A long time ago, 11 months actually, I shared about our homeschooling or rather life schooling journey and our decision to homeschool our then almost-two-year-old. He's now almost three and I thought I would give you an update.

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11 months ago...

I had this to say about our approach:

We already sing the alphabet song almost daily, we read books, sing songs, read rhymes aloud, count just about everything we come across and talk about colours and shapes. We have no expectation of when he needs to have learned what, we simply desire to tap into his curiosity and love of books.

We still do all those things. He knows his primary colours by now and counts to 20. He knows some shapes, they haven't interested him and we don't push things.

Moving forward

During our time in Carla this summer two things became obvious. Our son has now taken a real interest in numbers and he wants to read on his own.

He is counting objects and on this fingers. He can say how many fingers you are holding up without counting them. I'm a little stunned by all he can do. With a lot of public school teachers in our family, some serving in underprivileged schools, we hear stories of what children can and can't do at various levels. I've caught some of the teachers in 'testing' our son to find his limits. They always do it in a playful and loving way, he thinks they are playing a game with him and he has no idea they are testing him, but I see right through it.

Last night and this morning, a couple of things happened that made my husband and I recommit to our homeschooling journey for lack of a better word.

Last night, I discovered that our son knows basic subtraction. I said I would read 5 (short) books for him before bed. Always the optimist, he brought 7 and told me so. I told him the deal was 5. When we had read three books, I asked how many do we have left if we agreed on reading 5 and we've read 3? 2, was his prompt answer. There was no counting involved - he just knew that the answer was 2. We've been counting obsessively lately and exploring numbers in all kinds of ways. We haven't focussed on the written numbers but just on counting out loud and counting objects, which seems to be where his passion is leading him at the moment. When we return home, I will be looking for a few numbers to add as visual and tactile learning tools.

Then this morning, our son brought up the subject of school and when he would get to go. He has been asking us a lot lately and we have just answered: "When you turn 6". Today we asked him why he was so excited to go to school? The answer surprised us. "Because I get to learn how to read!"

We then had a chat with him about there being no need to wait until school starts to learn to read, he could do that right now and we would love to help him!

Learning to read

Remember that statement from 11 months ago, that we don't care when our son can do what, we just want to tap into his curiosity and support him as best we can!

I have a few ideas I want to try with our son. Like allowing him to type small texts on our computers. We already play read i.e. I read a few words and then he 'reads' (from memory) the rest of the text. If you have any more ideas on how we can support him on this learning journey I would love to hear them. Especially if you have used the Bible in some way. I'm always looking for ways to incorporate

If his fancy takes him elsewhere, we will abandon reading and follow it right along with him. But as he has gotten older, his requests for books have only increased and they are getting longer and much more involved. I would be lying if I said it wouldn't be a relief to have him reading some of them on his own.

How have you taught your children to read? How did you learn to read?