How We Homeschooled Today #54

Easy reading and the Empress Theodora

Aug 17, 2023

(If you’re new here, my children are five and seven.)

The children read in bed for possibly an hour or more. Dozens and dozens of Biff and Chip books. These are way ‘below’ their current reading level, so here is a wonderful comment the author Julian Gough left on a previous post, about why easy books are so important to developing readers (Julian writes the Rabbit and Bear books, which are great first chapter books for that tricky in-between stage where reading books are too easy and ‘big’ books are too… big):

Excellent advice. I particularly like your recommendation to keep the easy books lying around. Children like going back to the easier books, not just because they are familiar and beloved, but because the experience of reading an easy, familiar book is so smooth; they feel accomplished, they feel they are good readers. Parents who take away the easy books as soon as they have been mastered are forcing their kids to always read books that they find hard. It’s often well-meaning (“They aren’t learning anything, rereading that old thing!”), but the message the children get is that reading is hard, and, worse, that they are bad readers (because it never becomes easy). Of course, learning IS hard. But the real reading experience, the experience one hopes to transmit to one’s children, is the experience of easy, pleasurable reading. Of mastery of something difficult. And leaving them the easy books, to return to whenever they wish, gifts them that.

They played with Lego for ages.
Then a friend came over and wanted to play. So I said the children should concentrate on their lists for a few minutes, get the work done, and then they’d be free. They did Multiplication by Heart (revising previously-learned facts as we did on Tuesday), a page of their Jolly Phonics books, and then I read aloud from a new book…
Empress Theodora, 500-548AD. The mosaic is from 570AD!
Weeks or months ago, my daughter chose a mosaic portrait of a woman called ‘The Empress Theodora’ to stick on the wall. The mosaic is from Ravenna, and dates from the 6th Century AD. None of us had heard of the Empress or knew anything about her. But in one of those lovely homeschooling moments when one thing seamlessly flows into another, earlier this week we read about the Byzantine Empire and the Emperor Justinian. And Justinian’s wife was… The Empress Theodora. I found this book about her online and today we read it. It’s not fantastic and it’s not terrible, but there aren’t that many children’s books about the Empress Theodora so our choice was limited! It is a nice way to develop our very limited understanding of the Byzantine Empire. We won’t be focusing on the topic for long but I know they will remember much more about it now that there’s a person and a story to connect with the page in the history encyclopedia.
And then, dear reader, they went to play with a friend, in the friend’s home, and the flat was child-free for nearly four hours. If you’re a homeschooler, you will know this is a rare and precious thing. I tidied up, listened to a podcast about King Alfred and the Vikings (did you know that Islamic silver coinage was arriving in Scandinavia from the 790s? I am always amazed at how connected our world was so long ago), and wrote tomorrow’s post all about how I plan numeracy and literacy.
At tea we finished the Empress Theodora book, and then they raced out into the garden to play with friends again until they were supposed to be in bed. But what are summer evenings for if not for playing outside with friends when you’re meant to be in pyjamas?

How We Homeschool Pen Pal Exchange

Spreading global friendship and literacy one letter at a time!

The first pen pals have been matched and I’m hugely excited! If you have a child who’d like a pen pal, let me know their age and home country and I’ll see what I can do.

Please feel free to share, the more the merrier. All children welcome.

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