Archive for April, 2009
Schedules and Priorities
This is the time of year that I love homeschooling. The weather is beautiful, breezes are blowing, allergies are so bad that I can’t get out of bed. Coughing, sneezing, fears of my throat completely closing when I walk out the door. Ah yes, spring has indeed sprung.
I’m so grateful that on days like these, my children can still receive a full education without mom going out of the house. I can stay in bed and get a little sleep, then start our day a little later. We’ve also come to a great compromise. School no longer starts at 8:30 AM. Let’s face it, I’m not a morning person, and the more I try to fight it, the worse it gets, and I’m finding that Gio is not much better. He may be out of bed, but his energy level (50x that of mine in the morning) is no position to be sitting behind a table doing school work.
Through a lot of trial and error, we’ve found that he is an excellent afternoon learner. We can accomplish more in one hour, when he doesn’t have little brother distractions and he’s worked off some of his energy, than we were in an entire morning of struggle. And the quality of the work is much better. And now that he’s letting me sleep in a little in the morning, I’m still awake after lunch to actually spend quality time with him.
There are many days that I doubt whether we made a good choice homeschooling, as does most other homeschooling parent at one time or another. Am I really providing them with the best education? Would he learn better in a more structured environment? Am I the best choice for a teacher with all of my health issues? But the answer is always, I know that I know that I know that this is what we were called to do.
This weekend, we got in all of our curriculum for next year. I started flipping through it today and began to review the evaluation guide. Naturally at this point my heart started to sink a little bit. All of those nagging doubts started to creep back in. I looked through the kindergarten requirements just to get an idea of where we were. As I read through them, I realized that we had completed almost all of it for Gio and much of it for DJ already. WHAT? I couldn’t have read that right. Not only are we on track, but we’re even a little ahead of the curve? Now, I’m not going to tell the boys that lest they think that they can slack off a little bit, but it gave me such a peace to know that I can educate our boys on our time frame and meet all the requirements that are setup for them to know.
With all that being said, I want to publicly say today how proud I was of Gio. Memory work and rote memorization have always been a struggle for him. I’m finding that he’s much like his mom in that way. If I can see it written, I’ll remember it, but just to hear it, I’m pretty much guaranteed to get something wrong. Gio has been the same way with his numbers. He starts out great, gets to about 15, then seemingly randomly gets off track, but somewhere around 60 he picks it back up and goes straight to 100.
Well, I finally got around to making our classroom look more like a classroom. I got several posters to make it more fun and functional and it finally seems to be working. One of the posters that I bought was the “100’s chart”. We’ve been working on it for brief periods of time over the past couple of weeks. As we worked with the chart, I realized that his gaps were not random, he was getting caught on words that sound alike. Since he could not read, and therefore could not visualize them in his mind, they sounded like the same thing. Fifteen would jump to fifty because they sounded like the same word. Twenty-nine would jump immediately to forty and forty-one because thirty and forty sounded the same.
Today, with both of the younger boys having quiet time, we spent a little time on the number chart. It hit me that we were having problems with the 15/50, so we took a little break and I took a chance on something. Even though he is not reading, I thought it might be helpful to “see” the difference in how the words were spelled. I wrote out “fifteen 15” then right below it I wrote “fifty 50”. We talked about how the words were formed and what the numbers looked like. I could see the light bulbs going off everywhere. Suddenly he was excited about the numbers and what they meant. He realized that he could actually read the numbers and count them.
He immediately started his numbers chart again, and with only one slight hesitation to make sure that he was saying the right word at the 29/30 transition, he finished the entire chart in less than a minute. I was absolutely in awe. Then he went on to count by 10 and practice on counting by 5 all within 5 minutes.
When our timer went off, instead of immediately trying to run off, or whining about continuing school work, he asked what subject was next and what we were going to be learning.He even told me that he wanted to take his schoolwork with him on vacation this weekend.
I know that this will not continue every day, but I am so proud of him for working through this and for us both finding a way to help him learn better.
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Odyssey of a Lifetime 