"Where does reading for pleasure stop and reading to learn begin?"
Midway through the second grade, we switched to Ambleside Online, a Charlotte Mason based curriculum. It is just as thorough as other classical curricula, but presented in a more relaxed way. This curriculum is literature heavy, and each level (1-12) is about 2 years ahead of the reading levels used in most public schools. That means that if a child is using Year 1 of Ambleside, the books are really on a 3rd grade level. The way you get around this is by reading aloud. In Ambleside, the teacher is expected to read the material aloud to students until about the 4th Year. Now don’t panic. I hear those of you who have multiple children groan. While I only have 3, it is possible to schedule the readings so that you can read aloud to all of them. There is lots of info on the website and in other, Ambleside Yahoo groups about just that subject. Personally, I rarely read aloud more than 2 hours per day, including bedtime stories.
My kids all began to read at age 4 (I’m just lucky). My eldest started late in Ambleside and so was already able to read some of the books on his own. Now, at 10, he reads all but the hardest books on his own (Level 3). I still read Shakespeare and selected others to him. We have also tweaked the reading list to fit our family. We left out books that weren’t a good fit. We skipped a couple so that we’d have time to focus more on the ones I felt he needed most, like history. My 7 year old is currently in Year 1. He started Ambleside in Year 1 at the recommended age of 6. He reads the poetry and Aesop’s Fables, some history, and some natural science on his own. Some books we read in tag fashion, one of us reading a paragraph, then the other reading the next. Still others are better if Mama reads them. Remember that kids are widely different in how they best receive information. Some are visual learners, some are kinesthetic, some are auditory, etc.
I believe reading to learn starts when kids first sit on Mama’s lap and listed to a story. Is my 4 year old not learning about doodle bugs from the book we read just because he can’t read it himself? I’ve heard that many boys do not naturally pick up non-fiction books. Does this mean that they are not reading for pleasure? I think there can be a distinction between assigned reading and non-assigned reading, but that does not mean that a child doesn’t take pleasure from reading "school" books or that he does not learn from reading for pleasure.