Oscar, age 5, has been "doing schoolwork" for a while now. We started Saxon Math K in January, mainly because I thought it would be a good idea to get myself used to sitting down a few days a week at the table with him. Now we’re a few lessons away from finishing the "Purple Book." He’s got a vacation coming up — going to spend a week with Grandma and Grandpa — so we’ll finish the book up, give him a couple weeks off, and start the "Green Book" when he comes back, a month from now.
I’ve made up my mind to move pretty swiftly through it. The gently plodding, repetitive, scripted nature of Saxon was reassuringly easy for us as we got comfortable with Doing School, but I think now that we have the routine down, Oscar can go a little faster. Maybe not double-time, but certainly more than the prescribed four lessons per week.
I don’t remember how long we’ve been working on reading. Months. Oscar can decode pretty well, as long as the words only contain spellings he has been taught. He’s learned one spelling for every common phoneme in the English language, and can read just about any word that uses only those spellings. That part went pretty fast and he was excited about it.
It swiftly got painful as soon as I broke the news to him that well, we have more spellings for all of these sounds, and some of the spellings could represent several different sounds, and there’s no easy way to tell in advance which combination is right.
I think that he’ll feel positive about it again as soon as he starts to notice that he can decode the words by trying the different possibilities. When, faced with words like "hive" and "give" on the same page, he whines, How do you know which sound it is? and I answer, After you have been reading for a while your brain will figure it out, I don’t think he believes me. But I know his brain will figure it out. I just hope that he doesn’t feel too miserable in the meantime.
Although he is chronologically in kindergarten, I don’t really think of where he is in terms of grade level. I have adopted the so-called "classical" model in my head, and am thinking, instead of kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and so on, of the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, dialectic. (Here’s the famous Dorothy Sayers essay on it.)
Oscar isn’t up to grammar yet. He’s in pre-grammar, or preparatory: a chunk of lifelong learning that began when he was two or three, after he learned to talk, and will last until somewhere between age seven and nine. The only academic goals of this chunk of his life: learn to read, and learn to add and multiply. I’ve also set the goal of reading all the stories in the children’s Bible to him this year. That leaves lots of time for singing, exercising our bodies, reading aloud, going to the zoo, that sort of thing. And of course making beds, sweeping the floor, visiting friends, cooking dinner.
Living, in other words. Keeping the priorities straight is an important thing for me to learn, too, as we go along.
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