Growing Confidence in Our Kids with Homeschooling
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Homeschooling for the Slower Paced Learner
We all know the story of the tortise and the hare. As a homeschool mom, I am their running coach. I have to find a way to help the tortise AND the hare to reach the finish line and win the race, each according to their learning style.
We have a son who was very meticulous and painstakingly slow at hand writing in the early school years. He was more cautious than his siblings when it came to answering question. He had a strong desire to be right and wanted to be sure that he understood the question. Often, I would spend extra time going over instructions with his for our assignments. Our school day were stretching out longer and longer.
Maybe you have a less than confident learner. Do you have a student who needs more help, hates to be wrong, or that writing is a struggle for?
Having multiple kids in our homeschool is a blessing, but there is a danger to compare the children to one another. That would be a huge mistake. Each student has their own strengths and weaknesses. Some shape who they are as a student. All are factors we need to consider to educate the whole child.
Gideon is an amazing brother. There is not a person he meets that is not a potential friend. I often meet kids he introduces as his friend, because they chatted while they were batting. He is the perfect kids to be catcher on the baseball team. He is the friend of every lunch lady and custodian everywhere he is associated with. He knows them by name and there is nothing fake about his kindness.
He is more than how he learns. We have taught him how he learned best, and worried the whole way. He did not have to take me to college after all. There was a few years that I wondered if he would ever work independently, but he has taken the reigns of his learning and is choosing where to take it.
One of the things that is hard with a child who needs extra help is that I worried that I was enabling him to be dependent on me.
A few things that helped me know that I was helping…
One of the things that I have always made our kids do, is formulate a question. They can not say “I don’t know what to do” because I will sing them the “Read the Box” song. Remember when the instructions were in little boxes at the top of the page. My kids would often say “I don’t know what to do,” and I would reply by “singing; read-the-box, read-the-box, read-the-box.” If they read the instructions and need clarity, I would have them ask me a more specific question. Do you need help with structure, do you need to clarify a definition, is there a item you are missing? Coming to me with a question helped them to be specific about the area they were not clear in understanding. I literally would not engage you without a question. Sometimes the kids had to get creative but the did not tell me “I can’t.”
Keep Clear Expectations: I do not Accept “I can’t” Statements
I Tore Down Foolish Barriers to Learning
Math and Language Arts were taking forever. Then I honestly assessed where we were having troubles and made a few small changes to our homeschool day that made a huge difference.
First, I took some time to observe what was going on in our school day. That might sound crazy, but many days just pass us by. We are in a rush of doing and going. We need to take some intentional time to observe our days to see what is causing trouble in our schedule.
When Gideon did math early in the day, it got done without troubles. If it got pushed back to after lunch, it took no less then two hours to complete. It was like he had use up all of the self control he had by then. For a young boy that was actually very likely true. We started taking more quick short breaks in our day to get the wiggles out. I still prefer to plough through and get it over with, but children have different needs than we do. As a teacher, we have to learn to meet them.
We switched to mornings for math and we made one small change, I filled in the answers.
I fely HUGE guilt for doing this at first. I felt like I was cheating or something, but Gideon took so long to write his numbers it just made sense to me. When I started writing his answers in the book for him, he took off. I quickly realized that Math was not handwriting time. Handwriting was being covered in a separate book. By taking the focus off of the forming of each and every number, he could focus on the problems on the page. Math was not the real problem at all.
We have to look outside of conventional wisdom to meet our children’s needs. The beauty of homeschooling is that we are able to work outside of the box. Even within our curriculum I was able to change how we presented information to individual students. Your child is the most important thing in your homeschool day. I had to stop caring about what someone might think about how I was helping. I had to stop comparing and start caring more about what my child really needed from me.
If writing is a problem…
- reduce the number of written answers
- let them answer oraly
- allow them to dictate to you
- let them voice text the answers to you
- add a typing program to your learning tools
- for younger children, practice hand strengthening exercises
He is Not Going to Take You to College
It was in these same years, that I read a great article on the Sonlight forum. I wish I could site it, I have looked and looked. I thought it was written by John or Sarita Holtzman, but I have had no luck finding it so you will have to accept my paraphrase. The article addressed working with students that need you to work side-by-side with them durring the school day. This is especially hard when you, like me have a group of students using the same Sonlight H/B/L. My two other kids could just read the instructions and do the work.
I was frustrated and less that enjoying this divided and fractured school time. This article was just what I needed to hear, it encouraged parent to give the extra support that their student needs. Some students are not natural risk takers and need nutured through the learning process. Giving the extra time is an investment that is never wasted. I was reminded how all of my children learned to drink for a cup at different times, some were more frustrating that others, with more spills and messes, but none were still drinking out of bottles in high school. So it has been with learning. They have all learned the skills they needed in due time.
It was the end of the article that I was most touched by. The author reminded me to be grateful that this child is homeschooled. A child who needs extra time and attention would not have faired well in the average public school setting. Praise God, that in His infinate wisdom, He nudged you to choose to homeschool. In this manner of education you will be able to meet your child’s needs like no one else could. What a blessing. That article changed my attitude and softened my heart. There were days that it was still frustrating. There were days that I wanted to be done with school and on to my own things, but I was glad that I was meeting my child’s needs in the way that helped the most.
Praise for Sonlight Dictation
One standard practice in our school day was to copy the Sonlight LA dictation passage. This is usually a quote from the currently assigned reading book. This practice was the one thing that helped develop Gideon’s ability to copy larger and larger chunks of text at a time. Many people choose to skip this practice. The passeages seem over their kid’s heads and writing abilities. I am one that believes that our kids are capeable of much more that we think, but I still need help seeing the long game, just like the rest of us. Copy work was not always easy. The kids never liked it. Never. I trusted my curriculum and the process.
The first year was the hardest. Our first challenge was creating a consistent habit, one the kids knew they could not throw off. Second was doing the work. One student was ready for the next line, while Gideon was working on the first few words. The instructions said to repeat the text several times in chunks. I was practically going word for word, but I knew this was the road to building a skill he needed. Over the years, Gideon retained larger and larger chunks of text. When we last used dictation, it was not a huge effort to remember complete statements and write them down. This has been a great help, since this year he is taking college lecuture notes.
Gideon attends Graceland University right now. He is exploring Elementary Education, playing baseball and he does not need me to sit next to him at all. He does however know how to ask articulate questions. He is unafraid to meet with his Professors and knows exactly where to find the resources he needs. Help is not an ugly word to Gideon.
The best part about knowing how to ask for help is that colleges provide a ton of it, for free. There are writing resource helpers, who will read over your work and give you feed back. There are math tutors, study groups and you can send an email to your Professor if you need to. For a student that confident that they can find the help they need, college is not too scary of a place.
