Lois Letchford's son Nicholas went from failing Grade 1 to confident reader in four months of home teaching in Oxford. She ditched stressful drills, made learning fun instead, and he started loving it. Her shift: stop what isn't working and keep the brain relaxed enough to learn.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Lois Letchford, and we're looking at the journey of a child who went from low IQ to PhD. How did it happen? What steps took place? That's one. And the other is we're looking at my transformational journey from a mother and a parent of a child who failed Grade 1 to reading expert. How those 2 journeys are intertwined because I learned from Nicholas and Nicholas learned from me and I passed on my information. How did I go about teaching my son? Well, it was by a series of accidents and the first thing that happened was I told you last week about his learning in when he went on to Grade 2 and the learning of spellings and I could see that Nicholas was persistent. That was number one. And he learned the basics Of spelling and the basics of words. That was really good. The second thing that happened in his life was really by accident. My husband is a professor and he had study leave in— study leave in Oxford, England. And it was during this time that I decided to remove Nicholas from school and teach him at home. That's what I did. And I started again with failure. I had a series of books called Success for All and he failed with them. I got frustrated and my poor little boy's shoulders just went up and up and up and his ears came down as he tried so hard to learn the words and he couldn't do it. My mother-in-law was with me and she said, Lois, put away what is not working and make learning fun. Her words were transformative to me because I threw away what it couldn't do. And I had to stop and rethink and just start with make learning fun because children are not learning when they are so stressed. The brain is shutting down. They are unable to take in the information. So make learning fun was the first step. At the end, and I really only had 4 months to teach Nicholas At the end of that 4 months, I had a transformed child and a transformed mother through the philosophy, make learning fun. Because he didn't just learn to decode, he learned that he could learn. Today, if you talk to Nicholas or you hear Nicholas talk, he will say, I love learning. Learning. And this is where it started, with that 4 months that he and I had together, where my goal was simply to make learning fun. Making learning fun allowed us to learn so many more things than just learning to decode. So hit like, hit subscribe, follow my journey, see what else I have to say, and enjoy teaching your child to read.
