I have not blogged in a while, I get busy and forget. I keep thinking I will do better; but I prefer to write when I have something great to write about. Today, I do.
I was not going to home school my kids. My kids were going to attend public school, maybe private school; but I did not have any confidence in my ability to home school! At 18 months Aidan starting tracing his letters. Then around 2 1/2 he was making grocery lists. He would ask how to spell something, I would say the letters and he would write them. At 4, he wanted to read. A friend gave me Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons, we went through 50 lessons and he was reading on his own. This was totally normal, right? All kids are this easy!
The time came to enroll Aidan in school and he missed the cut off for Kindergarten, but he was reading and knew all his addition facts. So, we decided to keep him home. Homeschooling was easy!
I know now, that it was God's plan for me to home school my children. He gave me an advanced, easy to teach child so that I would have the confidence that I could do it. (I have had many confirmations of this fact in the last 3 years.) Then he gave me Lilly. She has been ornery since the beginning which makes it hard to know what she knows.
My favorite example was doing colors with her at 2 years old. I asked her to point to the red block with about 5 blocks in front of her. She moved her finger around and then stopped for a second over the red block, turned her head to look at me, and pointed to a different block without looking. She also refused to talk until she was 3. She COULD talk, she would say a word and then cover her mouth and resume pointing to what she wanted.
Fast forward to 4 years old. We had been singing our ABCs since birth, she can sing a lot of songs but she cannot sing her ABCs! Once I heard her count to 10, but we usually got "1 2 3 4 5 6 7-11." Yeah, I know, too many Icees! BUT she wants to learn to read. I can do this, I taught Aidan, no big deal! WRONG! We tried for a month with no progress. We dropped it for 6 months, kept looking at letters and reading great books together. We tried again, nothing but frustration for both of us.
At 5, I started reading Charlotte Mason's original homeschooling series. She lays out a beautiful method for teaching reading. We tried and we made some progress. She read me a book! Then she read a couple of Bob Books. Then we tried 100 Easy Lessons again, to learn some more phonics. It was like she hit a wall. So we stopped with all phonics lessons. We went back to the Bob Books and a more Charlotte Mason-type method; we are slowly, slowly learning to read.
Her ornery personality still causes some problems; yesterday she read half a book with no trouble, today she read out of the same book with the same words and she seemed to struggle A LOT. She was never looking at the book! She was just guessing words without even looking!
So what have I learned? I have learned to be flexible. I have learned to be patient. I have learned to listen to my kids. I have learned that what is right for one child is not always right for the other. And most importantly I have learned that what I am comfortable teaching is not always going to be the best method for my kids to learn by, and that is tough!
