I knew I wanted to home school my children the very moment Noah was born. I knew I didn't want him to leave my sight for one second. Five children later and my fifth year of homeschooling. That sentiment has changed a little bit. Sometimes I need those sweet seconds of alone time. That being said, most days I still feel the same way. Imagining my kids leaving every day for eight hours and missing out on all the wonderful things I get to see them accomplish each day, would be sad for me. When Daniel and I began homeschooling our son Noah, it was pretty easy. I thought this is easy, no problem. Noah was hitting all his milestones, reading early. He caught onto math concepts quickly and really seemed to enjoy learning. I put in a leapfrog video and the next day he was remembering every sound and letter that little cartoon frog taught him. I automatically thought each child would seamlessly do the same. I mean I obviously had mad teaching skills, right? Then my second child was approaching the pre-kinder age, the age to introduce letter and numbers. And all this time he had been exposed to a lot of learning with Noah's curriculum. And my second born was a bright kid. He was hard working, intuitive, strong, social and every bit ready to begin learning. We began with the leap frog videos and flash cards. Candy incentives to remember the sounds of the alphabet. And as hard as he tried and as hard he would work, he seemed unable to retain anything I was teaching him. Here is an excerpt from my blog back in April 2010
April 7, 2010
This is us doing "How To Teach your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons", we have
done this lesson at least twice and I had been working with him for about 10
minutes before I started recording him. The "t" sound was our new sound and he
could not get it. We had gone over the "t" sound using other exercises to help
him. He has done this with every letter we have learned. The other sounds have
been drilled into him for the last few months. But we are still on lesson 9
after three months and with each new day is a huge review on sounds. He did
finally get it the last time we went through it, we will see how tomorrow goes.
He is actually extremely good at recognizing shapes, colors and he can memorize
verses well. He is very good at figuring things out, like tying knots, riding
his bike, doing things with the animals. Telling a story back to me and
recognizing letters and numbers seems to be very difficult.
Seven months into the school year and three months working on a phonics book that had taught my eldest son to read, and we were no where near knowing the differences between a letter and a number. In the above excerpt, I had videoed Graham trying to recognize the letter T and tell me its sound. After three months of working on this one letter intently, every day, he could not remember it. I knew then that this was a child who needed to learn differently. I had absolutely no idea how to help him. Every piece of curriculum I found was teaching a child how to read with the exact same method. Look at it, repeat it and Memorize, memorize, memorize.
Two months later I wrote this about Graham's learning:
June 17, 2010
I have stopped working with Graham on schooling, other than a few special
projects and a little un-schooling. This has seemed to relieve some of the
pressure and is allowing him to shine. Happily he is now copying the letters
that are in his name and working on their order. He has memorized his birthday
and today, I brought him into a math lesson with Noah. We were doing weight
measuring and estimating weights of items found in our house with small blocks.
We measured four objects and tracked on paper how many blocks each item would
weigh. We first guessed how many blocks we thought it would weigh and then
recorded the actual weight. We then used our data to see which object we
collected weighed the most and which object weighed the least. To my delight,
Graham was the best estimator! He could easily guess just by feeling the objects
in his hands and looking at them how many blocks he would need. He also
remembered which item weighed the least! He was very proud of himself that he
knew something Noah did not. Noah is very factual and only used the numbers to
make educated guesses, Graham relied on his very developed common sense to
figure it out; making him a much better estimator!
I knew that Graham was extremely bright, the problem wasn't him. The problem was me and the lack of curriculum that could somehow get him to recognize and memorize a letter. By the end of Kindergarten we had painfully gotten through most letters, not all, and numbers 1-10. He could not count in the teens and couldn't find the pattern or rhythm of counting past that. When he began to sound out a word like cat. He would say each sound C-A-T and then say TAC. Whatever letter sound the word ended in, that is what he repeated back to begin the word with. DOG was GOD and HAT was TAH. He hated school. So we quit doing school for a while. He would check out books at the library and studied the pictures and we would read only what he was interested in and then he would draw picture stories to share his thoughts. He'd do some copy work off the board. That was painfully slow and frustrating because he couldn't keep his place and tended to write all over the page. We tried fun things like finding pictures and circling groups of things. That also became difficult because he would circle the objects all over the page in no order and would lose his place. I was beyond frustrated and scared. I knew how talented and smart my child was. But how could I get him to learn these basic concepts?
I had been researching dyslexia for about a year online. Most of the tests were for children who were reading with difficulty. There were not a lot of early intervention tests available. I tried the public school system for some type of test that they give children in school who are having difficulty. They don't test for the problems I was encountering until the 3rd grade! I then went to my pediatrician who sent me to an occupational therapist.
July 23, 2011, he was tested for ADD, ADHD, Autism, Dylsexia, SI and every other abbreviation known to man. Their conclusion: impairments in occular motor tasks. trouble with bilateral coordination (jumping jacks, crossing the midline, crawling) and sensory processing. Basically he was unable to track things visually from left to right. His eyes literally jumped when tracking an object going to left to right. Meaning, his brain re-set when he crossed the midline of his body. This explained why reading was so difficult. We read from left to right and once his brain recognized something on the left, it had to regroup and then figure out what was on the right of the page. Trying to put those two things together was extremely difficult and didn't come naturally for him. Although this was a foreign concept to me and would take another year to really understand what this diagnoses meant. I finally felt we were getting somewhere.
Until I started looking for curriculum. How do I begin teaching this child to read? Even with a hearty diagnosis, I didn't have a clue as to how to begin this daunting task. And again, if he had been in public school this might have been overlooked until the third or fourth grade. So at least I was a little ahead of the game. Graham was starting first grade unable to read, write or count past 10. I needed a plan.
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