Homeschool Trial
I am not even sure where to start with this one. To be able to share where we are, I first have to go back a bit. I cannot sugar coat it, the pandemic had certainly made life tough on so many, including us. The disruption had also effected the girls a lot.
When I first got over the initial shock and fear of them not being at school I have to admit I was looking forward to homeschooling.
Mary Poppins
At the start I researched, created a fun and educational process for us to follow, created rewards to break up the day and to keep them motivated and I started out with a very Mary Poppins esque manner. And do you know what? It was great, I loved it, they loved it and yes it was a challenge keeping them all interested and ensuring I got around to helping all of them even though they are at different stages of their learning journeys and it was fun!
The schools also got over the initial shock and introduced learning planners and microsoft teams.
Cruella Deville
The transition into the hybrid of homeschooling but not as we would like it and being like school at home was not a smooth transition. First I am not a teacher, second my house is not set up like a school and third I had never been as stressed as trying to get my children logged into microsoft teams!
We went from having fun and loving learning to me being more like Cruella Deville and my children finding they were doing more work than when they were at school! It was horrible and none of us were having fun at all!
Realisation
Fast forward to school returning back to … well, a new normal and a pattern was beginning to emerge. Everyday Grace was telling me she was ill; headache, stomach ache, feeling sick. At times I just brushed it off but when I really paid attention to the amount of times she was telling me and the amount of times I was needing to drop work to collect her from school I knew there was a problem. And yes, this smart little cookie had worked out that say the word ‘sick’ and you could get sent home and I really had to find out what was ‘really’ going on.
Grace does struggle with how she learns at school. Nevaeh is extremely academic, would sit, by choice, for hours doing work books and learning English and Maths as well as anything else she could. Grace on the other hand not so much. When she was really young, to get her interested in learning numbers and letters I would hide laminated letters and numbers in split peas, lentils, rice etc… and then she would happily learn. We learnt numbers by counting steps when we were on walks or trees, stones she thrived from more sensory and experience based learning.
So, when addressing the not wanting to go to school with Grace I already had an inkling that she maybe struggling a bit.
What she said to me broke my heart
I was not really prepared for what followed though. She shared with me that she thought she was stupid, that she never gets anything right and burst into tears. My heartbroke…
Grace is very intelligent, she is so bright in so many ways and I said to her if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree it will think it is stupid it’s whole life. You are the fish and the schooling system is like telling you to climb a tree.
Homeschool
Mark and I spoke at length and I am condensing this down a lot, if I shared all of the information and experiences we had had with Grace this would be more like a novel than a blog post! There was so much back and forth on if we were doing the right thing especially for Grace, maybe we should homeschool but two very important questions kept going around and around
- Would I be good enough to teach her and her sisters?
- Would we survive financially?
It has felt like for months the only conversation Mark and I are having is Homeschool.
In the end we have settled on a homeschool trial. We will use the first two weeks of the summer holidays to homeschool the girls. It will give me the chance to see where the gaps in their education are, what their learning styles are and how best to move forward.
Peace of Mind
Time for my confession, I have such peace of mind since we made this decision to trial homeschooling. I feel like it will give me a chance to really pay attention, to also help the girls know that as parents we are here for them. It will also help me know if I am even cut out for this.
For me, if I can help build Grace’s confidence then it will mean so much. She is such a special girl (and yes, I know I am bias) it breaks me so much to think she thinks less of herself because she feels she is measured against someone else’s perception of what makes someone intelligent
