Language Pie

By Karen Andreola

What are you making? the young mother asked her 4-year-old son as she sat on
the steps of the back deck. He was busy before her.

Im making a birthday cake, he answered. Im going to bake-bake a cake-cake. Im
making it for you.

Thats nice, she said. She had been reading him nursery rhymes and noted that he
must have picked up the repetition of pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake. He was absorbed in
his task of making mud pies and mud cakes. The mud was a mixture of sand that
had spilled from his sandbox into the surrounding garden and the soil therein. It
didnt matter if no grass would grow there for a bit. What mattered was that the little
boy was making something. And it gave him something to talk about. Will you have
a party? his mother asked.

Yes. Im going to have a party. Then, after a pause he asked, Mom, would do me
a favorite?

She understood him to mean favor but chose not to correct him. What do you
need?

I need birthday candles, he answered. I want blue ones. Can you get them for
me?

She smiled and got up to oblige him.

Her son knew how to carry a conversation and form sentences while he formed his
mud pies and cakes. He patted and molded and pressed each pie into shape. The
mud pies could be seen plainly. How his words were shaping his brain and organizing
his thoughts could not be seen plainlybut it was just as surely happening.

In a word-rich environment, one that makes time for conversation, a child learns
how to use language. Language shapes his thinking. As he puts his words in order to
form sentences he is putting his thoughts in order too.

Language is not the garment but is the incarnation of our thoughts, said the
nineteenth-century poet William Wordsworth. Yet our fast-paced, twenty-first-
century lives encourage a kind of linguistic passivity. From birth children are
bombarded with noise and hurry. Obnoxious music plays in the marketplace. Screens
flash images. Screens are even attached to the ceilings of our cars to keep children
fuss-free in traffic. Where are the unhurried, quiet moments of conversation? Where
is the stillness, the quiet or bored moments for reflecting upon this world?

A child can be in a room filled with designer toys and didactic materials, but it is the
words he speaks in response to the words he hears that will be what develops his
brain in readiness for reading, in readiness for gaining the lions share of his
knowledgethat isknowledge from books.

Reading is words in pattern. A child first becomes familiar with pattern, rhythm, and
rhyme by the pleasant way language is put together in his nursery rhymes. He hears
them over and over. When the words are familiar to him, you can stop after reading
a line and he will tell you the next. He is reading already in a sense, through his ears
not his eyes, when he connects diddle with fiddle, moon with spoon, pig with jiggety-
jig, Miss Muffet with tuffet.

An enormous amount of learning takes place in the young yearsall without the aid
of the workbook. How quickly, by grade one, the dial is turned and set to the
workbookwhen it seems that children cannot be expected to grow or learn much
outside of it. We cling to the security of the workbook for all the grades thereafter. Is
it because without ten problems on a page we arent able to measure learning by the
proper percentages of understanding? Rather than suggest when to use and when
not to use a workbook, how few or how many, I wish to open eyes a little wider to a
sampling of other thingsthings less clearly visibleless apparently measurable
and mark them as trustworthy.

They are:

Age-integrated conversation and spontaneous telling
Reading aloud
Silent reading
Formal telling of a books passage with Narration
Quiet reflection, daydreaming, and imagination

Also to note are hands-on experience and observation. These are learning
experiences that can be shaped in words.

The Principal Ingredient in All Learning

Years back I picked up a used copy of The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease
published in the 1980s. It has underlinings by the previous owner. If one of the
paragraphs were not already starred I would have starred it myselfin pink ink. Mr.
Trelease eases the conscience of the teacher who thinks she is neglecting the
curriculum in order to take time to read aloud to her class from a well-written story.
Reading is the curriculum, Jim Trelease points out boldly. He sees language to be the
principal ingredient of all learning: Not only is it the tool with which we
communicate the lesson, it is also the product the student hands back to us
whether it is the language of math or science, or history.
1
How brilliantly basic!

He claims that children who hear words intelligently, intriguingly, and elegantly
expressed through a read-aloud are better able to share their own thoughts verbally
and in writing: Each read-aloud, then, is a language arts lesson, bolstering the four
language arts: the art of reading, the art of listening, the art of writing, the art of
speaking.
2


The Art of Knowing

When The Read Aloud Handbook was published, its ideas were ripe for the picking
among home teachers. Other voices were also praising the value of reading aloud. In
the 1980s Susan Schaeffer Macaulay, too, upheld this teaching method in For the
Childrens Sake when she introduced us to Miss Masons living books and the
simple yet marvelously empowering method of Narration. Susan Macaulay speaks
highly of literature [as] an important and central part of education.
3


The best thought the world possesses is stored in books, says Miss Mason. She
insists on well-written books on a variety of subjectsbooks that capture interest
books with juicy detailsbooks that take their timerather than those that are
stripped of life, i.e., those deliberately made-to-be facts-only schoolbooks that are
typically set before a student. A living book, however . . . will enliven the learner.

When a child is a student of living books he can more readily be trained how to
narrate from them. In my article in the May 2012 issue, I introduced Narrationthe
simple method of a child telling back in his own words what was just read aloud to
him. When a child narrates (verbally or in writing) we perceive he has knowledge,
because it is shaped in his own words (as it was shaped in his own mind). Miss
Mason heralds her discovery of living books and Narration:

Here . . . is the key to that attention, interest, literary style, wide vocabulary,
love of books and readiness in speaking, which we all feel should belong to an
education that is only begun in school and continues throughout life. . . .
4


We cannot see, as plainly, how language shapes the mind as a little hand shapes a
mud pie. Take heart. I remind you that it is just as surely happening. I call it
language pie.

Endnotes:
1. The Read-Aloud Handbook, by Jim Trelease, Penguin Books 1982, page 37.
2. Ibid.
3. For The Childrens Sake, Crossway Books 1984, by Susan Schaeffer Macaulay,
page 115.
4. A Philosophy of Education, Charlotte Mason Research and Supply 1989, by
Charlotte Mason, page 29.


Home educators know Karen Andreola by her groundbreaking book A Charlotte
Mason Companion. Karen taught her three children through high school--studying
with them all the many wonderful things her own education was missing. The entire
Andreola family writes product reviews for Rainbow Resource Center. Knitting
mittens and sweaters and cross-stitching historic samplers are activities enjoyed in
Karens leisure. For encouraging ideas, visit her blog:
www.momentswithmotherculture.blogspot.com.


Copyright 2012, used with permission. All rights reserved by author. Originally
appeared in the July 2012 issue of The Old Schoolhouse Magazine, the family
education magazine. Read the magazine free at www.TOSMagazine.com or read it on
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