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I never worry about Rebecca being “at grade level” in terms of her own self (I really want to write an entry about de-schooling my own mind!). We’re unschoolers and “grade level” isn’t … interesting .. to me. Half the time when people ask, Rebecca and I couldn’t even say what grade she’s in, heh. I do sometimes think about it if I worry she might notice or worry that she’s “behind” other kids her age in a given area. Mostly, though, I’m just fascinated and awed with the process by which she learns without typical methods of instruction.

I’ve written about how she learned to read without being “taught.” It was “late” by school standards, but it was easy and fluid and now she reads as well or better than other kids her age. What’s funny to me is that she still says she can’t read. She admits she can “read a little,” but for some reason she thinks a person “can’t read” if they don’t know every word they see. I’ve told her that even an old lady bookworm like me doesn’t know every word I see, but she’s clinging to her notion. Maybe she’s afraid that if she “can read,” I won’t read books to her anymore? I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that she’s doing what she wants; she reads for information and for fun.

For a long time, she nearly refused to write. She hated it fiercely and avoided it as much as possible. Lately, she writes more, especially since she got interested in keeping a journal. Like her path to reading, her path to writing is SO interesting. She still loathes lower case letters and vehemently rejects using them. I’m not sure what it’s about, something about having trouble making the more curvy lines of lowercase letters look the way she wants is my guess. I suspect it’s going to change soon, as her interest in writing increases, she’ll find lowercase letters faster. I’ve never given her punctuation lessons, but other than a few quirks, she’s using punctuation correctly. I noticed recently that she seems to be using apostrophes correctly, using them for contractions and possession appropriately. She’s unsure about commas. For a while she would insert them randomly, but she doesn’t do that anymore. One of her current quirks is to put a long dash at the end of each line, like she were splitting up a word or something. I’m not sure where she got the idea to do it, she told me she “just likes to” when I asked.

I can’t wait to see where she goes with writing in the next few months. She’s interested in having a pen pal and that will definitely challenge her. Last night she was writing thank you notes and it was so cute. I liked how if she wasn’t sure how to spell a word, she looked in her mind to think where she’d seen it before and either spelled it out of her head or went to look for the source to copy the word. It wasn’t very efficient, but she was determined to only ask for my help in spelling as a last resort. It was sort of typical of her in general, fiercely independent, highly perfectionist and extremely sensitive to any real or perceived criticism.