No forced phonics — No drilling — No frustration
Watch Asya between the ages of 4–14 months then see the progressive after-effect she experienced over the proceeding 10 years.
They often read the same book to her 2 or 3 times per day. Her mom noticed how it would calm Asya. Eventually, she began to repeat certain details by herself, looking more and more each time.
Asya's first book (same as in Video #1 above) was like a teddy bear, a travelling companion for her. And she always had books, pencils, & paper... even the Rome Travel Guide.
Whenever a visitor arrived she would, inevitably, go to her bedroom and bring back a book to read with them.
Her parents had the self-control to give her space to “read” by herself while by her side, without falling into the role of “teacher”.
Asya would mostly be reading from memory and filling in the rest with gibberish, but all with appropriate tones, mimicking how her parents read.
Her mom would choose quality book stores. Asya would choose her own books.
Activities were simply for fun with some having the added benefit of developing fine motor-skills.
By the time she was 3-and-a-half, she could repeat and recognize letters. Then she started making comparisons out loud between words, with sets of letters.
For example, her name Asya and the word for “lion” in Turkish, aslan — in this case, the “as” sound (in English it sounds like “us”).
...without anyone having “taught” her phonics or given any explicit instruction.
For example, as Asya's self-directed learning continued to grow, she read, wrote and drew more and more. Now she has a big box full of writing, drawings and other projects.
Below are two examples.
At age 4-and-a-half, inspired by the work of Julia Donaldson:
Both of these were initiated without having been prompted or pushed. Asya didn't mind getting help from her mom for the princess book because they just worked together on a fun project. Her mom never tried to create a “teaching” moment. In turn, this built up Asya's self-confidence to eventually complete projects by herself, like the animal newspaper.
Asya's animal newspaper she made at age 7:
It didn't really matter whether we were camping, travelling around Australia on a 5-week holiday, or just going for a Sunday stroll around a nearby village; Asya had a book in her hand...
She took about a dozen books on our 5-week holiday. She read them all at least 3 times.
Shortly after this, Covid hit and during that period Asya's self-directed learning blossomed. Despite minimally invasive obligatory online lessons with school, she was essentially unschooled for 12–18 months.
By that stage she was 8–9 years old and was reading copiously, drawing every day and absorbed in writing continuously.
One particular story stunned a few native Turkish speakers because of the depth of its language. Unfortunately, because it was in Turkish I couldn't quite appreciate the quality of her writing.
But I understood comments like “...many adults couldn't write like this...”
And on one occasion, a person even suspected she had received “help”, which was simply not true. On top of that, neither of us tried to “teach” or even correct/mark her writing.
The point is Asya's writing was a direct result of her being a voracious reader...
When Stephen King was asked whether good writing can be taught, he said:
“It can be learned but I'm not sure it can be taught. It's a self-taught kind of thing. I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and feel of narration through a number of different books. You begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knock you out. But little by little you develop your own style.”
As Asya approaches 12 years old,
she continues to write furiously and
constantly talks about writing...
For the child:
For the parent:
In terms of how to teach kids to read, a parent unable to detach themselves from the role of “teacher” means they usually end up at some degree of forced phonics...
I know this might be a provocative statement for some.
After all, phonics is “proven to work” and it's a “great way to give your child a head start” so they “don't fall behind”.
But these are all loaded statements.
“Head start” and “falling behind” are residue statements from the obsession of teaching children at an earlier and earlier age, year after year, under the banner of early childhood education.
“Proven to work” — yes, it can work for some but at the cost of, at best, taking away their opportunity to explore for themselves and, at worst, teaching them that reading is a chore and something to despise.
And then, of course, for some others it plants seeds of low-confidence, feelings of inadequacies and incompetence.
“Across many, many different cultures it's something that adults understand — that children will learn better if you don't teach them explicitly.
Of course, if someone wants to learn something explicitly, that's great. If they don't want to do that, that's fine too — however they want to do it is great.
But it's interesting to know that in a lot of cultures it's kind of taken as a given that people will learn better and more deeply and more solidly if they learn through experience and experiment and figuring things out on their own, rather than being instructed explicitly.”
— Carol Black, from Episode 37 of the “Exploring Unschooling Podcast”
Unschooling mom, creator of the documentary Schooling the World and co-creator of the TV series The Wonder Years.
First — she learned individual letters; a, b, c, d, etc.
Second — she started joining two together, “as”
Third — she started joining groups together, “as” and “ya”
She discovered her name! Asya!
The most important thing for us was that she loved spending time with books and that she saw it as something fun and natural. The rest took care of itself.
Asya's case is not isolated. For one, my brother and I also taught ourselves. And there are countless other examples. A parent just needs to get past:
Forcing kids to learn to read is not necessary because all kids learn when they are ready.
If a parent can follow what Asya's parents did and employ the 4 key elements, like my parents also did with my brother and me, then once children decide to teach themselves to read, their progress will be rapid.
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