Early education materials

I've been going through Anya's books, trying to find something that is easy enough for her to attempt to read, but without being as boring as Hop on Pop or Go Dog Go!. There are some better Seuss books that we are missing, which might work. The dozens of cheap Scholastic books which we purchased while she was in preschool (and I felt pressured to hand in book orders nearly every month) are for the most part useless here. Some of them (the "Froggy Does X" series, for instance) I don't particularly want her reading, as the behavior and scenarios involved are questionable. Some books are infantilizing, e.g. a Scholastic book about sleep that begins "A horse's eyelids go down when they go to sleep. A chicken's eyelids go up. Which way do your eyelids go?" Other books use a combination of boring, simplified language and difficult vocabulary which leaves me mystified: what reading level is it aimed at, exactly?

Thankfully, though, I've hit upon The Boxcar Children (and its 18 sequels, though I haven't read those yet). I liked this book as a kid, and was a little surprised to learn that it was written using only the most common 500 words in the English language. The vocabulary repeats fairly often, as in the first scene where the words "bread" and "bakery" and "boy" and "girl" are each used a few times, which gives kids practice. The text uses basic words which come up frequently: day, night, table, chair, walk, carry, happy, hungry, smile, said, and so on. Compound words are used liberally, as in "Greenfield Road" or "blueberries," which seem like long words to a kid and yet they're easy to sound out. In short, the author put considerable thought into the educational aspects, but the story (4 siblings surviving all on their own) is still interesting to most young kids.

(As an aside: I'm always afraid that Anya will be seriously upset by the idea of orphans, and yet, from Harry Potter to Pippi Longstocking to The Boxcar Children, kids are intrigued by life without (much) adult supervision, and Anya is no exception.)

Still, this book is considerably above Anya's reading level at the moment. I've made up a pile of miniature flashcards with words I've gleaned from Chapter One. I figure that if she can learn to sight read these words (around 60 or 70 of them, I'd guesstimate) then she can make quick progress in the book.

As you may have noticed, my "unschooling" mentality has kind of gone out the window here. I'm encouraging her, though not pushing her, to look at the flashcards with me, and I never thought I'd use flashcards at all. But Anya has been saying things like "When will I be able to read?" or "When will I be able to read Harry Potter?" about ten times a day, and there is no other way to get there except to get a certain basic vocabulary under her belt so she can read a bit faster and thus avoid frustration.

Having mentioned the variable quality of early reader books, I'll also say that many math workbooks are not well designed. We have the Miquon Math workbooks, and on every page the arithmetic problems occur in a certain pattern which is designed to lead a kid toward some insight. For instance, they might have a series of problems such as: 2+4, 2+5, 2+6, 2+7, etc. This is designed with the hope that kids will have an epiphany: if you can't remember 2 + 6, maybe you can remember 2 + 5 and just add one more. Similarly, they introduced multiplication by writing 2 + 2 + 2 and on the next line, 3 x 2, so that kids would see this equivalence over and over again. Every page has some such purpose, and is not merely yet more drilling. In contrast, the workbooks we buy at the grocery store or Target contain problems written down at random, it seems. They are good for drilling, but only for drilling. There's no "a-ha!" moment induced by these generic books.

Education is an area where I am not convinced there has been any progress over the past few decades, in terms of the actual science of teaching. The Boxcar Children was first printed in 1942, and the Miquon Math stuff is from 1964. The little workbooks with the pointless pictures and decoration, circa 2004, are mostly crap. I had no idea I'd have to be such a discerning consumer of educational materials, but I guess I do. And a pre-1970 copyright date, in my limited experience, is a good sign!