September 19th, 2009 Homeschooling: What No One Tells You
Sometimes I feel that my life doesn’t count for much. I’m not a missionary. I’ve never written an influential book or even opened a soup kitchen.
Yet I saw something the other day that made me realize how valuable we Moms are. At the eye doctor’s office there was an African-American mother with her little son, an obviously delayed child. The child could not speak – he only made sounds- and the mother was teaching him sign language. With obvious love and animation, she would show him a sign and then he would try it….then his face would light up when she praised him. Professional workers and experts are great, but I’m not sure that anyone other than a mother could work like that with so much love, patience and tenderness. It would probably be much easier to write that child off intellectually and let him stay in a low state of development, but that mother was devoting her time to being sure he reached his potential.
That’s what lots of us are called to do.
I started out homeschooling with a shelf of 19th century (reprints and originals) textbooks and lots of wonderful ideas.
It seemed so easy. Our child seemed intelligent and had a great voculary. I was sure that all I had to do was simply present the information to her, review it a few times, and she was good to go. How hard could that be?
(I hear other home-school Moms out there laughing hysterically.)
Nobody told me that children have to be developmentally ready to learn and that people learn in different ways and at different speeds. No one mentioned learning differences and difficulties (I won’t call them disabilities.)
From the beginning…(no pun intended), I noticed that our daughter had a few problems with “beginning” and “ending” and with patterns. I dismissed this at the time. When given a pattern to repeat and she’d make a mistake, she’d tell me, “But I think it’s prettier THIS way.” I just chalked it up to a strong-will and really didn’t make much of it. I think now it was a sign of something else.
We started simple phonics when our daughter was 3, and I expected to have her reading simple stories by the time she was 4.
No dice.
Now, at 7, she can read simple stories, but she reads mostly by sight. Rod and Staff Phonics is pretty intensive (at least it seems so to me), but she still prefers sight-reading. When she tries to sound out a word, unless she actually has her finger under it, she may mix up the sounds. We have to really work at tracking left to right.
We also started with numbers, counting and using blocks and toys to add. Things just didn’t click. I thought that kids naturally counted on their fingers to add, but this didn’t even come to her intuitively. She still can’t grasp that the numbers on the left of the number line represent smaller quantities than those on the right of the number line, or that when you take 1 from a number, the answer is like counting backwards.
You name it, we’ve tried it: making Power point presentations and songs to learn math facts, using Math-U-See blocks (good, but she wasn’t really learning her math facts), lots of repetition, hopscotch-type games, adding toys and lots and lots of practice. What’s working best right now are flash cards with a triangle and 3 numbers on them: the sum at the top and the two addends on the lower corners.
I won’t lie and tell you that I haven’t had times of frustration and discouragement….especially when friends show me how their 3 year-old who can read and say, “He just picked it up by himself!”
Nothing I’ve done in my life, I think, has made me depend MORE on the grace and help of God….daily, hourly, and by the minute some days.
