unschooling reading and writing

I'm still swirling with Chana and high school.  But that's not for today.  Jack, age 5, has been pre-reading the in past month.  Trying to read boxes and packages.  Reading Hebrew and bringing me the reader.

He's also been typing.  He keeps asking me how to type "candy crush" and "rhino rush" and "piranha" and other things.  It takes him a long time to find the letters.  But this is how he learns.  Soon he will get more fluent.  Soon he will recognize when he wrote it correctly and be able to pick it out of the autofill.  Elazar, age 7, is not yet fluent at typing and often asks for help as he types ("How to you write 'room without requirement'?") but he can sound out a lot and is much quicker at typing.  I'm starting to feel a little sci-fi in the sense that my unschooled kids rarely write on paper but type constantly.

Tonight, Jack brought me a book that had easy phonics like "Lad had a dog."  Or something like that.  He read each letter but he was having trouble blending.  So I remembered the book Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons that I somehow acquired (if you homeschool long enough, people give you lots of old books).  I pulled it out and Jack was sitting right next to me so I didn't really have time to read that how to use the book part.  We just plunged right in and winged it and he did the first 5 lessons.  Lessons are supposed to take 15 minutes each but Jack didn't like some of the games so we went straight to the reading parts.  He was pretty excited and we'll see if he sticks with it.

Now I'm off to book Chana's Japanese lessons online.  I bought her an inexpensive app in the summer which she used somewhat but was complaining to me that she's having trouble learning.  She saved up to go to a trip this summer to Japan and she wants to speak Japanese.  I was sort of at a loss so I had given up.  But I was trying to book her violin lessons when I realized that the site I was on had language lessons.  So we are signing her up for 5 Japanese lessons and we'll see how it goes.