Straw men* everywhere
Jolly Phonics (seven 20 page workbooks & a couple of second hand videos**) , £7.50 from another HEor whose kids didn’t enjoy them.
But what can this be … surely not … picture books … chapter books … library books …. fiction … non fiction … everywhere … everywhere … everywhere … piles …. need more shelves … drowning under books …. how is this possible?
My single aim in life is to produce a child (hell preferably more than one child) who hates reading … no love of reading in this house thank you very much. Simon & I do our best to read in private so the kids don’t see it as something pleasurable, we’ve started to hide the books we accidentally acquired before we went to the dark side. I want to be just like all those other home educators whose entire collection consists of 100EL, Letterland & Jolly Phonics and who’ve never heard of a library. I come across them all the time.
* someone please point out to me where it has been suggested that a diet of enforced reading schemes is the way to encourage reading
** highly amusing if only for the 1970’s OU/BBC/home video production values 
ETA: fuck I need help … the baby just walked in with a real book … whatever will I do?
PMSL! Straw men indeed. I think some people just like to reassure themselves of their superiority by comparing themselves to absurd extremes.
Violet would never have learnt to read from picture books, because by the time she was interested in reading, she wasn’t at all interested in picture book stories. She spent most of her 5th year listening to The Hobbit and Alice in Wonderland on CD. I guess I should have just given her the books to look at whilst she was listening to them and let her decode them herself.
Makes you wonder why they bothered publicising the translation of the Rosetta Stone! Should have just told everyone else that it would be far better for them to figure it out from scratch.
Comment by Alison — 27 November, 2007 @ 6:51 pm
Maybe there aren’t many (any?) home educators who have only reading scheme books for their children. But there are plenty of school kids who go home with a reading scheme book in their book bag each week, and who have no books of their own at home - or very, very few. And there are plenty of people who never go the library. Trust me, I meet *undergraduate students* who display a startling lack of awareness about how a library works.
Why does it matter if people want to celebrate their way of doing HE, on their own blogs?? It would make for a pretty boring blogging universe if people wrote everything with a long disclaimer about how they were only speaking from their own experience, and weren’t judging other people, and so on…
Comment by Allie — 27 November, 2007 @ 8:50 pm
completely OT but thanks again for the ballet bun cover, it arrived today and Anna is almost considering keeping her long hair as a result!
Comment by Sarah — 27 November, 2007 @ 11:01 pm