Tara is learning to read and write !

 

I am fascinated by the research work and the efforts of Dr. Peter Gray in the field of self-directed learning and unschooling. I keep myself updated through his articles usually posted on Psychology Today which he shares on his Facebook wall. Yesterday I read, ""Children Teach Themselves to Read" an article authored by him. The article spoke about how children learn to read and write without being taught. It gave many examples and stories to back this claim that goes completely against what language specialists have to say.

Since there were no stories from Indian families, I decided to write down the story of how my daughter is learning to read and write. I have mentioned about her language skills in one of my blog posts on thegreatkapok.blogspot.com and in one of my articles on medium.com.

So my daughter Tara is almost six now i.e. she will be six in October 2020. She has been noticing alphabets and numbers for a long time now. She started expressing her curiosity around alphabets when she noticed car license plates in the parking lot next to which we would take our dog for a walk. She was about 3 years old then. Initially she would point out to the alphabets and ask me to tell her what it was and this continued for a few months until one day when she stopped asking. She was probably bored or this activity no longer interested her. One day she noticed Diwali lights on the balcony of a flat. The string was arranged in a way that looked like the alphabet, 'W'. Look Mamma, "That's a 'W' said she. She started noticing this alphabet everywhere and 'W' became her favorite letter. A few months later, she brought up reading alphabets on license plates once more, just that now she wanted me to ask her to identify the alphabets and bingo - I realized that she knew many of the alphabets. 

Along side, she was interested in writing her name. She used to ask me or her brothers to write it over and over again. I think she was about four years old then. However she hadn't ever tried writing her name as yet. A friend asked her to write her name on a drawing she had just made. I was about to tell this friend that she didn't know how to write when Tara took her pencil and wrote her name down. Of course the spelling wasn't correct, but she got the first and the last alphabet correct. This is what she wrote:

I was overjoyed and struck with awe. At that time we didn't correct her spelling. We simply expressed our joy and our pride. Soon she had figured out how to write her name and was writing it everywhere.

Tara has never had the patience to sit with me to read a book. However, she has been reading many picture books with the 'read to me option' on her iPad. Probably that is where she learnt to recognize the alphabets she hadn't come across while reading car license plates. Or maybe she learnt them through the nursery rhymes or could be from her friend who went to school. a phonics App she downloaded on her iPad definitely helped her.

One day, she downloaded a phonics app on her iPad. This app started with recognition of alphabets (lower and upper case) and the sounds it made. She didn't take much interest in the sounds, but loved the alphabet tracing activity. As she learnt to recognize alphabets, we all started to dictate spellings of words, she wanted to type in to search videos, games, images or books on her ipad. Slowly she started remembering spellings and recognizing words by sight memory.

Tara also loves to make lists. Initially, her lists would have pictures she would draw and now they have words accompanying them. Most often she asks us to dictate and she writes them down. She does remember spellings of a few words she regularly uses.

Does she understand the sounds that alphabets make? She doesn't understand the sound made by all the alphabets - she has figured out some through the phonics app. But doesn't yet know them all. She yet hasn't figured out the role of vowels...in fact she doesn't know what vowels are.

All her friends in the neighborhood go to school and she wants to go too. As unschoolers, we believe that experiencing whatever she is curious about is her right and after the COVID crisis ends, we will enroll her in a school. She is super excited about that and often comes with a notebook and pencil and says that she wants to do similar work that she has seen her friends do at school. She has thus begun asking for repetitive writing of alphabets and numbers and much to our pleasure writes them once or twice and then says, 'I don't understand why schools make you write over and over again.' and turns her attention to other things.

At present, she knows spellings of words she needs - mama, papa, cat, ant, dog being among the first words she has learnt. She often interchanges the D and G in Dog. She recognizes her birth month - 'October' and words she regularly uses on her iPad. We are absolutely happy and content seeing her learn on her own without a teacher telling her. We are also looking forward to seeing her journey unfold and I am going to regularly document her growth and learning.