So I think it depends on what you’re looking for and need support around. It’s going to be a really comprehensive collection of written and audio material, with several modules that cover things like what SDE can look like, parenting in partnership, building community and neurodivergence (and much more!) there will be live meet ups for each module and support along the way, which I think is cool, and a huge variety of voices which I think is what makes it unique. Let me know if you have more questions!
Thank you for such a full answer! Initially I was exploring alternative education options, but as I’ve learned more on SDE, and we’ve been “deschooling” ourselves, this seems like a better fit.
“not stressing that they are 7 or 8 or 9 and can’t read, and trusting it will happen…
The disclaimer to this statement is this: sometimes kids don’t want support but they perhaps have learning disabilities or challenges that require support.”
This can be a substantial challenge for parents, however. They often don’t know if a child has a learning disability. It’s actually quite common for kids with spiky profiles to go through multiple evaluations before they get accurate identifications.
I think the main thing for a parent with a “late” reading child is to educate themselves about dyslexia, try to offer a variety of multisensory learning options, and even focused tutoring as an option. All within the context of consent and recognizing the child’s sovereignty and right to prioritize other things.
Great post Fran!
Good point and thanks for adding this! It’s so tough to know what to look out for.
Your L sounds SO much like my K - down to loving a good pun. It was nice reading about him and his journey as mine is still working toward basics with reading at 8 years old. I haven’t really been concerned as much as I would have thought given his timeline this far, but it is still nice to hear stories of similar kids and how they’ve grown in their literacy over time
I'm glad this was reassuring!!
This was a great read, Fran! I’ve got 3 very very different readers and 1 probably soon to be reader. I think thinking about literacy in a cultural / culturated context really makes sense. For our family, reading is a core part of both sides of the family, and is important to my husband and I. Not the skill, exactly but the worlds it opens and as a way to spend leisure time together but apart, if that makes sense. Only one of my children “struggled” with reading, but what he struggled with is exactly as you said - the emotional side, the confidence side, the willpower or whatever to keep going when it was hard and most importantly to want to keep going. What transformed his reading was audiobooks, as he fell in love with Roald Dahl on the Yoto and must have listened to some stories 50 or 100 times or more. To the extent he started talking like a Dahl character, however, that gave him the confidence to then hold a book and “read along” and then suddenly he was reading. He is in school, so had gotten a lot of phonics but found it “boring” and he still even with loads and loads of reading is never going to be a speller because he finds English illogical and spells phonetically, lol. But that hurdle of confidence was really all it took to launch him into reading and now he is my most prolific and voracious reader. Writing is…another story. But the patience I learned with reading had been instructive. One thing that has worked is…(because like your son he hated early reader books and definitely writing spelling sentences), we have recently started copying our paragraphs from books we read aloud (which is at the moment The Hobbit) and he is not loving it but not fighting it at all either because we get to talk about the story again and it’s somehow not as bad as writing some formulaic thing.
I love this!! I remember you were worried about your 'struggling' reader.. it's so amazing to hear how he latched onto it and finally gave it a go. And that audiobooks were a way in. I remember worrying that L had found audiobooks and he wasn't gonna bother with reading haha.. but for us too, it turned out to be the opposite. Plus, audiobooks are totally reading ;)
My husband and me. Won’t let me get edit what I wrote!