Annual homeschool post

Yesterday at the park, I told a friend who has special knowledge in the area that I have very recently discovered that some of my kids have dyslexia. I was standing with a mutual friend who is in the same boat as me. Friend #1's response was intended to be funny, and she said in a joking, exasperated tone, "What have you guys been doing all these years?" I admit, that comment pierced my soul. 

I think I was hurt by the implication that I had either been lazing around or not paying attention and that is why we have just figured this out. Since I first started teaching our kids to read, and we have 6 who read now, I have seen little indications that there was "something there" with them. We used a phonics based method to teach them to read and spell. I did try to teach them to form their letters correctly, put tails below the line and ascenders above, and not to confuse "b" and "d". I have pointed out mistakes and I made them recopy misspelled and poorly punctuated papers that we had to turn in to the school. Almost every paper they wrote, I wrote out first or typed into the computer. I helped them edit each paper line by line, talking through adjectives and adverbs, introductory phrases, transitions, and how to take "there is" out. And it didn't stop there. 

When I saw that they struggled to retain information from their text books, I read them out loud. When math had them stumped, I wrote out each step while they told me what to do next. And when I saw that their Language Arts standardized test scores didn't match what we thought they should achieve, I blamed myself for not trying hard enough (which I wasn't) and redesigned and retaught our spelling curriculum. 

I had to spell that out because I think over time I will forget the work I did to help my kids learn and only remember what I didn't do. I didn't teach spelling consistently when I was lying on the floor in the bathroom with hyper-emesis. I didn't knock down doors fighting for the kid who I knew needed speech therapy at age 4 but the health insurance considered him fine until he was 9. I told myself that letter reversals were normal at a young age and never tried to figure out what age they are no longer normal. I also had to spell it out because otherwise I would have overlooked the natural accommodations I made as a homeschooling mom who knew her kids well and knew their abilities and limits. 

This is my handwriting but their thoughts

When people new to homeschooling say that they think it's great because you can tailor the curriculum to each child, I always try to moderate their enthusiasm a bit. I explain that having 6 students at different ages makes it hard to design a unique curriculum for each child, so often you end up doing the same thing with each child at the same age. To me, this isn't really any different from a brick school which uses the same curriculum for the same grade each year. I don't want to discourage them, but I do want them to understand homeschooling reality.

But after the comment of what have you been doing all these years, I began to look at our curriculum a little differently. Foremost, I've seen the benefit of using a curriculum that insisted on phonics based reading. Otherwise, I don't think my kids would be able read at all. I've also seen the small changes I have made in day-to-day assignments by reading aloud or answering questions orally or grading compositions on content separately from mechanics or doing the writing for them or saying, "School's over. We'll do that tomorrow." I have tailored a curriculum that worked for our family into a curriculum that supported dyslexic children effortlessly. I'm going to remember that the next time someone gushes about homeschoolers being able to make the curriculum fit their family. And the next time someone asks, "What have you been doing all these years?"