Early reading through play

Most orthodox educationalists, as well as an awful lot of home educators, would be horrified at the idea of teaching a baby to read. This would be particularly the case when it is revealed that the poor mite was given no say in the matter and subjected to the most intensive teaching from the age of three months. This at least is one way of viewing the case.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that many people, both teachers and home educating parents, create a wholly false division between play and structured education and also between teaching and games. Let us ask ourselves what babies like. One of the things that they like is the undivided attention of a kind and friendly adult. They enjoy this all the more if the adult plays simple games with them; things like peek-a-boo. Babies often want the same activities repeated over and over again. Whether it is a game or a favourite book, they like to have things repeated often.

Thinking now about reading, we realise that a lot of it consists of identifying shapes with which we are familiar. I am not talking about letters, but the shapes of words. The word ball has an entirely different shape from the word dog. These distinctive shapes are largely caused by the ascenders and descenders; those parts of the letters which stick up or down. If we want a baby to read, and I can’t imagine why we would not, then the first step will be to teach her to identify different shapes. Most puzzles for children are too complex for our purpose and so we turn to products marketed for children with special educational needs. Here are some which are perfect, being no more than simple, geometric shapes with handles so that a baby or child can grasp them:



http://www.livingmadeeasy.org.uk/children/shape-puzzles-%26-boards-p/basic-inset-shape-boards-0018698-2721-information.htm





A baby of three months will, with help, be able to manipulate these puzzles and learn the difference between circles, squares and triangles. This is a good beginning and after a while we can move on to slightly more complex puzzles; things like this:



http://www.livingmadeeasy.org.uk/children/shape-puzzles-%26-boards-p/two-piece-colour-jigsaw-0014312-2721-information.htm




From these, it is only a short step to simple conventional jigsaw puzzles.

Now the great thing about this sort of game is that the reward for the baby is intrinsic. Babies love the attention of an adult and they also like to repeat simple games over and over. Doing puzzles of this sort with an adult on hand is unbelievably satisfying to a three or four month old baby. Here is a puzzle which although a little too complex and fussy for my taste, could be used with a year old baby:



http://www.sensetoys.com/P2N853896601_categoryid;5VEMYAGHAJ





Now it is important to realise that it would be no use just leaving these things laying around and hoping for the best. The reward for the baby lies in the attention from the adult. We hope to get the child to associate the identification of shapes with pleasurable interaction with a loving adult.

Any reasonably bright child of eighteen months old can be taught to identify and name individual numbers by this method. By this, I mean that a child of eighteen months will, after a programme of teaching such as this be able to point to and name numbers when she sees them on houses or street signs for example. Once this is done, the process has been established. Here is a baby who can read! What is good about all this is that it has been done only by undertaking the kind of activities with the baby which she would ask for if she were able to do so. Adult attention and simple, repetitive games in which the adult also shows pleasure. All that has happened is that a parent has played with her child in the most natural way possible and the first stage of literacy emerges as a by-product.

In a few days time, I shall talk a little about how to extend this sort of play, with a view to getting the baby to read text.

Who wrote the briefing paper which Education Otherwise is circulating to Welsh Assembly Members?

In September, a series of documents began to be put up on the Home Education UK site about the new legislation being discussed in Wales; that relating to the regulation of home education. Eventually, they were all melded together into one document, which bore the name of Wendy Charles-Warner. It may be found here:

http://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/wc/wc-wa-brief.pdf





On October 13th, Alison Sauer introduced this briefing paper to the Education Otherwise site, uploading it to their files. She said:

This is the Briefing Document from the Wales Facebook Group with Welsh intro and summary added. Most is in English.



It was at once greeted as her own work. Edwina Theunissen, a trustee of Education Otherwise living in Wales, said;





Thanks Alison, for this. It's the most impressive doc I've seen so far and should be a great help to home edders in Wales. It must have taken a great deal of time and effort so congrats to you and whomsoever your collaborators are.





Alison Sauer did not react by disclaiming responsibility for writing the thing, merely accepted the congratulations as her due. At this point, most people assumed that Alison Sauer was the prime mover behind the briefing paper. A day or two later of course, she initiated a campaign of harassment against me via Facebook; getting people to bombard me with silly emails and publicising my address and urging people to arrange for nuisance deliveries to be made to it. Her supposed grounds for doing this were that she did not feel it right that Wendy Charles-Warner, the supposed author of the briefing paper, should be mentioned publicly in connection with it. It is interesting to see what Alison was saying at this time. In emails to me she uses the expression ‘we’ a lot, which suggests strongly that she was something to do with both the briefing paper and also Mrs Charles-Warner. For example, speaking of Wendy Charles-Warner, she said;



we do try to keep her whereabouts confidential



The newspaper and BBC articles were not supposed to be published online and we do not draw attention to them on purpose.


Whom do readers suppose that Alison Sauer means by this mysterious ‘we’? We, as in ‘me and Wendy Charles-Warner’? Or perhaps, in light of later developments, 'me and Education Otherwise'?  In any case, it is clear that Alison has a stake in the briefing paper and is in some way very involved in it. As we have seen, trustees at Education Otherwise thought that she had written it and were dealing with it on that basis.

Four days later, on October 18th, Education Otherwise made a surprising announcement. This may be found here:



http://www.educationotherwise.net/ndex.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=334






It will be observed that the briefing paper is now being unambiguously attributed to Wendy Charles-Warner and that she has been appointed Education Otherwise’s official representative in Wales, a role previously held, incidentally, by Edwina Theunnisen. The briefing paper has been officially adopted and is now being printed and sent to all Welsh Assembly Members.

I have not room in this post for a detailed criticism of the paper. It is pretty dreadful and contains many errors and inaccuracies. That is nothing to the purpose here, except to mention that the style is unmistakably Alison Sauer’s. We have seen that it was accepted as such when first it appeared and also that she was using the term ‘we’ when referring, apparently,  to she and Mrs Charles-Warner.

What would Education Otherwise’s motive have been for misleading people in this way as to the authorship? There are two good reasons for concealing publicly the fact that Alison Sauer had a hand in this document. For one thing, her name on the cover would have discredited it at once as far as many home educators were concerned. After the fiasco of the abortive attempt to introduce new guidelines for local authorities about home education, anything with ‘Alison Sauer’ on the cover would be damned in the eyes of many. There is a more serious objection to using her name openly in connection with the briefing paper. Welsh Assembly Members are likely to look more favourably upon such a document if supposedly written by a Welsh home educator than they would if it had been produced by an English businesswoman. Some of them are already getting a little ticked off at the fact that most of the opposition to the proposed Bill is coming from England, rather than Wales.

As if that is not enough, there would be a horrible suspicion, were Alison Sauer to be seen as involved with the briefing document, that she was not completely unbiased and that there was a clear conflict of interest. As readers know, Alison runs an outfit known as SC Education:



http://www.sc-education.co.uk/home/






This company is working hard to encourage the spread of the flexischooling model of education. Indeed, according to her company website, Alison Sauer is  ' currently liaising with the DfE to promote flexischooling as a recognised and credible system.'  One of the alternatives advocated by the briefing document, instead of the compulsory registration and monitoring of home education,  is of course an expansion of flexischooling. If shown to be the author of this document, the unfortunate impression might be created that a commercial opportunity was being exploited here by Alison Sauer; that by pushing for an increase in flexischooling in Wales, she would be creating future work for her own company.  Another benefit of the system that the briefing paper recommends is, ' Investment in training for LA staff in the law and their duties'. By an uncanny coincidence, training LA staff in the law and their duties  is something else which Alison Sauer provides.

 I shall in another post examine the briefing paper itself in detail, but for now I wonder if Education Otherwise would like to explain in a little more detail the precise provenance of the thing? For some, it is beginning to look rather as though Alison Sauer now has her feet firmly under the table at Education Otherwise; a development which is unlikely to be universally welcomed!