Learning language arts through literature is the perfect solution for homeschool parents who feel they don’t know how to teach reading or how to teach writing.
I spent 17 years as an elementary classroom teacher so I went into our homeschool journey feeling very confident that I knew how to teach reading and how to teach writing. Although I did not necessarily love the district-mandated literacy curriculum, it included lessons and worksheets for phonics, grammar and vocabulary and my students typically performed well on the assessments that came with it. They left my classroom knowing how to read and write and I was able to check the boxes that showed they “reached benchmark.” Let’s be honest though. Reaching a standardized benchmark isn’t exactly creating a love of reading or an interest in becoming a life-long learner.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
I was a well-educated, highly-trained, experienced teacher who had taught hundreds of kids over the years.
My husband was just a fun dad who loved spending time with his kids and that time often included books.
He doesn’t have a degree in education. He never attended workshops on best practices for phonics instruction or strategies for increasing reading comprehension. He certainly never thought about how to teach reading or wondered how to teach writing.
However, what he did was read to our kids every single day…and still does. He has always explained the meaning of unknown words as they came up. Together, they discussed the characters and events of the stories in the same way adults would do in a book group. They’ve read picture books, chapter books and series like Harry Potter and compared stories and authors. Not only did he connect with our kids through shared reading experiences, they developed a bank of information about places, people and events that has amazed me.
Although he read to them for the simple joy of the experience, they learned more about reading, writing, and vocabulary than they ever could have through the workbooks, boring passages, and isolated lessons that are part of pretty much every homeschool reading curriculum.
Learning language arts through literature is not only better for children who are learning how to read or how to write for the educational benefits, it is also a much cheaper alternative to purchasing a homeschool curriculum program.
