Teaching the Child You’ve Got

We often begin home educating our children with a vision, or expectation of how things will go. Maybe it’s because we have already successfully educated other children, maybe it’s because we have experience in the school system, or maybe it’s based on our own time spent going to school. Especially if we are homeschooling multiple children, we learn rather quickly that not all children learn the same. As a homeschool parent, you can focus on teaching the child you’ve got.

This isn’t a bad thing – it’s just a fact. There isn’t a good way or bad way to learn. One isn’t better than the other. That is the first thing to wrap your head around. If your child doesn’t learn easily in a typical school setting, that doesn’t make them a “bad student”. If your child doesn’t move through lessons, units, levels and grades at the expected pace, that doesn’t make them a “bad student”. 

In the words of a man I have a lot of respect for, “Don’t ask how smart a child is, ask how a child is smart”. This means, every child has skills, strengths and knowledge. Find those things. Offer them praise. Find how they learn best and teach them that way. 

Changing Your Mentality

Most of us need to retrain our thinking when it comes to education. First things first, we need to leave the word “behind” out of our vocabulary! Behind what? Behind their grade level? Well, who decided what would be taught in each grade? How come it’s different in the different states, provinces, and countries? Really these guidelines support the organization of the school system but they aren’t necessary for education.

Shocking, I know! If you think about it, if you plan to educate your child at home until grade 12, you just want them to have learned what is necessary before they leave home. The speed, or order, that they learn is not as important as long as there is forward progression. Is your child learning? Are they moving forward, even if it’s at a slower pace?

As homeschool parents, it is so easy to worry ourselves with keeping our kids at their grade level. Let me let you in on something. I spent 7 years teaching in the classroom, and I can assure you that every classroom has a very wide range of abilities and where the students are on a scale of understanding. For example, one year when I was teaching grade 5, I had to provide 4 different levels of spelling lists. One of those lists was a grade 1 level spelling list for a couple grade 5 students. 

At least here in Canada, students aren’t held back or required to repeat grades anymore. Regardless of how much they have learned, they are put into the next grade with their peers. In my professional, personal opinion, this is doing the children a great disservice. Not being able to read in grade 1 is ok, but getting to grade 5 or 6 and not being able to read can cause social issues in the classroom. They can’t do the rest of their work because they can’t read the work. Their writing is behind so they have adaptations. Kids this age recognize these things. Repeating kindergarten or grade 1 to ensure they were able to read would have served them better as they got to upper grades. 

How do we correct this in our homeschool? We worry less about grade level and where a child should be and just teach the child we have. We find out where our child is and teach them that. Once they learn it, we teach them the next thing. And we repeat this over and over again. If we realize we moved on too quickly, well that’s no problem! We just go back and go over it again.

Delight in your child; in getting to know them and figuring out what makes things tick for them. You are a team!

Teaching The Child You’ve Got

Let me say this very clearly: “Your child isn’t behind”. There is nothing to be behind. There is not competition, no scale. Let this soak in.

Shake off that weight and pressure and just focus on your precious child in front of you. What is next for them to learn? How can you teach that? In the next section I will provide a few suggestions to help you think outside the box.

The more a child experiences success, the more confidence they will have that they can be successful again. What are your goals for your child? Spend some time thinking that through, but also be prepared to need to adjust them.

For instance, in past years, we have always finished our math curriculum. That has been my expectation. This year, it became apparent by Christmas that that was too lofty of a goal for one of my daughters. The jump between this level and the last level was feeling too expansive. There were some things she wasn’t confident in and that was causing her stress surrounding her math.

By Christmas, I had changed the goal to get halfway through the curriculum. There were 2 books – a part 1 and part 2. I changed our goal to get through the first book before the end of our school year. We took breaks away from the workbook to reinforce different skills. 

As we kept working, it became increasingly apparent that even finishing the 1 textbook was maybe not going to happen. That is where the change in mindset comes in, being able to be ok with that. I had to think about what was really going on. Even though, during our lessons, I was not expecting her to do the workbook questions on her own, she was putting that expectation on herself. When the workbook was in front of us, she felt like she should already know how to do it. 

At that time I decided we were done with the workbook, likely for the year, and I was going to teach concepts myself on the whiteboard. I started with where I felt she was at to build confidence and then slowly started adding a step when she was ready. I modeled, then we did problems together, and moved to her doing them on her own. This has been working so well. It seems removing the stress of the workbook has allowed her to accept working at the pace I set.

For another child, this wouldn’t work. It can be trial and error to find what’s best for our own child. But what better work is there than teaching the child you’ve got, that God has entrusted you with!

Tips for Teaching Outside the Box

The number one thing I would recommend is to keep at the forefront of your mind what it is you are trying to learn. What I mean by this, is that if you are teaching history via a read aloud, don’t correct or stress about their spelling if you have them do narration. That is just an example. 

Another example might be that if you’re working on story problems, maybe you allow them to use a calculator. You’re teaching them how to work with the information given more so than do the calculating themselves perhaps. 

Pace is a huge way to adjust your teaching to fit your child. Most curriculums teach a new concept every lesson. For some children, that is totally fine. For others, that is a recipe for stress and disaster. They will not feel confident to move on and will get more and more frustrated. YOU ARE THE BOSS OF THE CURRICULUM! Just because it is laid out to do a lesson a day, doesn’t mean you have to! Like I mentioned above, just because it’s meant to be done in one school year doesn’t mean you need to. 

You can even just rip out the pages that you want them to do that day and put them in a binder, or on a clipboard, so the student isn’t seeing the whole workbook.

Expectations are another way that I adjust my teaching to the child I’ve got. So if we are doing a dictation assignment, and I know some of the words are beyond what we have learned, I write them on the bottom of her page (or on a whiteboard or a sticky note) instead of letting her be frustrated. This allows her to stretch her brain on how to write and spell the words we are learning, without the stress of figuring out words beyond her current understanding. 

Just because a textbook says write 5 sentences, that isn’t law! If I know we aren’t ready for that, I can change it to 3. (or whatever number I want). If we are doing science or history and not practicing writing, I can scribe for my child instead. 

Really it’s about changing your mindset that anything is adjustable. YOU’RE THE BOSS!

Make it fun! Use math manipulatives to help kinesthetic learners. Actually go outside and measure things. Play games!! Not specific math or learning games, just fun games. Let your kiddo be the scorekeeper. All of a sudden they’re getting repetitions of mental math they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten. Hide sentences around the house for them to go on a scavenger hunt to find and then read them to you. The sky is the limit here! Be creative. You can practice spelling or dictation in the driveway with sidewalk chalk or on the windows with window markers!

We want our kids to love learning! I know sometimes you just have to do the work, but it’s also important for them to see the beauty, fun and adventure in learning as well!

More than anything, I want you to hear my heart that your child isn’t broken. You aren’t doing it wrong. You are giving your child their best opportunity and a successful education and you are doing it out of pure motherly love. Don’t panic. Keep making forward motion.