I never planned to be a stay at home mom and certainly not a home school mom, but here I am and I must say I do enjoy the process. Okay, I don’t enjoy it everyday. Mostly, I am thankful that I found HomeWorks, which is a parent partnership with the Cheney school district. In the beginning I was not brave enough to have been on my own. Now my first grade daughter home schools a majority of the time at home and has access to several enrichment and complimentary classes through the school district as well. Each class is usually no more than 10 students and have multi-level grades in each class. Classes like gymnastics, yoga, art, sewing, math, space, motion, drama, dance, and so much more.
My journey began when my three year old daughter couldn’t recognize letters separately than numbers. No problem – kids learn at different levels, right? Age four we signed her up for preschool and the teachers were happy, happy, no worries, she’s doing great. What? She still cannot identify any letters. Age five (since we have a late birthday we were not eligible for kindergarten) we signed her up for a pre-K class, where she did learn M and A. So when it came time to look into Kindergartens we looked first at private options and I began an almost militant process of drilling the alphabet into my child. Fear had taken ahold of every part of me. Then I found HomeWorks and signed up. It was still touch and go at the beginning of Kindergarten, when my now six year old daughter could only identify 18 uppercase letters while my three year old son could identify all 26. At some point I realized that she could understand letters in words. After three years of drilling letters individually in every form possible, I learned that my daughter can only see letter when they are being used as they were intended. Now that we are 1/3 of the way into the first grade school year, imagine my surprise when I realized that my daughter can understand the concept of reading when I give her little books instead of drilling her on simple words individually. What was I thinking?
We are not out of the woods yet, but we will get there together and celebrate each accomplishment as it comes. While taking an art class we have identified a possible visual perception (possibly verbal perception) disorder and are trudging through the process that brings and learning as much as we can. One day at a time, one step at a time, a deep breathe and a smile. Love and happiness…patience, patience, patience!
Charma Abendroth