Moving Stones: Encouraging a love of reading in a stony field

There's an analogy missionary friends of mine use that I think applies to challenges that require a long term commitment without the encouragement of immediate gratification. They will tell you they are moving stones on the mission field so others may plant and harvest the field.

If you take a walk in the New England country side where I spent my adolescence you'll notice stone walls border fields and connect stands of trees. Centuries ago colonists looked at the stone covered fields and made a decision. They needed to eat. To eat they needed to grow food. To grow food they needed to move those stones. So they moved them, one at a time and built walls. As they would plow they would find more stones. When the weather turned cold and harsh the earth would push up more stones and the farmers would move those too. It was an on going process that was never quite finished but without moving the stones their attempts to grow food would be more difficult. Stones get in our way and we have to move them.

"I love to read! I want my child to love it too but he/she hates it. My child would rather (fill in the blank) and fights me whenever I say it's time for 'fun reading' time. What can I do to make them love reading?"

Well, first I don't think anyone can 'make' anyone love anything. Love is a choice, it is voluntary. As parents we can create an environment where that choice to love reading can be easier to make. When I say a love of reading I don't mean 'school reading'. I mean reading for pleasure, to explore the worlds that exist in books. Reading is my favorite past time but put a text book in front of me and even I will groan.



I grew up immersed in books and they provided an escape from the troubles of the home I grew up in. I assumed my own children would love books as much as I did as a child. And at first they did. We spent hours in the library and brought bags of books home to read aloud on the couch or in bed together. Then a funny thing happened. Two of  my three children started to 'hate' reading. How could this happen?! How could my children 'hate' reading? They loved listening to stories but they 'wouldn't' read on their own. While my second child taught himself to read by 'eavesdropping' during reading lessons with my oldest child his siblings were struggling. It took a long time before I realized they have dyslexia and reading for themselves was a truly painful experience. I didn't know what to do. There were stones in my field.

Fast forward 10 years. If you were able to ride in my mini-van, take a walk with my teenagers or hang out in our house you would hear all of them discussing elements of literature, themes of science fiction and social commentary found in media and making analogies of social issues and literature. How could this happen? If you listen to their language you'll hear post high school level vocabulary come from their mouths and you'll observe them making arguments using literary references. How do they know those things? Where did that vocabulary come from? My husband and I moved stones.

Here are some of the stones we moved and how we moved them.

Great Expectations:
I had to examine and evaluate my expectations of my children. Did my expectations come from a realistic place and match how my children were made? My faith tells me they were made on purpose by a creative God so if they have challenges there is a purpose that is grander than my immediate convenience and comfort level.  Maybe arriving at the goals of being able to witness life through story telling, an expansive vocabulary to enable effective communication and enhancing critical thinking could be accomplished in a different way. Maybe the 'how' of getting there was the stone that needed to be moved. Important note: My husband was incredibly supportive of me and trusted me to pursue teaching them in this way. His own educational experiences empowered me to take whatever time and methods were necessary. This was a long, hard process in a field filled with stones we hadn't even seen yet but he backed me up 100%. He became a stone mover and was not a stone. The end of our story would be very different if he had not trusted and supported me even in my place of weakness and insecurity.


The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes:

Parents are detectives who identify stones in the field.

I had to identify what stones were getting in the way of my children being able to access the stories I wanted them to fall in love with. That meant I needed to ask for help from people who knew more than me. I read Cynthia Tobias' The Way They Learn which helped me begin to identify learning styles but I still didn't feel I had a handle on how my kids learned and how I could teach them. Then I discovered Jill Dixon's The Concise Learning Styles Assessment and everything became clearer. Mrs. Dixon's* guide not only helped me understand how I learn (and teach) and how my kids learn but gave me real strategies to help them. That was a start but I also had to know how to help my dyslexic children and I was clueless. Then I ordered her The Homeschooler's Guide for Learning Problems and I finally had real solutions I could actually use to help my kids learn to read. All my children have ADD tendencies like their parents and that impacts how they learn as well. Later we would also discover my son has Asperger's Disorder which is another influence in how he learns.

Pride & Prejudice:
My pride and my prejudice were also stones I had to move out of my field. I had to ask for help when I couldn't teach my dyslexic children to read. That meant finding tutors to spend time with my son and daughter to do what I was having a hard time doing. I was too emotionally invested and my impatience would either erupt or simmer but either way it was palatable and undermined my children's confidence. Learning had always been easy for me and I felt at a loss to help my kids because I didn't understand how they experienced the world. It also meant I had to let go of my need to control everything in my children's life and the timetable of their life. We were broke so I had to be creative about getting what we needed. I turned to a type of bartering with other moms and home school teenagers who had a heart for my kids and experience with the stones that needed to be moved. Many churches, libraries and social support groups like the Salvation Army provide tutoring services for free. Contact your local teacher's college and see if there are students who need practical hours for their degrees who might be able to tutor at an affordable price or for bartering.

The Sound (not) the Fury:
Reading time had become a fury of fights and drama. As I learned more about dyslexia I began to understand why reading was (literally) painful for my kids. They hated reading for themselves but they loved to listen to stories, partly because the 'pain' of reading visually was removed and mainly because they were auditory learners so they were able to receive the information the way they learn. I separated the stones of practicing the mechanics of 'how to read' from the act of inputting the content of reading. Now that they are teenagers I don't read aloud as often but my daughter is an avid 'reader'. She listens to almost all of her books on audio recordings and reads along with the hard copy of the book. This has helped her mechanical reading ability soar. She still has trouble with reading but guess who has been chosen as the narrator in her class play....twice! She works harder than most of her peers just to do the basics. It takes her longer to read and write all of her homework but her character has blossomed under the pressure.  My son practices 'mechanical' reading with his tutor, his dad and me and we've chosen subjects he is interested in like nature and video games to practice. With both of them we discarded the visual methods of teaching reading and found great success with word families and choral_reading. They are also highly tactile and kinesthetic so using Jill Dixon's Roots & Fruits to help them with their vocabulary we focused on her suggested methods of drawing pictures and stories to remember words and creating silly sentences and stories to tell using their vocabulary words.

Write With the Best

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

I use similar methods to encourage their writing. For 8 years we've been using Jill Dixon's Write With the Best because it uses examples of good writing (from the classic literature I want them to be familiar with), breaks the 'elephant' of writing into bite sized pieces, and incorporates learning styles. Writing is left brain and mechanical while creative writing is a right brain activity. The mechanical part of writing was insanely difficult so I moved that stone out of the way by allowing my children to 'dictate' their stories to me. I write/type what they say and then later we go back and edit it. This is how 'real' writers  write. They don't 'edit' as they go. They spill out all the words onto paper so they don't lose their ideas by blocking them with the left brain activity of editing. Once all the creativity is out of the way they go back and edit, edit, edit. If it worked for Mark Twain and Shakespeare why wouldn't it work for my kids? My son has 'written' and created several in depth stories over the years that were born from his many hours walking around outside and acting them out in his own world of make believe. And I listen. I listen to my kids tell their stories, share their ideas about the world and I am present when they are ready to ask questions. All of this enhances an environment to express thoughts and ideas. And it often 'interrupts' my day and my 'lesson plan' but it has paid me back in dividends.

 

Every family is different just as everyone's field of stones is different. These are things that worked in my field with  my stones. And it took a long time. In fact, the field still has stones in it but we have more walls and more planting space then we did before. The field is fertile and it is yielding what will become a bountiful harvest. My job as a parent is not to be the expert on everything or do everything myself. My job is to move stones so my children can grow.

Some famous people with dyslexia, ADHD, Asperger's and/or Autism



*I used Jill Dixon's materials before I met her. I heard her speak at a home school support group meeting when I was in a dark hole and was convinced my children would end up as hobos and it would be all my fault. I left that night with hope. Then my second son joined her class at Jill Dixon's Eclectic Academy of Learning in Savannah, GA when he was 8 years old. Later she asked me to be her history teacher and over time I have re-developed and written the history program used at the Eclectic Academy of Learning. I am currently the director of an EAL campus and use all the tools she taught me with her books and guides every day with my own children and many others.