Am I holding her back?

At one time or another, I believe most parents worry about whether their child is receiving an adequate education. 

Parents of children who attend public schools wonder if their child would be better off in a private school that just isn't in the budget right now; parents of private-schooled children wonder if their child should have gone to the super-elite private school that denied their application. 

As parents, we just want our children to have the best education and best opportunities possible. This worry never bothered me so much as when we embarked on the journey of home-schooling.

I recently went through a phase of worrying almost constantly whether I had made the right decision in pulling my daughter out of public school. 

I work full time as a nurse (12 hour shifts, 3 days a week--and lately have been putting in overtime), so we home-school on my days off. I work the midnight shift, so when I get home, I go to bed for a few hours. Sometimes munchkin wakes up and turns on the TV before I get up. This creates a problem because she doesn't work as well afterwards. She is more argumentative, and more restless. She wants to do the bare minimum and then go back to TV, or playing with her toys. 

Occasionally, I let her. I tell myself: "We will make it up tomorrow" or "The baby is fussy, and neither of us can concentrate on school work right now." Most of the time, we do make it up the next day, or the one after that...occasionally it is a week or two before I feel that we are caught back up. 

It is during these times that the devil sits on my shoulder and tells me that I am a failure. And I listen to him. I begin to beat myself up, wonder if she needs to be back in school, wonder if I am holding her back by not doing school 5 days a week...

And then, one night she crawls into my lap with a National Geographic Kids reader about Polar Bears and begins to read to me. She sounds out words she doesn't know, and uses the pictures to help her guess at the words she cannot sound out yet. She surprises me with the speed she is able to read, and her ability to recognize a word (she previously didn't know) when it shows up again. I realize at this point that I am doing the right thing, she is learning and is reading at grade level as she should be. It's still not going to be easy; things worth doing rarely are. But for now, I can flick that old devil off my shoulder and be content in knowing that I am doing what is best for my family.

Proverbs 22:6
Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

Homeschool mamas, do you ever feel this way? How do you remind yourself that you are doing ok?

Post-It Note Clue Hunt

When I decided to begin this adventure of home-schooling, I knew there would be days when I didn't feel like doing "normal" school work, and days when Munchkin wouldn't feel like it either. That is the beauty of home-school...if you don't want to do school on Monday, you can add it back in on Saturday, or do a little extra each day to make up the difference. When we do fun activities, it gets Munchkin excited about learning, and we wind up way ahead of the game. (When this happens, we normally do not take days off, but save our days off for when life gets in the way or when we want to do something different on a "school day."

One such activity that Munchkin has really enjoyed is the Post-It Note clue hunt. It takes a bit of prep work, but it is definitely worth it. I wrote all of my clues on Post-Its and hid them around the house...each one leading to the next.

I used sight words and words that could be easily sounded out so that she could follow the clues with minimal help from me. This clue said "Dad is the man to see."

So she figured out that she had to get her next clue from Dad.

The "Look on the flag" clue led her to this one. She is doing first grade work this year and still learning to read, so we were focusing on short vowels and sight words. 

"Look under your bed"

She gave me the last clue each time she found a new one so that she didn't get mixed up. All together, she had to read about 25 sentences to get to her prize at the end.

We even took the game outside!

"Look in the back of the big red truck"

Munchkin loved her prize. This was something we had already planned to buy her, not a prize just for this game. She enjoys the game whether she is playing for a big prize or a dollar store prize...or even just a hunt to find a stuffed animal she already owns.

Enjoying her bean bag chair!

Sometimes she even gets to sit in her chair while we do lessons or read together. Also, we have used this game for math facts as well. To do that one, I wrote a problem on the first sticky note, then the answer on another...and a new problem on the back of the answer to the first one. She was only doing math facts up to 10 when we did that hunt, so I used 3 different colors of sticky notes and wrote "change to green" etc when the next answer was going to be on a different color. (So we did all pink, then all green, then all blue.) Again we had about 25-30 sticky note problems.

Hope you enjoyed this learning activity. Check out my Link Parties page for a list of all the parties I link to each week.