Bubble & Squeak

The time is getting near, in another week school will have finished and I will be homeschooling my girls.

Bubble received her school report today and all was well. A couple of things she hadn’t ‘acquired’ yet like “discussion in a group setting” etc. nothing to worry about considering she is doing it all in a foreign language. She knows all the letters of the alphabet (sounded out in french) and her handwriting is beautiful, because she spends time in class copying long sentences, which she finds hugely boring. She doesn’t understand any of the words she writes.

Now, my dilemma: am I going to continue to teach her in this manner – the french way???? Or am I going to revert back to the English method, the way I learnt to read and write at school and start from scratch with the handwriting and the sounds of the alphabet?

If I teach her the french way: phonetically, copy-book cursive script, syllables and emphasis on meter:
She will have beautiful handwriting (yet not individual).
She will be in line with all the other children of her age at school.
She will learn to pronounce words phonetically and then transfer this method on to English words (I have seen this done with a child from french to Dutch) which could be really confusing for a while.
She will, no doubt be confused when I do introduce her to English, but only then and not before.

If I teach her the English way: emphasis on word recognition and sight reading each letter to sound out the word, joining up the letters only later on:
She will develop a much more individual writing style, but perhaps not so legible.
Her french will suffer, especially the reading.
She will be confused with the sounding out the alphabet to start with, until she forgets the french and the English takes over.

So what to do? I dearly would like to teach her how to read and write in English, after all that is her mother tongue, but her handwriting is so lovely – is it worth keeping up the french copy-book way just to hold onto all that she has learnt so far? But are the two methods compatible and how on earth can I teach her a bit of both simultaneously?

I have already got the ‘breakthrough folder’ I used when I was at school; a magnetic board with all the common words written out on little strips, with a thing that looks like a large magnetic scrabble stand to form the sentences with. She loves it; it is fun to use (much better than copying words she can’t read) and she is starting to recognise simple words from it. She need not write anything, but if she copies the words out onto paper, her handwriting is awkward and all over the place; each letter formed separately, nothing like the joined-up script she has mastered at school.

It seems that both methods are learnt from polar opposites, one emphasizing the mechanics of the pen, the other from recognising and reading the words first before a pen is raised (with the french way losing hands down in the ‘enjoyment’ stakes).

Perhaps it may just be a case of letting her decide how she wants to learn. She already has good penmanship, so I am confident that her handwriting will be strong and flourish eventually. It may just be a case of leaving it until she feels ready and then engaging her in the most exciting ways. She loves ‘Cat in the Hat’, so that may be a good place to start.

I shouldn’t actually even be thinking about it yet and certainly not worrying about it. Because I want to follow an un-schooling and autonomous learning path with my children, I should jolly well accept the fact that I should relinquish control and trust that she will tell me eventually, when she is ready, how she wants to do it.

Leave it at that.

btw, Squeak will just do what her sister does. Yesterday she picked up an ‘M’ fridge magnet, said, “EM” and held it up to her t-shirt against the first letter of MALTA. She’s got it sussed already at 2½.