I have overloaded my cart, I think…

Of course, I want my daughter to have an excellent home school education. I want her to have the basics or core curriculum of language arts, math, science, and social studies. I want her to have literature studies, and spelling. I want her to have supplemental science studies, Spanish, music, and art. Ok, so supplemental science, Spanish, music, and art are not core curricula, but I still want her to them.

My problem is that I am having a little bit of trouble balancing all of those things. There doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day, and while I really want her to have the supplemental enrichment courses, I am having trouble fitting it all in.

Part of the problem is that my daughter has a sleep disorder, in addition to her ADHD. What this means is that sometimes she doesn’t sleep. When she doesn’t sleep at night, no amount of ADHD medication will help her focus the next day. So she might be awake, but unable to focus on school.

Or, she might not go to sleep early, then the next day she sleeps really late. Which means that we don’t get an early start. By 4:30pm I’m ready to stop school and have a little bit of adult time, but if we haven’t done enough school, then I don’t feel like we can stop.

This backs up dinner, makes it hard to keep house, hard to have “me” time. Ok, I’m not complaining, not really, I knew when I took on home schooling that my child marched to the beat of a different drummer. I’m just feeling a little overwhelmed today. Sometimes I just need to vent it a little…ever feel that way?

Ok, so what are your children reading? Are they reading on their own, or are you reading to them? My sixth grader is reading Fablehaven right now. I do not have her reading anything in particular for “school” so to speak. I figure it is more important to keep her reading anything that is close to or above level. I know that as she gets closer to high school I will need to work on more literature based reading. There are tons of books she needs to read because she needs to have the ability to make connections. That sounds odd, doesn’t it? Here is what I mean. Suppose she goes for a job interview, and her boss, an older person says, “Six of one…”, leaving the remainder of the sentence unspoken. Of course, we know that, “…half a dozen of another”, is what follows. We make the assumption of what he is talking about, because we have some basis in learning or experience, that tells us how to complete the answer. Or suppose someone makes a reference to steering clear of another person because, “he is a real Ahab.” Would my daughter know that the “Ahab” was a reference to the sea captain from Moby Dick, hell bent on revenge at all costs? I will give you another example of why having the experience of literature is important. My father was born in another country, his first language was not English. He came to America, got a high school education, became a naturalized citizen, joined the military, married, had children, owned his own company, and then decided to go back to school. He thought that pursuing the American Dream was a life calling. When I was in middle school my dad began college, eventually receiving a B.S. and a masters degree. Somewhere along the way he discovered that his scientific education was not enough. He discovered that he didn’t have the cultural or literary basis to take part in the circles his science education thrust him into. He began a secondary, and completely separate line of educating himself. That line of education had him reading literature that many people didn’t even thing about knowing something about. Milton, Shakespeare, Byron, Steinbeck, Hemingway all became his companions. He would sometimes come home from work with a library book or two, and comment that he had met yet another author he needed to become familiar with because of some comment or discussion that he did not have the reference knowledge to understand. He was a lifelong learner, always hungry for the next world a book could take him to. I want to follow in his footsteps, I always want to hunger for the next piece of knowledge. I want my daughter to have the love of learning that drove my father. The way that I am fueling that fire in my daughter is through allowing her to read as she wishes. I am purposefully addicting her to books and knowledge, so that she will always want to learn more, always need to learn more. In addition to the books she reads herself, we have books that we read together that are above her level, and audio books. The good thing about books that are a little bit above level is that they also improve her vocabulary. Sometimes we use literature based word lists to let her see the words she is hearing through audio books, or when we read to her. Often, she doesn’t even realize that she is learning something. My goal is this, should you ask my daughter what she loves about reading books, and learning, I hope her answer is, “Everything!”

We are done!

Ok, that sounds so final. Let me qualify that. We are officially done with 5^th grade. My daughter has been doing 6^th grade science for a while now, because, of course, it is her very favorite subject, and she wouldn’t do anything else if I didn’t insist on a little math, and a little language arts, reading, logic, foreign language, art, music…you know, everything else!

And, naturally, my daughter is very legalistic, so even though she has been doing 6^th grade level work in some subjects, like science, she could not stand for me to tell people she was in 6^th grade.

“But Mamaaaa…”, she would stage whisper, “I’m still doing 5^th grade language arts!!!”

It gets very confusing for people who ask her what grade she is in, because she feels the need to tell them exactly what grade she is doing in each subject.

So, now, legally, literally, figuratively, and in any other way you can think of, as of Thursday of this week, she can honestly tell people, without any misguidance or smoke screens, that she is in 6^th grade. Yippee!!

What does that mean for us really? Well, because she put off her home school language arts until the bitter end, we have had to focus on it really hard for the last couple of weeks, in an effort for her to complete the course. So now, she is tired of language arts and doesn’t want to see it again for weeks, if ever!! Because we were focusing so hard on language arts, I had to curtail the amount of science and social studies she did. So, she feels deprived of her two favorite courses of study, and only wants to do them. And amid all of this, math has become the forgotten subject. I plan to ease her back into math every day using a couple of math games, just to jog her memory and remind her that it can be fun.

Seems like a lot of imbalance going on in her schooling right now, and my goal between now and Thanksgiving is to try to bring a little balance back into how much work she does in each subject. Every year we seem to get into this state of imbalance between where she is in science and where she is in language arts. I would love to use science as a reward for math and language arts getting done, but she loves science so much it seems unfair to put off science in favor of her least favorite subjects.

Has any one else run into this problem? How do you keep things in balance? I’d love to hear comments on this.

In the mean time, my daughter is OFFICIALLY a 6^th grader!!!!!!! Woohoo!!!!

There is a whole lot of talk about students with special needs and their access to the kinds of help that they need to learn. One school of thought says that special education teachers with years of book knowledge and teaching experience are the only ones who are capable of giving special needs students the kind of education they deserve. This is an institutionalized approach, and it works, to some extent. Another school of thought says that the teacher doesn’t have to have special knowledge or years of experience, as long as the teacher has access to a good curriculum that assists them in providing for their special needs students. Homeschoolers of special needs children tend to fall into this category. Even though I’m a homeschooler, I’m not sure which camp I want to throw my hat in with. My daughter is gifted, and ADHD. And I find those two things together to be quite a handful. I’m fortunate to have a great curriculum, and a child who can read anything I put in front of her. While she is difficult at times, we manage well in our home school. I see other people in my local home school group that have children with more specialized or exotic problems. And I can see where those parents might need more assistance to find the methods most useful in teaching their children. I mean, honestly, I only deal with gifted and ADHD. Some parents have children with pronounced learning, sensory, and social difficulties. Some of those parents deal with more than one child in their family with learning difficulties or special education concerns. Can a parent handle such pronounced difficulties at home? I believe they can, especially if they have access to services that will help them deal with their child’s specific issues. Parents have a vested interest in getting the best education possible for their children, and they live with their children, day in and day out. This means that they are more aware of when their children will be more receptive to learning, what triggers make for bad school days, and what subjects the child needs the most help with. Most of all, no one loves these children more than their families, and the individualized education that can be provided at home can make the difference between a child who can learn and function, and a child who gets caught up in a system that does not learn to their full potential. Parents of special needs children sometimes need special help, and different methods to teach their children. They need support, and access to services that will aid in that teaching, and they need resources that are specially designed for their child’s own specific strengths and weaknesses. In the end, is that any more than any of us need or want? We have the desire for our children to learn, we have the will to teach our children, and we want them to succeed. Those are some serious motivators!

There are so many words in the English language. If you are an adult, who learned to speak English as your first language, you may not realize how difficult our language is. If you are an adult who learned English as a second language, you know what I am talking about. One of the worst things about English is that is not a pure language, it is a conglomeration of several different languages. Because of this the grammar rules and spelling rules are not as easy to navigate as in other languages. An example of this is Dolch words. These are essentially sight words that can not be decoded by pronouncing them phonetically. I’m not sure how many of them there are but I can tell you that there are pages and pages of them and they are divided by grade level.

Because the Dolch words cannot be decoded phonetically and must be learned by sight it is important to give our children other ways to learn and practice the spelling of these words. Of course, my favorite method teaching spelling words of any sort is to have your child play a game with them. My child likes to play crossword puzzles, and word ladders. Other children like speed drills, or matching games. Any of these will help your child learn to spell Dolch words and other words from their spelling lists without the drudgery of copying words over and over. Another benefit of playing online games is for those children who do not like to or are unable to write. For these children, the computer games allow their brains to move at a faster pace than their hands can write the words, allowing them to learn at their brain age, not at the pace of their physical limitation.

English is a difficult language to speak, and spell. Help your kids out in any way that you can. Games, flash cards, typing games, and word searches are all ways to assist our children, and if you can make them online, the children will also be learning valuable keyboarding skills in the mix, quite a bargain.