Real Life Homeschool - a Week of Recounting the Struggles and the Victories

Real life homeschool huh? Is this where we all break down and cry for the hard days, or where we all do the happy dance because one of our children FINALLY learned to read or do long division,  or (insert your own struggle here)???

I think what real life homeschool means is being real. Sharing the highs and the lows. Blogging can sometimes seem to be all rainbows and happy thoughts - thinking of the character from the Lego Movie yet? 

Yeah, that’s not a realistic representation of homeschooling, or life. Some days are REALLY HARD, while other days are awesome... just like in the rest of parenting. There are as many ways to educate your children at home as there are families doing it. 

This week I’m planning to share some thoughts and real life instances from our homeschooling journey. Yes, I’ll be digging through my photos and adding in some crazy memories. I hope you’ll join us all week! I'm joining in with over 50 members of the Schoolhouse Review Crew to share what real life homeschool means to each of us. When you're finished here, click the banner at the bottom to read about the journeys my friends are on. I will admit right here that I am not an obsessive planner. We have always chosen broad goals for the upcoming year, and just done the 'next thing' each day. My 'planner' is more of a 'recorder.' That style might drive you crazy, but that's how we do things. Part of the joy of a blog hop is your ability to see how a lot of different families interpret the same topic. Many of the Crew members will be sharing 'a day in the life' posts so you can get ideas of things you might want to try. Be encouraged, your time spent educating your children at home will reap rewards ... even if it takes a while... don't give up!


Today I would like to share a story from our past. One of those struggles that God has turned into a victory. It is the story of a struggling reader.

In our own family, we had a struggling reader. Her name is Arlene. While I thought Arlene was doing just fine in her travel along the road to reading, she though otherwise. One day while we were at the library, I overheard Arlene talking to one of her favorite librarians, “Miss Toni.” Toni was talking about some new books they had just received that she thought Arlene would enjoy and Arlene replied “but I can’t read.” Now, that was not exactly true, but in her mind, Arlene thought that because reading didn’t come easily, she wasn’t any good at it. Thus the word “can’t.” Like all librarians worth their salt, Toni proceeded to encourage Arlene that she could read. Toni remembered some of the books Arlene had checked out in the previous weeks, read, and then told Toni about on our last visit, and she reminded Arlene about them. Arlene was about 9 at the time.

A little warning light went off in my head. “Why does Arlene think she can’t read? What have I done wrong?” I decided that the best option was to put a pause on our reading for school, pray, and ask God to intervene. I am quite happy to report that He did- in a big way!

We had used Siegfried Engelmann’s Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for phonics. While it had worked extremely well with Arlene’s older sister, it had obviously not worked as well for Arlene. There is nothing wrong with the book, and given the chance I would use it with her again, but with more thought, and probably with some phonics games thrown in as well. Arlene has always been what I term a “gross-motor-skills-junkie.” Let me explain. Arlene learned how to walk the week she turned one. Then about a week later she was running. With each gross motor skill she had tackled, she learned it and learned quickly. She gets all of this coordination from her Daddy, not from me! The second time I ever took the girls roller skating, Arlene (only a 5-year-old at the time) let go of the wall and started skating little circles in the middle of the rink. (You know, the middle where no one ever goes until it’s time for the limbo? That was her territory.) 

So, when it came to moving, she had it down pat, but fine-motor skills were not her thing. That was the area where her older sister excelled. I believe this difference in their giftings stood out in Arlene’s mind in a way that was not beneficial. So even though I had not seen any warning signs for dyslexia or processing disorders, I started to doubt how well Arlene was reading simply because she didn’t think it was going well. 

Arlene was feeling rather down, and frustrated. I wasn’t doing much better myself. 

In steps God. 

Because the girls had been bugging me to take them back to the library, I loaded them into the mini-van and away we went. I told them we weren’t getting any books for school, but that they could pick out a few books just for fun. They discovered the area in the adult section where all the Garfield books are kept. (741.5 D in case you’re interested!)

Now to the fun part. The girls knew that Garfield is funny because of the punch line. Maybe they didn’t understand the term, but they knew it was the last box in the comic strip that made you laugh. So my little girls, ages 11 and 9, spent as much time as possible in their bedroom reading Garfield books. There are over 100 titles now, but I think they started with three books. After a while, Arlene’s older sister Emily got tired of reading them all out loud, or maybe she just got tired of sharing . . . either way, Arlene was left on her own with the Garfield books, and a desire to know why each strip was funny.

In steps self-motivation. (You know that input from God that assures us we can do it? That is what self-motivation really is.) Arlene put that same determination she used when learning how to roller-skate years earlier into learning how to read the punch line. She wanted to be able to laugh (they are called funnies)! As Arlene did her own struggling with Garfield, an amazing thing happened, she gained confidence and fluency in her reading. Facing the struggle and working through it turned it from a mountain into a molehill. Then she couldn’t wait to read the comic strips to me. What a change, from struggle, drudgery, and sometimes heartache, to joy!

*Update* Today Arlene is almost 15, and she reads with the best of them. This year's literature selections have included Pride And Prejudice, Frankenstein, Strange Case of Dr Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Tale of Two Cities. Those are not titles a struggling reader would tackle. Those are books Arlene can read because God showed up and turned what used to be a struggle into a joy!

See you tomorrow for another peek at Real Life Homeschool @ Home Sweet Life!


Discover real life in other homeschools 

with the Schoolhouse Review Crew 

bloggers! Join the blog hop to read 

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If it's too overwhelming to read them all, here are some of our favorites:

Every Bed of Roses

Ben and Me 

Footprints in the Butter

Mountain of Grace Homeschooling

Raventhreads 

Counting Our Blessings 

Homeschooling for His Glory

Ozark Ramblings

Chestnut Grove Academy

Only Passionate Curiosity

Farm Fresh Adventures

He is Risen!

Week 12 - The Family Room + DVDs

 I was SO happy to see that Week Twelve's challenge from Michele was to clean and declutter our Family Room + DVDs. 

We don't have a family room, and the living room is still looking pretty good from week 8! We do have the front room, which is the go-between for the rest of the house. Thankfully it got cleaned when I did bookshelf #4 in week 10. The only thing that really still needs done in here is the ceiling fan, but I'm in the middle of a sewing project at the small table right underneath it, so it needs to wait until next week to get cleaned.


The other part of the weekly challenge was to go through our DVDs. This is a task Kurt has been working on for a while. He puts them on our home cloud storage, so the girls and I can access them through our apple tv, then they get stored in a sturdy tote. The only discs that reside in the living room are in our small Blu-ray collection, or movies we are currently reviewing or using for school. With the extra work that always appears when its time to go to our homeschool convention (last weekend,) I was happy for an easy week. Perhaps I'll even get a chance to work on the Pictures and Scrapbooks challenge for week 13 this weekend... right after I finish that sewing project - LOL!

Don't feel bad if you're not getting everything cleaned and decluttered every week, the goal is a cleaner home in 34 weeks. Keep taking bite-sized steps towards your goals. That's the only way we will get there. 

I hope you have a blessed Easter! He is Risen Indeed!

Thankful Thursdays - 4/2/15 - Reminders of Our Past

Last Week was our state's Homeschool Convention. While in the Capitol City of Indianapolis, Kurt and I took a small detour one afternoon to see one of the buildings downtown. In case you're wondering, yes, we did go to see the giant NCAA bracket on the side of the JW Marriott hotel. 

The curious thing is, even though the hotel is fairly new, it is nestled in between several historic sites, including being caddy-corner from our Statehouse, which is the fourth Statehouse in Indiana's history. The current Statehouse was built in 1888. The original capitol of Indiana, founded in 1816, was Corydon, but in 1821, Indianapolis was platted and construction of a new state capitol, in the middle of the state, by the banks of the White River, began. By 1825, only nine years after Indiana officially became a state, the capitol was moved to Indianapolis.

I've been to the Statehouse a few time over the years, I've lived my whole life in central Indiana, yet I noticed something this time I had not seen before. Something that made me thankful. On the south side of the Statehouse there resides a historical plaque that recounts part of Abraham Lincoln's address as he travelled through Indianapolis in February of 1861 on his way to assume the Presidency. Regardless of your viewpoint on Lincoln's involvement in the Civil War, or the War Between the States, depending on where you were raised, his words are still true today.

"I appeal to you to constantly bear in mind that not with Politicians, not with Presidents, not with Office Seekers, but with you is the question: Shall the Union and shall the liberties of this Country be preserved to the latest generation."

As I had just spent two long days contemplating what to teach, and how to teach it, to our girls for the rest of their High School years, this thought made me pause and reflect. In case you haven't heard, our state is in the spotlight for a recently passed law that echoes a Federal law guaranteeing the free exercise of religion, as the US Constitution guarantees in the First amendment "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,..." 

I was pausing to be reminded that the free exercise of my religion (my relationship with Jesus Christ) could not be dictated by the State or Federal government. I am thankful to live in a land where I can worship God freely. Yet, more importantly, I was thankful to be reminded that even if the laws of our State or Nation are someday changed, the liberty to worship is actually a God-Given right, not a government-given right.

I was thankful for a historic plaque. A plaque whose original intent was probably to mark an event that immediately preceded the Civil War, but whose purpose that day was to remind me of Christ. In my past, I had been a slave to sin, but Christ freed me. This one plaque, set in a chunk of Indiana limestone, was a reminder not only of our State's past and future, but of my own past and future.

Look around you, God places reminders all around us, to point us to HIS plans for our future!

Greek Morphemes Lessons (It's NOT Greek to ME!) - A Crew Review

If you have a High School aged student, you may be wondering how to prepare them for standardized testing. One way often emphasized is to teach word roots. While word roots are valuable, learning prefixes and suffixes are vitally important too. Emily and I have been reviewing Greek Morphemes Lessons (It’s NOT Greek to Me!) from Ready to Teach for the Schoolhouse Review Crew for the past seven weeks. Besides being an easy-to-use, open-and-go curriculum, I’ve learned that you don’t have to wait until High School for your students to benefit from this program.

The basic Greek Morphemes set includes an Instructor’s Manual, with flash drive, and a consumable Student book. (The Instructor’s book used to come with a CD, but Ready to Teach has realized many people are purchasing laptops without internal CD players, so thus, the change to a flash drive.)

This program is thorough, yet still so simple to use. The Instructor’s guide gives you a blueprint of the different suggested ways to implement this program. The three basic plans are: first - in a classroom setting, where the instructor uses the an overhead projector, or the enclosed powerpoint slides to teach the morphemes (word parts) to a group all at once, then the student do their assignments independently. The second plan involves the parent and student working together through the powerpoint slides on the computer, then the student working on the assignments, with Mom or Dad helping as needed and grading the tests. The third plan works well for older students (like our Emily - almost 17.)  In this third option, the student uses the flash drive to watch the power point lessons, then works independently on their assignments each week. This option really only requires the parent/ teacher to be available for the weekly tests and to help sparingly as needed. 

Watching how easily Emily learned how to do what was asked of her in each assignment, I realized that these lessons could easily be used with younger students. If you have a Middle School aged student who has learned to work at least semi-independently, you could use the second option and give them a head start on understanding these word pieces that are so prevalent in the reading they will likely be doing in High School.

For classroom settings (or your local co-op) the Instructor’s Manual has more than you should ever need, and is divided into sections for easy navigation. The first section is short, but sweet, and includes the how-to’s on getting started, plus bulletin board ideas. The second part includes the lessons and answers your students should be working to find. The third section includes transparency masters, which are helpful for school settings where technology is not readily available. The fourth section includes review activities to help your student prepare for the tests, and the fifth section is the tests and answer keys. This softcover book also includes pre-made review cards for the teacher so you can keep up with what your students are learning.

The student book includes pages for recording what is learned in each lesson, as well as exercises that challenge them to put those new morphemes right to work. In the back is a section of cardstock designed to be transformed into review cards by the student. Emily found it easiest to cut these cards apart using our scrapbooking paper cutter so the edges all stayed straight.

From Emily:

Greek Morphimes is a well written, easy-to-follow course on understanding greek roots, prefixes and endings in the words we use every day. The book comes with easy to tear out cards for memorization and a flash drive of lessons. Each lesson begins with a slideshow of the word definitions and an explanation of the lesson sections for the week. The definitions are written down in the workbook along with the other assignments, which include defining vocabulary words, using them in explanatory sentences and having the student make up new words of their own. Each of the lessons (save the first) add the pieces from previous lessons in their vocabulary words. The lessons are each followed by a test of that week’s definitions, all on the same flash drive. A glossary can be found at the end of the workbook with all of the definitions from the twelve lessons. It has made finding parts of words for definitions much easier for me, and all I needed besides the book and cards was scissors or a paper cutter for the cards and a dictionary.

Make 'Em Laugh

This Charmed Life

I was reminded again today of what a blessed life I lead. Those who don't know Christ might call it a "charmed" life, but I prefer to call it what it is - blessed! I'm not a pencil pusher, nor do I have to contend with rush-hour traffic every day. For the most part, I get to set my own schedule at work, and the girls don't have to catch a bus at 7 a.m.

This home educating life isn't any easier than the next life, in fact, at times, it may be more difficult, but I would not change it for anything! I am SO thankful God has called us to this life. This life with more intangibles than I could ever list, and more blessings than a million dollars could ever hope to buy. This life where I love my friends and family who encourage me daily. This life where my children help with the housework, where my husband willingly goes to work to provide for us, this life where I even have time to occasionally read a book.

This life I lead is blessed. Thank you Jesus for my life, and thank you friends for being a part of it!