toddlers more advanced with learning if at home with mum....

pipkin71

morlandbanks - if your daughter didn't want to learn, she wouldn't. The fact that she does doesn't make you a pushy parent, you are just feeding your child's thirst for knowledge so good for you!

pipkin71

An interesting area I touched upon in my research and something I would like to look into further should I go on to do my MA is the school system in Sweden. There, children do not start compulsory schooling until 7 and yet their educational attainment is not poorer than ours - and our kiddies start school much earlier.

Penny_Watcher

When DD1(24) was tiny I was a lone parent and we basically had each other for company. She was an early talker, early reader and early writer mainly because she had all my attention. She went to play group to learn her social skills, but any learning at home was done at her own pace.

As she grew I started work and she went to a private nursery where the 3/4 year olds did the primary reception year work a year early. This gave DD1 an excellent foundation upon which the rest of her academic careers was built.

Although she said she was bored in reception to begin with at primary school the teacher soon caught on that DD1 needed some extra work to stretch her.

She sailed through primary and secondary and despite a period of devastatingly bad health, she gained 12 A* and As at GCSE, 4 As at A level and a Master of Engineering degree from a top university. She now is a computer boffin for an international merchant bank.

This was all built on strong early education. If she didn't want to learn she wouldn't have done so.

Spendless

pipkin71 wrote:

An interesting area I touched upon in my research and something I would like to look into further should I go on to do my MA is the school system in Sweden. There, children do not start compulsory schooling until 7 and yet their educational attainment is not poorer than ours - and our kiddies start school much earlier.

There are other countries like this too should you wish to research further. I discovered in Canada (Toronto) earlier this year, their school intake year is Jan - (eldest born) Dec (youngest born), unlike England where it runs Sep-Aug. The children start full time school in Sept when the majority have had their 6th birthday that year, the younger ones would be 6 between Sept and Dec IYSWIM.

Prior to this they do 2 years of half days.

I discovered this by talking to a mum who had a 6yo (July born). I also have a 6yo (March born) and she was amazed to dsicover mine was going into yr 2 this Sept having already done 2 years of full-time school when hers only a few months younger was only going to start full-time this Sept.

magnolia65

Who ever tells you that you should not teach your children at home is talking out of their rear end. I was told this in the playground by one of the mothers (a know it all one) when my child started in recetion 9years ago. So I asked the head what their policy on it was and she told me rubbish. They would prefer active parents from day1.
Long gone are the days of that it was all in the hands of the school authority to rely on them for your childs education. Today it is a 50/50 commitment to make sure your child is being taught properly.
I taught my son to read before school and he was and has always been in the top of the class (14 now) and daughter was taught the same way but didn't want to know. Later found out she has dyslexia. She is now 13 and we have just had academic year meetings and both are way above the national average when it comes to their predicted year9 SATs.

As stated before, it's all to do with being an active parent in your childs education and for me I believe that starts at day 1 of the childs life and lets face it many kids who are home educated go on to bigger and better things.

Nicki

pipkin71 wrote:

My DD2 is being held back at school. For example they are teaching the 2 and 3 x tables when my daughter is on 7 and 8s. School spellings she is sent home to learn are words such as tip, hot, bet sit whereas at home, she is given understand, sandwich, obstacle wonderful etc - DD2 is in first year juniors!

I have a meeting coming up with senior management where I will raise my concerns, although I don't hold out much hope, which is why I continue to teach my girls at home - that has nothing to do with hot-housing or feeding my ego.

It all goes back, however, to doing what is best for your own family, afterall parents know their children better than anyone and could see if their child was thirsty for more knowledge or switching off.

I think there is a distinction between what you describe here, Pipkin, and what the OP was asking. FWIW I agree that once children start school, as parents we should be reinforcing what they are doing there, and extending it if we can. Therefore if your child is doing times tables at school it is fine and dandy to be extending her beyond what they've taught in school up to that point.

What OP and morlandbanks are talking about are setting out to teach a pre-schooler to read and write using their own techniques or ideas they have culled off the net, so that they are able to do these things before they start school. Whether the phonics package is free or not is neither here nor there. The child didn't find it themselves by googling for good games (and if they did, I apologise profusely and agree that this pre-schooler is indeed highly talented and gifted), mum chose to direct the child towards it, specifically to teach literacy skills.

My point is that yes bright children do need to be stretched and challenged, not just plonked down in front of the telly or a video, but why choose to teach things that will be taught anyway at school, and probably in a different way at school, when there are so many other things you could be teaching, which will also help them academically and challenge them.

My opinion, and it is just a personal one so feel free to disagree, is that children who go into nursery having already been taught to read using one system, are more likely to experience:

1. boredom, as they still have to sit through all the group teaching where all the rest of the class are taught to read

2. confusion, if they have been taught to read using say word recognition and the class is being taught phonetically, or vice versa.

If you leave these particular skills to the school therefore, and focus on other areas, such as the ones I gave as examples in my first post, or something that you as a family are interested in, your child is unlikely to experience these two specific problems and will have an academic advantage over the other children because they have been given activities which have caused their brain capabilities to develop, and they will be stretched and stimulated, so surely this is a no-lose situation.

On the research side, there is, I know, some well received research, which I studied last year during the child development part of a psychology course, which shows that the older a child is (within reason) when he starts to learn to read, the better his literacy levels at end KS2. I can come back later and post the reference if I remember and I can find it in my notes. My recollection is that the optimum age to start teaching reading is around 6-7, though obviously our schools start earlier. This is clearly based on an analysis of the outcomes of a large number of children, and there will be exceptions to this rule. I'm not sure if I should admit or not at this point that I was reading fluently before I started school (30+ years ago) and had an above average educational outcome, so I know this isn't hard and fast.

Please don't anyone take from my first posting, that I consider stimulating or stretching bright children in a range of ways to be wrong or the mark of a pushy parent. The ref to feeding the ego, which I recognise was inflammatory, and I apologise - it was quite late last night when I posted - was directed specifically to choosing to tutor your child in the skills you know the school will be teaching first, with the view to making your child looking brighter than the other children, or you as a more involved parent.

morlandbanks

Nicki, I resent the inference that I am trying to make my child seem more advanced than other children when she starts school!! For a start - you can't MAKE a child learn!! Lots of people use the internet as a way of playing with, entertaining and educating thier children. My family don't watch much TV, but most people find it very educational and entertaining. Would you have a go at them for tuning the TV to a kids channel so the children can watch something they will enjoy and be entertained by? Or would you prefer children only watch the channels they tune to by themselves?
I didn't show my daughter starfall.com because I'm eager to teach her phonics - which IS what the primary school she'll go to school teaches, so she isn't learning by another method. Actually she's learning Letterland at nursery, but having 2 systems doesn't seem to be confusing her in the slightest. I let her play on Starfall because she really enjoys it. If she enjoyed a site that teaches the finer points of fly fishing, I'd let her play on that! She just happens to enjoy learning phonics.
I'm not 'chosing things that will be taught anyway at school'. I teach my children lots of things. We bake together, we're learning Spanish together, learning to knit. Many things.
I don't know why you have such a problem with people teaching children to read and write just because they aren't school age. School age isn't set by nature, it's set by government. If our children are ready to learn earlier than yours, doesn't mean they shouldn't.
Also, you mention that children will be bored if they're ahead. That's rubbish. Any half decent school has a 'gifted and talented' programme to accommodate those children who need it.

pipkin71

I taught my children to read and write using the letterland system. When they got to school the nursery teacher poo-pooed the idea they could read and write and suggested they would fall behind in nursery because the school didn't use letterland. That didn't happen - what did happen is my children were / are held back by the school because they are advanced.

Last year - in year 2 - DD2 did suffer with the boredom and that is still happening in year 3 because the school are not meeting my daughter's needs. That is something I am going to challenge the school about in our meeting and I don't feel that it is because I chose to teach them at home.

As it is, I have been involved in education for 18 years [not including my own time at school!] and when I became a parent I already knew I would not be relying on the state 100% for my children's education.

I do agree with morlandbanks that if a child is ready then go for it - as well as teaching phonics you are also improving ICT skills and rightly so, if your child wasn't ready, they wouldn't want to learn.

As a by-the-by, traditionally in schools, children were taught phonics analytically, where they would learn that pig, pen put for example start with a p. Nowadays they are taught synthetic phonics where they blend letters together to form the words. Therefore, the field of education is constantly changing and teachers cannot be relied upon to have the best method for teaching your child.

Despite the difficulties I have faced / am facing in ensuring my children get the education they deserve, if I had my time all over again I wouldn't do it any differently, because my children were ready to learn at the time they started and it wasn't a chore for the girls - it was done in a fun way, which is what education should be about.

Mrs_pbradley936

If you really want to know about the teaching of reading get this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Children-Cant-Read-What-About/dp/0684831619/sr=1-4/qid=1164904550/ref=sr_1_4/026-2862818-6623632?ie=UTF8&s=books

It tells you about the history of the teaching of reading and how phonics went out of fashin in the 70s and it really is good if this topic is of interest to you.

pipkin71

https://www.literacytrust.org.uk is also a very informative site and pointed me in a few directions when completing my final paper which actually focused on whether children with lower socio-economic status were more likely to achieve higher educational attainment if they were introduced to phonics before pre-school age.