Can curiosity kill the ‘Covid gap’?
Trusting your child’s ability to learn
According to a recent report by the National Foundation for Education Research (NFER), my children, like many, have apparently fallen into the ‘covid gap’ of lost learning. My kids would be in year 1 and year 3, though they haven’t been in school since they were closed for most pupils in March 2020. NFER estimates a significant loss of learning for 6- and 7-year-olds, equivalent to about 3 months of missed school (more for my kids presumably), and concludes that catch-up learning is needed.
To be honest, I am pretty shocked that anyone can claim 6-year-olds need to ‘catch up’ on an education interrupted by a global crisis.
It is true that my now 6-year-old has not maintained the reading or writing momentum she had during her short time at school, in Foundation. She would eagerly rip open her book bag each evening and voluntarily read her school-set book, sometimes two, tenaciously sounding out words until she recognised them. I know that not all children have such gusto for their reading homework, but my daughter did. When we started home schooling because of the COVID-19 pandemic, my priority became our family wellbeing over and above reading, writing and maths, and we moved to child-led learning.
Despite shelves bursting with books for all ages and interests, my daughter was reluctant to pick one up. On the odd and heart-warming occasion she would slowly and carefully read her big brother a story (The Tiger Who Came To Tea by Judith Kerr being a firm favourite). That habit, however, flickered and dimmed until books were left ignored and collecting dust while, instead, we galavanted through forests, splashed through streams, foraged in the hedgerows, junk modelled, grew vegetables and baked cakes.
At first I was worried. Was I failing as a home educating parent by not making her read her books every day? Fuelled by the fear of parental failure, for a while I tried to sit down regularly, encouraging her to read aloud a book we had plucked from her book shelf. But she’d be restless and distracted, in stark contrast to her previous laser-like focus on her school books.
According to Natural Learning expert Dr. Renuka Ramroop, out of the school context, learning to read takes just 30 hours. Interestingly, this is partly because children read when they are motivated to and learn in ways not necessarily prescribed by schools. It was towards the end of a walk that I first noticed it. Close to home, my daughter had run ahead and, when I caught-up, I heard her, ironically, reading aloud a new sign that had been placed on the school gates. She had no apparent reason for reading the sign, no one had asked to her to, but her curiosity had driven her to find out what this new addition meant.
In the following days and weeks, though she wasn’t picking up books, I began to register the moments that she read. Without fail it was when she had an authentic need to. She put her skills to use, nudging them forward at a pace in step with her desire to answer her questions and solve problems. She read the ingredients of recipes, packet labels, cards that arrived in the post, the names of television programs and snippets of her Collins Guide to British Mushrooms.
More recently, having been captivated by the music and performance of Hamilton, my 6 year old printed out the lyrics to the iconic rap ‘My Shot’ and sat down to learn them. It’s a work in progress, but she’s tackling, at speed, with melody and emotion, a lengthy and meaningful text, because she has been inspired to do so. Though many of the words most likely don’t appear on the National Curriculum’s year 1 spelling tests, I am pretty confident she is not lost to the ‘covid gap’.
The potential significance of this seemingly selective reading has only recently dawned on me.
Now she reads, and also writes and makes calculations, because she wants to and, fundamentally, not because she is expected to. In doing so, she is independently developing an interest in reading, and writing and maths. Each started as a means to access information and better understand the world, and have evolved into tools for creative expression, documenting discoveries and getting a recipe just right.
At school my daughter’s reading was highly praised, which gave me a warm fuzzy feeling and a sense of pride. She was positively beaming when she received a reading award in assembly. Seeing her learning change in recent months, however, I have begun to question the soundness of the drivers behind such pride. Completing tasks solely because you have been asked to do so—because it is expected of you—stands to foster self-esteem derived purely from external validation. It encourages the need to please an authority rather than satisfying a self-driven need. In comparison, pursuing a problem or taking on a task because we are intrinsically motivated to do so, stokes the fires of internally-derived self-worth. Knowing our own interests, passions and motivations, and developing the skills to implement and explore them, lays the foundation for positive personal development, self-confidence and awareness, which stand to build a resilient child and future adult.
With a surge in mental health issues among young people, and particularly among teenage girls grappling with the need to meet unrealistic societal expectations, I feel somewhat like we may have dodged a bullet. It’s early days, I know, but the realisation that children will choose to learn when given the opportunity to be curious, has fully opened my eyes to the potential of child-led learning. It has the potential to provide long-term mental health benefits, revolutionise our education system and set our children up for real life chances.
While my daughter was ignoring her books, she didn’t lose learning opportunites, she was simply learning things that aren’t measured by our education system. She was learning to ride a bike and identify wild foods, to climb trees and wild swim, to bake cakes, grow vegetables from seed, sew aprons for her dolls and express herself through art. She was, and is, happy and busy and bubbling with ideas and curiosity.
Perhaps the ‘covid gap’ can be bridged by taking the pressure off and simply supporting our children in following their curiosity.
