From Donna C:  Six times a year, I plan to have a guest columnist. For my first guest this year, the following is from Donna, one of the members of the HOO Message Board.

When I began home schooling, I put myself in a cramped proverbial box feeling like I had to duplicate the “real” school schedule and classroom setting in my home. Although this is not wrong, to want a well-organized and scheduled classroom environment, it might not be the best choice for your child or yourself.

It was challenging to break free from the box I thought was ideal for educating my child. My daughter’s learning style is most conducive to moving, touching and doing school rather than sitting and listening. I prefer to have a pile of nice, neatly completed and corrected workbook pages at the end of the day, but my daughter likes to learn with manipulatives and messes.

Let’s set our workbooks aside for an afternoon and go into the kitchen to experience school. Doubling a recipe is great exercise for practical understanding of fractions and simple addition or multiplication if you dare to triple a batch of brownies. One particular recipe we tried called for alternating pouring the milk and flour to make the batter of the blueberry buckle. It occurred to me that my daughter was learning new vocabulary while cooking. Spending time in the kitchen, a student can learn reading, math, following directions, vocabulary, nutritional content of foods and history.

During the summer, my daughter was learning about graphing from her online curriculum. Enthusiastically, she got out markers and rulers and made all sorts of pie and bar graphs. It was her idea to go out and collected coniferous and deciduous tree samples. We sat up in the tree house with our mini microscope and our notebook to record our data. It was so refreshing to compare and contrast these aspects in nature rather than looking at them online or in a textbook. It’s true this took more time than the traditional workbook to learn about graphing and science, however I suspect it is a lesson that instilled a deeper love for the scientific process.

It’s hard for me to admit, but my daughter hates to write. Due to her language processing disorder, putting her thoughts to the page in written language it is like torture to her. But if I announce we are going to observe a particular aspect in nature, she will proceed wholeheartedly to write about anything we see. Later, we take her notebook and clean up the writing. I gently help her to fix her spelling and combine some of her sentence fragments to make one or two good sentences to go along with the drawings she made.

I’m not saying we can throw out the workbooks and online lessons. What I’m suggesting is to break up the days of formal lessons with something that will stick with your child. Many children need to learn in a hands-on manner to get the facts into the long term memory. For my daughter if we don’t find a way to get the information to the long-term memory, it’s like bouncing rubber balls off a brick wall. The information scatters and almost none of it will be retained.

I introduced the concept of division this week. I started with a big Hershey bar. Okay, that might be because I really like chocolate but I knew it would hold her attention. We played on the white board for a while drawing stick figures and pieces of the Hershey bar until I was certain that she understood this abstract idea. I know at first she won’t be able to complete her division problems in her workbook but she does understand it.

My last thought is to not be afraid to set something aside. If a concept like multiplication or telling time is not clicking with your child’s understanding then don’t be afraid to wait.

We had to back off from reading to make progress. We played games and read aloud to her everyday. For months I did not ask her to read more than a sentence or phrase. Yes, it was scary. I prayed and felt this was wisdom from the Lord but I was wondering if she would get farther behind.

Then without warning, she picked up a Junie B Jones chapter book and said she wanted to try to read it. I questioned her choice and she told me it just sounded like fun. I had to hide my enthusiasm so as not to scare her away from the idea. A week later she finished her first chapter book! She proclaimed it was like watching a funny movie in her head. Still trying to mask my excitement, I asked her what she did if she didn’t know a word. She said she read the words around it for clues. I could no longer hold in my excitement. I almost yelled, “That’s what you’ve been learning in your reading curriculum!” We had set it aside but she didn’t forget. She was ready to read and she was having fun doing it.

I hope I’ve challenged you to think outside the box of a regular classroom experience for your home-schooled student. Pray about creative ways to present a new or troublesome concept to your child. Hide those workbooks once in a while. I hope your school year is full of the pleasure of discovering the joy of learning.

 Although relatively new to the home schooling experience, Donna Crowley facilitates the education of her SLD daughter with unconventional, creative methods to ultimately instill the love of learning for a lifetime. Donna has also personally overcome learning disabilities and strives to encourage parents of LD children to never stop trying to bring their children to their full potential. Donna lives with her husband of 17 years and two daughters in a rural farming community in Michigan.

Donna Conner lives in Fort Worth, TX with her husband, Glenn, their son, Mike, and their dog, Lucia. Donna and Glenn have been homeschooling their son since the beginning of his education. Mike completes his homeschooling this year. Donna is an artist and has always enjoyed writing. She wrote Homeschooling Only One five years ago, after discovering that there were many other families homeschooling only one child. Her website is devoted to those with only one student in their homeschool, with listings of online resources. You can visit her website at  http://donnac.com and read her blog at: http://www.homeschoolblogger.com/DonnaC

copyright © 2008 Donna Conner ~~ All rights reserved. Content may not be reproduced in any form without written permission of author, except in the case of brief passages embodied in critical reviews and articles where the title and author are listed.