Change is hard, but it's also necessary. Since the pandemic, I've been doing a lot of self-reflection and focusing on personal development. I am a product of the public school system, and I had always believed it was what we should do, how it's done.
I know how that sounds. It's cringeworthy. But for a long time, I felt that homeschool came from a place of entitlement and privilege. After all, not all families can homeschool.
But this year that's changed. It started with the little things. My son waking up every morning complaining with an angry, "I hate school! I'm not going to school!" It zapped my energy. I'd thought it was just the pandemic. His class was the hardest hit with learning loss. Halfway through kindergarden, schools shut down, and it wasn't until March 2021 that in-person schooling returned (a hybrid half in-person schedule). Those are the years when a child learns to read. I thought his complaints would go away as he acclimated to the full day schedule in second grade, then in third, but that never happened.
When the district started exploring the balanced calendar (aka year round schooling), I thought angrily to myself, We could always homeschool.
When he brought home a letter that said the school didn't think he'd be reading at grade level by the end of the school year, I thought, We could always homeschool.
Little things like that added up, until I realized that this is what I had wanted all along and that home based instruction was the best path for our family.
For years I had been saying how I wanted to learn alongside him during his school years. But what I had thought of as doing homework together was really being a homeschool mom.
The benefits kept adding up. He could learn at his own pace. Unlike remote learning (when I didn't have a clue what I was doing), I could choose curriculum that worked for him; I could be his teacher.
I could get him "caught up" with reading, which really meant fnding and filling in the holes in his reading foundation.
We could learn together.
As the school year ends, our homeschool journey begins, and I'm excited to share that with you here.
Want to learn more about how to help your child read? One of the biggest struggles I see parents of young readers face is worrying if their child will ever learn to read. That’s why I created a free guide full of mistakes parents make with struggling readers and how to fix them. It’s called, The 5 Biggest Mistakes Parents Make with Their Struggling Reader: https://thereadersdropinn.ck.page/43630d5646. (Again, it’s totally free!)
Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week.