Where I come from

This shows the Earth, with special focus on England (with a dot to show where she comes from) and Ireland.

Entirely from memory.

So exciting!

I know someone who can read, Nea, Nea,
I know someone who can read, oh, Linnea love!

Linnea has been wanting to be able to read (as distinct from wanting to learn to read) for some time. But nothing I did to help her seemed to help. Then I discovered the pleasant but unchallenging Peter and Jane ladybird books and she was much less reluctant. Now we are doing a little bit day by day and she is definitely getting it.

She feels badly when she can't do it, when she isn't completely certain that she knows a word. She whispers them, or says them without breath in her voice so the word is inaudible. But as she gains confidence, using these books where she doesn't care about the story or what the book actually has to say, she is delighted with herself.

It is also possible that my good opinion no longer counts for nothing, but I'm reserving judgment on that; that really would be a sea-change.

But my first born daughter has discovered that her ability to read is a skill she can hone and improve, and she's taking pride in it.

Freedom to learn

Providing unstructured, unsupervised time for the children sounds like it should involve very little, like me drinking tea and picking my toes and reading the whole internets.

Ahahahahaha.

I am this close to eliminating it from our lives. Let me see how I feel when I've forgotten about the mud.

Basic Literacy

Most of the advice says one should give children interesting texts to learn from, thing which are worth reading. This was entirely the wrong tactic with my daughter - it raised the stakes too high. She'd like to practice on books she doesn't otherwise care about, books without story or plot, which are no more interesting the first time than the fiftieth.

Enter "Peter and Jane."

I quite like Peter and Jane. They don't ask much, they have a fairish balance of usually-gendered activities, there's a black-skinned baby doll, they seem like real children.

But the books are boring. That's exactly what we need.

James and the Giant Terrifying Nightmare

The other day, my eldest daughter, who usually doesn't want anything at all, ever, handed me Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach and asked me to read it. We read the first thirteen chapters non-stop.

She was devastated, but didn't want me to stop. The protagonist's parents died when he was four (essential starting point for all children's literature, getting rid of the parents) and her face froze up a bit. Then the aunts were cruel to him and she cried. Eventually she couldn't speak or finish eating her banana and tears ran down her face and I had my arms around her as I read, but she didn't want me to stop and so I continued.

We reached the point where he's inside the peach and realises that he's now in the company of friends, and that's where we stopped.

Later, she asked, "It's not true, is it?"

She didn't mean the talking insects. She meant the cruelty.

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Since then she has refused to let me read the book, even now all the scary parts are over and it's just the nice parts. She's very very thoughtful on the topic of aunts (she has five lovely aunts and a several very nice great-aunts too).

I'm going to suggest we all watch the DVD tomorrow, instead. It can't possibly be as scary as what happened inside her head when I read the book to her, and it might help reframe it all in a more digestible way, so that we can finish reading the book and move on.

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Some children like Dr Who. She is afraid that he is lonely, and doesn't like to look at the monster masks in Waterstone's bookshop. Actual moments of peril just about finish her off.

And television violence upsets her, too.

I wonder sometimes whether I should try to desensitise her, but I don't think so, really; I think I should, at this stage, protect her. She does ok now with promises that the hero of the piece really will be ok in the end. But she hates seeing headlice washed down the plughole, because they might get lost in the dark down there.