I bumped into a friend today and she reminded me of the ‘not-quite reading blues’!

Lots of homeschooled children, especially if you are autonomous or unschooling, learn to read later than average. My son was almost 10 before he got anywhere close to being able to read fluently by himself.

But this didn’t stop him from WANTING to do a lot of things that involved reading – including computer games or looking at things on the internet. So during the ‘not-quite reading’ stage you hear a lot of ‘Mom, what does this say?’ I remember I felt like I spent a lot of my time popping backwards and forwards reading out sections of whatever he was looking at on the PC.  Eventually, I could stand it no longer!!

To my aid came a piece of software that would read out sections of text for him. I can’t remember if it was this exact piece of software, but NaturalReader is the sort of thing I mean.  It’s free. You download and install it. Then when you highlight some text (from emails or a web page for example) it reads it for you.

No more shouting for Mom to read it!! Hurrah!

Ipads and ipods and kindles of course can do this too.  But this little piece of PC software saved my sanity! And, I think it  really helped to improve his reading ability.

You won’t need it for long. Once they get going with their reading then you will find they really do leap ahead in ability in no time at all. But in the meantime at least you CAN be in two places at once!

How do you cope with the ‘not-quite reading’ blues? Leave me a comment and let me know.