My daughter is a voracious reader. She always has a book in her hand, whether it is an actual, physical book, or an e-reader, or a computer with e-books on it. She loves to read any and everything, Because she loves to read so much, I have not worried much about her vocabulary. She seems to retain a lot of what she reads, and she seems to be able to put those words into her spoken vocabulary. For this I am grateful. That is, until I read an article about ways to expand vocabulary. This article indicated that only about 20% of information that was read was actually retained, but that information that was read, spoken, and heard was retained at a level closer to 90%. Wow, that is an incredible difference in retention.

I have always said that playing games helps my child learn, and more and more studies are showing that the more ways a child is exposed to a piece of information, the higher the retention of that information is. So, once again, I’m advocating the use of word games, like word search, or word ladders, as a way for students to practice vocabulary. This also means that my child will be doing more repetition, because it seems that repetition is a good way of retaining information also. She hates repetition, and so I will have to be more and more inventive. This means that I am looking for more ways to be a sneaky parent. I need to find out more ways to allow my daughter to repeat her work without actually looking like she is repeating it. And I will throw that question out to home school parents out there. Does any one have a new or inventive way to get your child to do the repetition that they dislike, without the repetition becoming boring? I’d love to hear some suggestions!

 I’ve been asked whether it is easy or difficult to home school. My usual answer is something like, “well, that depends on what you consider hard!” In reality, the answer is dependent on where you live, how committed you are to home schooling, and probably how organized you are.   

I’m fortunate. Ok, there are many reasons that I am fortunate, but among them is the fact that I live in a state in which it is very easy to home school. I don’t have to jump through any hoops. I don’t have to get approval, I don’t have to have my curriculum approved, I send a letter once a year to the State Department of Education and voila! We home school.

I know that some states have much more difficult laws about what parents have to do to be able to home school. Some only require a home school portfolio. This is basically a record of the child’s achievements. This can vary from a simple list of subjects, chapters completed, and a grade for the chapter test. Other states require portfolios that show every detail of the home school plan from a copy of their printable lesson plans, to the number of hours spent per day, on which subject, and where that instruction was given.

Because there is such variation, it is important that you know the laws of your state, and what is required for you to stay off the radar. By this I mean something like this…does your town or municipality have a daytime curfew? Daytime curfews mean that local officials like policemen, may stop your child if they are out of the house during the hours that would normally be school hours. That official may question your child, and may turn them in to a truancy center. If your locality does have rules like this then you need to make sure you are with your child, even if you have them in the front yard for P.E. during the day. Another thing to consider is the errands you run during the daytime. If you are doing mundane errands such as grocery story, or picking up the dry cleaning and you have your school age child out during the day, be prepared to get strange looks, and even questions.

We do have doctor’s appointments, pharmacy pick ups, and field trips, and library trips during the day, but we try very hard to not to do household errands. My child is clean, fed, dressed appropriately, and hair brushed (ok, most of the time anyway!) if we have to go out. There is no need to play into any preconceived notions about home schooling by being careless.

In the end, the more you comply with the state laws, and local statutes, and the better the records you keep, the easier home schooling will be. It is important for you to take your child’s home schooling seriously, letting it take priority over other outside commitments, at least during the hours you designate at your school hours. The more seriously you treat school, the more seriously other people will take your home schooling. You might even get support from unlikely sources, if you show dedication and consistency. While this all may seem like a lot of trouble, the benefits of home schooling might just be worth the difficulty!!

So, how is your school year going so far? Have you started the hard work yet? We are just beginning to start the part of school that my daughter considers the “hard work”. Of course, if it is related to language arts at all she things it is hard. And some of that is harder than other parts. Spelling is a really hard part for my daughter. We try lots of things to help her with spelling, since she finds it so difficult. We have tried games to make spelling fun. We have tried word ladders, and repetition using the white board. And those are the things that work, to a point. Oddly enough, I have found that letting a fellow home school mom present the words and run a short lesson with my daughter gets much better results than if I do the presenting. I’m not sure why this works, except that perhaps my daughter behaves better for her, and my friend doesn’t start the lesson with pre-conceived ideas of frustration causing her to be impatient. This was actually working pretty well for us, all it required me to do was present my child, and the spelling lists by grade. The problem was, that it worked so well, that my friend said it was kind of a waste of time for her to continue with the presentation because my daughter obviously did very well in spelling and had apparently overcome any problems she had in the past. What?! So, we are not continuing that experiment, even though it was successful. And, when I went back to presenting the spelling lesson, imitating the plan my friend had used successfully with my daughter, I ran into the same old roadblocks as far as my daughter making a reasonable effort with learning the spelling lesson. I’m beginning to think that my daughter’s spelling issues might have something to do with our butting heads. It’s enough to give a home schooling mom a complex! At any rate, we continue to experiment with things that work for spelling lessons. We keep the things that show promise, and drop the ones that will clearly be a failure. I suppose spelling may always be something my daughter struggles with. I hope one day she either gets better at it, or I accept the inevitable idea that she might never be good at spelling. In the mean time, we trudge on, trying to learn to spell, one letter at a time!

Words. It is hard to remember how much there is to actually learn about the English language. Every day that we do language arts in school I remember something that I have forgotten. Who knew English was so complicated? For those of us who grew up speaking the language, over the course of many years, we learned all about homonyms, and compound words, idioms and oxymorons. No wonder our children are frustrated sometimes. We have got to be patient, because English is a hard language, and we have learned so much that our children have yet to learn.

It is important to use every resource at our disposal to help our children in learning the rules of language arts. One of the things we like best at our house is games, but for some families children learn better on paper, like by the use of workbooks. Or perhaps flash cards are more your child’s style, or word blocks. Sometimes your child might just need the lesson taught one more time, by one more method. So after your child has done their main lesson on a language arts subject, and you think that he or she didn’t quite get it, or needs a little more practice, pull out the compound word video lesson, or let your child play a game contraction game. Every little bit of practice in helping your child learn one of the most difficult languages on the planet, English, will go a long way in all of their school work!

It is a commonly held belief that learning phonics helps children become better readers, spellers, and writers. Phonics are usually taught early on, in kindergarten and first grade, as the student is beginning to learn to translate spoken English to written English. Since my child is an accomplished reader, I thought we were past worrying about phonics. But I am beginning to rethink this, because she is still not a very good speller. Did I mention that she is entering  sixth grade?  This may be something she struggles with for her entire life. And I think I know where the problem began.

I pulled my daughter out of public school midway through first grade and began home schooling. Because I did not want to buy a full year’s curriculum for first grade since she had already done half of it in public school, I began her in second grade work. She had no trouble with that work, at all, and so I thought that we were home free. As she continues to have problems with spelling, I am beginning to wonder if she missed something fundamental during that half year of work she didn’t get exposed to.

Looking at some of the stuff that would have been covered in that half year, I discovered that continued work with phonics, and breaking words into syllables, or segmenting, occurred during that time. Around fourth grade I tried to have her go back and work on the phonics but honestly it is like that ship has sailed. She knows that work is for younger students and feels like I am treating her like a baby.

She does not sound words out, but she has a phenomenal memory. She can tell me if a word is spelled incorrectly, but she cannot tell me the correct spelling, though she will recognize it if given the correct spelling.

Since I cannot go back and solidify her knowledge of phonics at this stage, we are practicing other methods of improving her spelling. We have been doing word ladders for some time, and they do a good job of exploring word families. And of course, I have her play spelling games, using word lists from her other subjects. I’ve even found a primary science syllables game that lets her practice breaking science words into syllables. I have hope that this type of practice with science and other words will reinforce her ability to break words into syllables, and thereby learn to spell better.

I guess the basic lesson here for parents is…don’t skip the fundamentals, even if your child seems bored. The extra practice, solidifying the knowledge up front, might save you from having to play catch up at a later time.