Homeschool success story!

I am so happy for you and your son!!! I also started homeschooling my son this past fall. He has had quite a struggle in public and private school with reading and writing. I find my son trying to read the Harry Potter books often. He has them all and I’ve read them to him. He also has the books on tape so sometimes he will listen and try to follow along.

In November we found out that he has developmental vision delays and he is currently in his fourth month of vision therapy. His reading and writing have advanced about two years since we started homeschooling. Though we have a long way to go, I think I am finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
He is so much happier and has come further this year than in the last few.

Thank you for sharing your success story and good luck to you both!!

Gina

Congratulations!!! When I hear people having to struggle and fight, and the child is depressed and hates school…I just think to myself…TAKE THEM OUT! Some children just need to have the time pressure removed to overcome the stress imposed at school so that they can relax and begin to learn at a comfortable pace. So much done at school is just filler anyway. I’d much rather concentrate on the basics until a child is confident in them. The moment the school tries to crush my child’s spirit, she’ll be out, too. I’m preparing, just in case!

Janis

Good luck!!

Thanks for sharing this great story. You’re so right that sometimes they need to time to work through things on their own, and other times they need very direct instruction. One of homeschooling’s big advantages is that you and your child are free to use whatever approach, or combination of approaches, works for you. Happy homeschooling!

Jean

Do, please, try to teach him that decoding.

I’m so glad to hear that things are working out well for you too! I had heard so many good things about homeschooling - but I was terrified at first. (I’m still working on the in-laws. My father in-law tries to give my son pop quizzes every time he sees him to make sure he’s learning something! :o)

But, I now believe that homeschooling was the best thing we ever did for my son.

-Ana

Do I have too????? He’s doing so well without it! hmmm….except for spelling…and pronouncing unfamiliar names…(You know, his dad (PhD) can’t decode very well either - you should hear his pronounciation of unfamiliar names - but he reads and writes for a living.) Can’t we just skip it? My son is reading at grade level (4) and above. Please explain to me why it’s necessary because it will take better tutoring than I can give him - he just doesn’t hear the sound segments or even get that there actually are sound segments.

-Ana

Well, there comes a point (and for most kids it comes between Grades 4 and 6, so you may see it soon) where *most* of the words are unfamiliar — the reading vocabulary goes beyond the thousand or two thousand words of a kid’s common speaking vocabulary.
Then there’s the issue of independence — in homeschooling and even regular school, you can note the word and ask mom how to pronounce it later — but that’s a difficult option if you go away to college, or on the job.
And spelling is a good skill to have both for college and on the job.

Decoding really is useful, we promise.

As far as hearing those separate sounds and parts, well, you *teach* them. Some kids pick up on this faster and some more slowly, but you don’t quit teaching any other subject because he takes a few tries to get it, do you?? You say the sound, print the letter(s), say the sound again, have him print the letter and have him say the sound over ten times or so, then you give a list of ten or twenty words he knows that start with that sound; then you give him, orally or in pictures, twenty other words with varied beginning sounds and have him sort them as to whether they start with today’s sound or not; then you have him spell simple three-letter words starting with today’s target sound. You repeat for ending sounds, then middle sounds of two-syllable words. In a few months you have covered all 45 sounds in English and he is spelling a lot more confidently and reading more independently.

Thanks for asking… it is your kid and your decision, but let me share my experience.

In the fifteen years I spent teaching middle and high schoolers, I taught many who were paying the price for that kind of thinking. They used their visual strengths and intellect and that can work really well — but they started stalling out at about the fourth or fifth grade reading level. The words just get longer and meanings more subtle. THey can often still fake it — but I had the advantage of working 1:1 and could uncover the potholes in their comprehension. THey really enjoyed reading a lot more (the good writers don’t use the most predictable words) — and it’s what made the difference between being able to write coherently with something approaching a grade level vocabulary, and being very frustrated when they were asked to.

I can understand your reluctance to trying to retrain his whole way of processing to hear the sounds— it can be like learning to be a musician or dancer…except you don’t like it and you’re not good at it! Let me suggest something like “Word Workshop” which is a book that focus on the longer words and has lots of effective strategies for decoding them that aren’t based on sounding the words out from beginning to end. (Actually, the strategies involve starting at the end and working back.) You can figure out the gist of it from the website.

Before I taught at New Community, I thought as you do — that these kids are bright and will do fine. Well, you never know what would have happened with any kid, but after a couple of years I realized that yes, they might have been “fine” — but by diving in and tackling hte reading problem intensively, they just had so many more options.

My older son also had trouble even recognizing the individual sounds in words, so we worked on phonemic awareness first, then went on to decoding. Initially decoding, blending sounds, etc. was hard for him, but at some point we got over the hurdle and decoding became a usefull skill for him to use as needed. For him, the immediate benefit of decoding was learning to read, but I see him use his decoding skill in lots of ways besides just reading and spelling. Being accustomed to breaking words down into pieces makes it easier to identify the difference between words like meteoroid and meteorite, and thus easier to get a handle on science vocabulary. Attention to details in words also makes it easier for him to get a handle on grammar.

Of course people can get by, and in fact do quite well, without ever learning to decode. OTOH, people who do know how to decode do so ALL the time, without really even being aware of it. It’s simply a tool that makes a lot of tasks much easier to do, and I think it’s well worth the time and effort.

Jean

My son has a very big vocabulary, so I guess that’s been helping him a lot. But I forgot about scientific terms that he’s not familiar with. I can see those words being a problem. Also, I went to the web-site of the program Sue suggested. I had my son read some of the words on the ‘method’ page and he really struggled (but I was impressed that he tried his best to segment the sounds). Then he looked at words that were high-lighted using their method and he got them right away (saying - ‘wow, that makes it way easier’). So, there’s one book and CD we’ll be getting.

Still, I despair of him ever getting all the short vowel sounds straight. But - don’t worry- after the pep talks, we won’t give up! :o)

-Ana

You’ve heard the positive pep talks and taken us to heart; I’m very glad.

If you run into difficulties or have questions, you now know that asking on this board will get you all sorts of help, maybe more than you can use; also feel free to email me in person for down-to-earth lesson guidelines.

Now for the horror story of what happens if you don’t learn phonics — look at my post on “Teaching Reading” titled “another victim of memorization”.