I’m taking the next several months to expand on the ideas developed in a previous blog post titled 5 Things that Changed our Homeschool for the Better. I will dive deeper into each of the five areas discussed in the post. First up is Focusing on Building a Reading Foundation.
In a previous life, I wanted to teach High School English. I loved it all! Compositions, plays, poetry, novel reading, and I even LOVED grammar. So, of course, when it came to homeschooling our daughters, I felt prepared to take on this area of our homeschooling adventure. I spent much time obsessing about reading, writing, grammar, and all that encompasses language arts. I obsessed over this area a lot, and I worried I would mess it up. My only initial fear in the Language Arts area of our homeschooling journey was that of teaching our girls how to read. While I have little knowledge of the formation of the English language, I hadn’t studied or prepared myself to teach someone how to learn to read.
To combat the fear I had of teaching our girls how to read, I discovered a program to teach the fundamentals of reading. Then it just came down to teaching everything else; it was where our Language Arts journey started to fall apart. During our early years, I tried a lot of different approaches and curriculums, but none of them seemed to fit. The problem wasn’t in the programs themselves. In developing these skills, I began to see they weren’t necessary at such an early age. Just because they were learning these things in public school did not mean that our girls needed these skills at that age. Because of Mouse’s difficulty in grasping these concepts, I began to dread teaching the area I loved the most.
My wonderful husband often reminds me of his struggles in school with a missed dyslexia diagnosis, and it finally made me stop and think. So, I stepped back and thought about what he said to me. I saw not a dyslexia struggle with my daughter, but learning was still an effort. So, I stripped down our language arts and examined what our oldest truly needed. The other thing my husband reminded me of was that as long as our girls could read, they could do anything. So, that is what we did. I took away all of the writing and grammar and allowed our daughter just to read. I wish I had done it sooner, but now she is thriving. Once she completed all the reading program levels, I slowly integrated grammar and writing into her day. Now, she is thriving, and I feel her comprehension is so much more than a surface level. While acquiring the skills she needed to read well, she was also learning the writing structure through all of the literature she was reading. She also began to love reading and began devouring more and more books.
I have not had our middle daughter do any grammar or writing (other than copy work and beginning spelling). She naturally already writes (and spells) well. She will not begin formal grammar or writing until probably next year or later when she finishes the last level of our reading program. She does seem to learn a lot just listening to Mouse and I already, so she has picked up a few things and plays our Mad Lib games with us, but only for fun at this point.
Taking the time to build a reading foundation reminds me of Matthew 7 where God talks about the man who builds his house on the rock. By creating a foundation for reading, I have naturally allowed our girls to develop their writing and grammar skills. I didn’t force them to learn. Thus, like building a house on sand, it would crumble underneath them as they tried to develop more skills. We sometimes need to examine our homeschooling journey, with the results in mind, rather than just the immediate needs (along with comparing to our public school counterpoint). We try to do too much too soon without waiting to see that the foundation skills are there. Our educational goals can be bogged down by doing too much too soon, rather than realizing each child learns as they are able and ready. Like some kiddos know to walk at nine months, others don’t walk until they are fifteen to seventeen months. It didn’t matter when they learned to walk, just that they knew and that we helped to provide them an environment in which to do so.
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