Homeschooled students typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests, according to The National Home Education Research Institute.
An earlier series of articles published by me in the Eagle Times showed a strong majority of students in public schools in NH and VT scored poorly on statewide reading performance assessments.
New Hampshire does not collect such data on homeschooled children and homeschooled students are not required to take the yearly state assessment or to report their results if they do.
But we do know that one of the many reasons people decide to homeschool is that schools do not serve their children well academically.
As one parent interviewed for this article said: “My child was removed from school because she was getting excelling grades in reading and we realized she couldn’t spell or read well.”
In researching this article, I conducted a survey to determine how reading is learned by homeschoolers. It ran from October 3 to November 14, 2023 and was advertised to the Upper Valley Homeschool group and the Granite State Home Educators group on Signal and Facebook. The UVHG has about 800 adult members and GSHE has over 16,000 adult members.
The survey asked questions about approaches to homeschooling, how homeschooled children learn to read, when they’re taught, where they’re taught and how they’re taught. It also asked about when children showed an interest in reading, how long it took them to become fluent readers and how well they read now.
There were 111 responses; one entry per homeschooled child. The children’s ages ranged from 5 to 21. Some children have special needs and learning disabilities, though those didn’t stand out. The results are summarized below.
How do people homeschool?
Fifty-five percent (55%) of the 111 children take an eclectic approach to learning, meaning parents try different things based on what the child is ready for and what works for that child. Eighteen percent (18%) of parents follow a particular curriculum, like the Classical Method or the Trivium, basically doing school at home, though with a lot more flexibility. Nine percent (9%) do what is called “unschooling,” which is usually thought of as learning as you go through your day-to-day life.
Many parents are able to guide their children’s learning full-time; some have at-home businesses, others work unconventional hours.
Many homeschooling families are part of co-ops or learning clubs, no matter which approach to learning they take. Groups meet daily, 2 to 3 times weekly, once a week or a couple of times a month, depending on what works for the families. Some allow kids to be dropped off; some don’t.
Two local groups are the Upper Valley Homeschoolers, who base many of their events in Newport NH and at Micah Studios, which is also in Newport. Micah works with homeschooled students between the ages of 6 and 18. All Micah students currently use Education Freedom Accounts (EFAs). (In full disclosure, I was involved in setting up Micah Studios, but am not involved with the school’s operation.)
How do they teach reading?
As one parent said: “Learning to read was always, in my mind, akin to potty-training; a necessary skill, which each child needs help with, but has to develop when they are ready to be provided and made available, but not to be punished for or be negative about.”
Who does the teaching?
- 47% were taught by parents, in addition to some also learning on their own (19%) or at school (5%),
- 29% taught themselves to read, sometimes along with parents (19%) or in school (2%),
- 8% learned to read all on their own,
- 7% learned to read only at school, and
- 5% were taught by themselves, parents and schools.
When parents say their children learned to read on their own, they mean that they didn’t use a curriculum or method to teach them, that the child just started reading one day. However, they generally spent a lot of time reading to and with them and taught them the alphabet and the sounds the letters make.
Below are survey answers that revealed a few patterns in homeschoolers’ approaches:
- They provide a rich reading environment for their children. “He was read to every day of his life by parents and siblings. There were always books in the house. Weekly visits to the local library.”
- They wait until the child can pay attention. “He asked to learn to read when he first turned 6, but didn’t seem to have the attention span to actually do lessons, so I started by just reading with him as much as I could. Once he was able to pay enough attention to the material to learn, I tried several different ‘curriculums,’ mainly Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons and All About Reading.”
- They do short regular practices. “We spent 5-10 minutes, 5x a week, stopping for breaks when he asked to. It clicked for him after a few months (age 6) and he accelerated with fluency! He preferred non-fiction books that would show him how to DO something (cookbooks, science experiments, etc.).”
- They focus on phonics (80%) and sometimes combine it with other methods. “We work on phonics as it fits into our daily life. We have common sight words that appear regularly on a board that we change every couple of weeks.”
- They try different approaches. “At 3, she asked me to learn to read so we got Learning to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. It was too much for her (and I found it boring) so we stopped. Later, we tried a reading program with enjoyable stories, but it taught memorization and not sounding out, so we did it mostly for fun. At 5.5, she got an Usborne collection for beginner readers. We went through the first handful of them together and then, suddenly, everything clicked and she started reading them on her own. Within weeks she went from barely being able to read to being a pretty good reader and by 6 was reading small chapter books.”
- Learning to read can also happen in the most unexpected places. “Honestly, she learned by reading text messages, prompts in online games, birthday cards, notes around the house, etc.”
When did these children show interest in reading?
Research indicates that children will learn to read more easily if they’re developmentally ready. In one study (https://bit.ly/3S1WRzT), 22% of kindergarten students started the year with a gap in their reading readiness. At the end of the year, gaps remained and those who were already ready to read made significantly more progress.
Homeschooling parents use interest to let them know that their child is ready to learn to read. As one parent said: “I am grateful I could give her the gift of waiting until she was ready.”
Some lessons from the survey:
- Some kids show interest in reading as early as 1 year old and some as late as 10 years old. “This child struggled and just wasn’t ready to even slightly connect the dots of reading until the age of 8.”
- Some children are taught to read before they are developmentally ready. “We withdrew ‘Pat’ in the middle of 3rd grade. Pat couldn’t read past a 1st grade level without major struggling. Pat has now been homeschooled for 3 years and is reading at 12th grade level and can’t put books down.”
Most of these children (73%) showed interest in reading between the ages of 3 and 5. Quite a few (20%) showed interest between the ages of 6 and 8. One was 10 years old and a few were 1-2 years old. The range is probably similar for all children.
How long did it take these children to become fluent readers?
Most of these homeschooled children (65%) were taught to read after they showed interest. One child was first taught to read at 9 years old. She became a fluent reader very quickly. Harry Potter was the first book she read on her own.
Some kids can learn to read fluently at an early age. One child was reading fluently at 4 years old, before going to school for grades K-4. “Starting with simple books, he was able to quickly improve his reading skills and comprehension. We introduced more interesting stories early and avoided simple readers without good story lines.”
The survey data suggest that it takes about the same amount of time for kids to become fluent readers whether you start teaching reading before or after the child shows interest. It can range from two weeks (if they’re really ready) to more than 4 years for children to read fluently.
Does learning to read before or after showing interest affect how much they LIKE to read?
“He loves reading now because it wasn’t forced on him as something he HAD to do just because he was a certain age or grade. It was offered to him as an exciting magical power when he was ready and interested to learn it.”
Over 71% of children in the survey like to read, whether they learned to read before or after they showed interest in reading. This might be because most of these homes provide rich reading environments, where parents and siblings read with the child early and often.
However, 20% of children who were taught to read before they showed interest do not like to read now, compared to 10% of children who learned after showing interest. The sample of children is small, so it’s hard to draw conclusions.
Did going to school affect when children learned to read?
“This child was not ready to learn to read in kindergarten when it was taught. She hated doing the phonics and simple reading homework at home. She simply did not understand it and ended up repeating kindergarten and hating school. She eventually ended up having panic attacks at school so I pulled her out halfway through 5th grade to homeschool. She caught up to her original grade and is now flourishing in college.”
Some of the children in the survey went to school for a period of time:
- 34% attended a traditional school.
- 23% attended, at some point, in grades PreK-3, the years that schools teach reading.
- 11% attended school beyond 3rd grade.
- 6% attended school for just one year and, for some, that year was PreK.
- 9% attended school only for PreK and/or Kindergarten.
Over 80% of the homeschooled-only children were taught to read after they showed interest, whereas almost 40% of these children who were schooled were taught before they showed interest.
Of course, homeschooled families have the opportunity to wait for a child to be interested. Children who go to school have to try to keep up with their class, no matter their level of reading readiness.
A number of years ago, I tutored a first grader, a 6-year-old boy, in reading. He didn’t know, or care about, the sounds that letters make. It’s not clear that it’s worth putting a lot of effort into forcing a child to read at that readiness level. My focus was to get him to trust me while exposing him to books and letters. Elementary school teachers have to meet this challenge every day.
Conclusions
“Homeschooling has allowed her more time to read and has accelerated her skills. Rather than getting up before she’s fully rested and rushing to get to a traditional school where she will be assigned 20 minutes of reading, she wakes up when she’s ready each day and reads in bed before getting up.”
All homeschooled children in the survey who showed interest in reading have learned to read. People who responded to the survey were self-selected so we might not have heard from parents whose kids had problems learning to read.
Homeschooled children are taught to read using many different approaches. Many parents mentioned following the child’s readiness and interest. Contrast this with schools, which use one approach for all students, whether it works or not.
In my previous series on reading published by the Eagle Times, one parent said that everyone in her affluent town hires tutors to teach their kids to read, even though they attend a well-performing public village school. Also, the principal of another village school said that many kindergartners start out not ready to read and that it is a problem. Perhaps school policies should change to allow children to attend kindergarten only if they are ready to learn to read, no matter their age.
Whether you homeschool your children or send them to school, reading to or with them at home regularly will give them a solid foundation.
(This article may have also been published by the Eagle Times.)
