Thursday, May 8, 2014

The Truth About Reading

The moments I have wanted and dreaded at the same time have happen for me the last few months.  Tim and I took a leap of faith and decided to pull our kids out of their small Christian school and homeschool.  I thought it was going to tear the world I expected to have apart, but it hasn't.  Keep in mind this is the first time in 5 years I have not been pregnant and breastfeed and being a mom to several children.  I am just breastfeeding right now. 

I mentioned in a previous post that homeschooling was never something I planned for myself.  My husband did a lot of research on homeschooling, but I always thought my kids would do just fine in public school.  Then I had kids.  I knew right away that I did not want my sweet little five year old to be put in a class of seventeen to twenty kids to figure life out.  He was very quiet and we even waited until he was six to consider any kind of school.  When we really had to decide something we picked a small private school and were blessed with some help paying for it.  Joel went to school and opened up a lot socially, but I still questioned if we had picked the right place for him.  It was the best school we could find, but by second grade he really was not learning a whole lot. 

People started to make faces at me when they realized my son could barely read a sentence in five minutes and math was even worse.  We worked on phonetics every summer and simple math to keep him on track, but school seemed to erase all of our work.  I felt depressed, but also sad because I did not want to see my child struggle in school the way that I had.  So there you go, Tim was right. 

We did not make it through second grade.  I have been working on second grade with my son and first grade with my daughter.  My daughter would probably do well in any school in town, she just has that kind of personality, but my son is different.  Not a bad different and certainly not dumb.  The boy can figure out all kinds of things if he wants to.  As mom I can teach at all levels, but it is also important to me to help my son feel like he is not behind.  Plenty of kids don't really start reading until later ages, one just doesn't hear about it.  Maybe one hears, X percent of the population is illiterate.  Why is that the case?  How did this happen?  There are so many factors that go into reading.  If I had one kid I would blame myself so much more if he was like my first son, but I have a daughter who reads everything she can get her hands on.  Our home is filled with books.  I read to my children, so does my spouse, and grandparents.  These kids know that reading is fun and important.

A friend looked at me one day and said, "The nice thing about homeschool is that he doesn't have to read yet.  Most kids pick up reading when they want too."  I remember thinking, but are they being hassled like me about my child not reading?  Have a failed completely?.. and then it hit me.  She is right.  We can read history and science together.  We can focus on grammar and talking about stories.  We can do so much to make books still important, at a level beyond nursery school, and really get to know why reading is worth it. 

When I learned to read I was placed in the dumb group called the sparrows or something like that.  We knew we were dumb because while all the other kids had long chapter books, we had baby books to look at.  Let's face it, maybe I had some trouble reading, but I knew what a real book looked like.  I never really grew into a person who loves to read.  I can say now that I like to read, but I love to write much more.  My husband tells me I must like writing because there was less pressure on me to write.  I can say at younger ages that is probably true. 

So as I sit with my kids and feel like hopefully they are actually learning, I realize they are getting a lot more help than most kids are.  If my son was in school, reading at his level, he might slip through the cracks, but I am not going to let that happen to him.  I am more aware of where he is at and I am able to be alright with that.  As a homeschool mom my friend is right, he doesn't have to read yet.  As
I leave insisting on reading alone I have seen a lot more improvement.  My little boy is now interested in books, he wants to have a chance to read to me, and even if every word is not perfect he can get through a sentence in less time than before. 

I can give him a chance to practice and we will get there.  Everyone tells me that by twelve, homeschool kids usually can read.  I would not say my son cannot read at this point, but we do have more work to do.  In just a few months there has been a lot of progress.  Sometimes we are the obstacles in our children's progress.  Just because a system tell you that one should read by five years old doesn't mean that kids wake up one day reading.  It is our job to nurture a skill, not beat it out of kid.  Don't feel bad if you are in my situation.  I used to feel ashamed like I had missed one to many library story times or something, but just as kids walk at different ages, they also read at different ages too.  I would rather have a son who starts reading at twelve and loves it for life than a kid of reads at five and hates it.

No comments:

Post a Comment