Learning to read, the hard way

I am working on a book about English medieval history, and I have just discovered the most astonishing fact (well, I think it’s astonishing.) When the children of wealthy families learned to read in the Middle Ages, they first learned the alphabet. No, that’s not surprising – the astonishing bit is what followed. Their next stage in literacy was the jump from recognizing and naming individual letters to combining them into sylables. Kids did this with the aid of a prayer book, and guess what? It was written in Latin. Only when they were profficient in Pater Noster did they progress to a language they could speak and understand.

Please don’t pass this on to Michael Gove. He might think it was a good idea, and incorporate it into his Guidelines for the Primary Classroom.

This amazing information came from Nicholas Orme’s wonderful book Medieval Children, which I can’t recommend highly enough.