Having a child who has been diagnosed with dyslexia can be overwhelming for any parent. For the homeschool mom, it can seem especially intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. Since homeschooling offers flexibility and individualized instruction, it is the perfect environment to foster learning for the child with dyslexia.
Children with dyslexia process information differently. Therefore, they must be taught differently, or frustration, stagnation, and feelings of defeat can compound their struggles. To become readers and writers, they need to learn and access information the way their brains process information.
“Dyslexia is a neurological condition caused by a different wiring of the brain. There is no cure for dyslexia and individuals with this condition must learn coping strategies. Research indicates that dyslexia has no relationship to intelligence. Individuals with dyslexia are neither more nor less intelligent than the general population. But some say the way individuals with dyslexia think can actually be an asset in achieving success.”¹
A Multisensory Approach
Research shows that a multisensory approach helps a child with dyslexia learn.
“When taught by a multisensory approach, students have the advantage of learning alphabetic patterns and words with engagement of all learning modalities. Dr. Samuel Terry Orton, one of the first to recognize the syndrome of dyslexia in students, suggested that teaching the fundamentals of phonic association with letterforms, both visually presented and reproduced in writing until the correct associations were built up, would benefit students of all ages.”²
What is a multisensory approach? A child with dyslexia needs information repeated to them in a variety of ways. Therefore, using visual, auditory, and kinesthetic-tactile activities helps children learn and later access the information they’ve learned. A multisensory approach is the glue that helps what a child learns to stick to their brain.
A child with dyslexia also needs time and support. They need to learn at their own pace, in small groups or one-on-one. Below are a few strategies and resources to help children with dyslexia find success.
Reading and Spelling Strategies
When teaching letter sounds and how to identify them with their matching symbol, direct instruction works well. You can also use this method to help them learn to count syllables and to understand the six basic syllable types. Teaching about rhyming, base words, roots, and prefixes and suffixes also works well with direct instruction.
Repetition is Key
For a child who has been diagnosed with dyslexia, repetition is of utmost importance. There are multiple ways to incorporate this into daily learning. Children love to play learning games, which lend themselves easily to repetition. Another fun way to teach is by singing songs. This works especially well with younger children. However, older students can also benefit by repeating words, phrases, and facts set to music.
Keeping words with similar spelling patterns together is a simple trick that facilitates learning. Additionally, help your child to compile a list of their most commonly misspelled words. Then encourage them to practice the words regularly. Mix it up by using letter tiles to build words. Or give them some old-fashioned tracing paper to use with pre-printed words. Word search games are also a fun way for your child to learn.
Make use of your read-aloud time by having your child track the words and follow along. This also works with audiobooks. Or get them involved by taking turns reading aloud. Make sure that you read books that interest them. Let them have some fun by using graphic novels and comic books. This helps to break long passages into smaller parts to encourage learning without becoming overwhelmed.
Another creative way to incorporate repetition is to let children draw or write about what they’re reading. They can also make related hands-on projects. These might include making movies, games, or 3D projects that depict scenes from their reading material.
Reading Comprehension Strategies
Implement a variety of strategies while reading. For example, you can pause after a passage, page, or chapter and discuss what they’ve read.
Use different types of questions as teaching tools. Your child can better understand how to make connections when you ask how they relate to the story or its characters. Teach them how to make predictions by asking what they think will happen next in the story. Help them to learn to make comments about a story by asking what they think, like, or dislike about it. And show them how to recognize inferences in a story by asking what they understand even though it isn’t directly stated.
Your child learns to summarize for clarity when you ask them to explain what has happened so far in the story. You can also teach them to visualize by asking what they see in their mind as they listen.
Writing Strategies
As with reading, direct instruction is a good way to teach writing. It helps when learning fine motor skills and letter formation, along with the mechanics of grammar and sentence structure. Additionally, when teaching them how to break ideas into smaller parts, direct instruction is the most effective. They can also learn to organize their ideas using graphic organizers.
Variety of Tools
With young children, practice writing with fun pens, glitter glue, in salt or sand. Also, you can make words out of playdough or trace them in the air.
Typing might be a better solution for older kids. Assistive technology like Dragon,Naturally Speaking, Kurzweil, a Livescribe Smartpen, and Read&Write are good resources for reading, spelling, and writing.
Interest is Key
Let kids choose their topics and genres. Writing assignments that have a purpose and are meaningful to the child will encourage them to practice. Think outside the box. Emails, Minecraft, invitations, and comic books can be creative ways to assign writing. Even submitting reviews and comments on their favorite YouTube videos can allow them to practice writing.
The Writing Process
First of all, teach your child to brainstorm. They can use graphic organizers to plan their ideas and information. Then, they are ready to write their first draft and begin any necessary revisions.Typing can eliminate the frustration of having to re-write drafts over and over.
Help to simplify the proofreading process. Ask kids to look for only one type of error at a time. Teach them to use proofreading sheets and word walls as aids in the writing process.
Help Them Thrive
It is important that a child with dyslexia practices reading and writing in a variety of ways. Because of this, they need daily practice for short periods of time. Use materials and activities that offer a multisensory approach, repetition, and direct instruction.
Furthermore, children with dyslexia need to spend time doing the things they love, feeling success, and letting their brains relax. A child with dyslexia needs to learn differently. As homeschool moms, we can help them thrive by offering the support, strategies, and resources they need.
“Dyslexic kids are creative,outside-the-box thinkers. They have to be, because they don’t see or solve problems the same way other kids do. In school, unfortunately, they are sometimes written off as lazy, unmotivated, rude or even stupid. They aren’t. Making Percy dyslexic was my way of honoring the potential of all the kids I’ve known who have those conditions. It’s not a bad thing to be different. Sometimes, it’s the mark of being very, very talented.” —RickRiordan.com
NOTES
¹“Multisensory Structured Language Teaching Fact Sheet.” International Dyslexia Association | …until Everyone Can Read!, dyslexiaida.org/multisensory-structured-language-teaching-fact-sheet/.
²“Dyslexia At a Glance.” International Dyslexia Association | …until Everyone Can Read!, dyslexiaida.org/dyslexia-at-a-glance/.
About the Author
Kelly left teaching middle and high school English to homeschool her children and reclaim how she and her family spent their time. Followers of interest-led learning, her family’s days rarely look the same, but they tend to include a lot of books, art supplies, and time outside.
Kelly facilitates local writing circles for women and children, leads classes on Outschool, and blogs about nurturing the love of learning on her blog, Curiosity Encouraged. She loves to journal, read memoirs, hike, and travel. She seeks quiet mornings and good coffee daily.
Guest Gretchen Roe from Demme Learning says that math is like death and taxes: you don’t get away from either one. She urges parents not to shortchange kids in their math instruction by claim they’re just not a math-family.
Learn how a mastery-based curriculum is student-centric, allowing a child to work at the pace they need to fully comprehend the skills (instead of the curriculum determining the length of lessons and how quickly you work through them). Find out why manipulatives are key to learning math and why some kids discard them too soon. Are your math lessons too long? Discover the ideal length of a daily math lesson. The day-to-day math we encounter as adults mostly comes to us in the form of word problems.
Janna Koch (00:36): Welcome to Homeschool Your Way. I’m Janna Koch, your host and BookShark’s community manager. In the homeschooling community, much like any community, there are words thrown around with an assumption that everyone knows and understands the meaning. I, for one, hate when I don’t know what a word means, because if I don’t understand the term, how can I give my two cents? If you don’t know, by now, I’ll just come out and say it. I love to let people know what I’m thinking about in almost everything.
Janna Koch (01:09): Mastery-based learning may be one of those words. You may have heard the term, but can’t quite give your two cents yet. I’m here to help. I’ve invited Gretchen Roe, a veteran mom who happens to have a degree in psychology and child development and has spent the last 19 years in positions of homeschool advocacy, serving on a variety of nonprofit boards. Plus, she is a sales representative for Demme Learning, one of BookShark’s partners in math and spelling. She will help us master the idea of mastery-based learning and equip you to give your two cents about it.
Janna Koch (01:47): First, a homeschool hack. Keep it simple. If you’re feeling overwhelmed with your homeschool or with life in general, ask yourself, “Are these tasks serving my why?” If you don’t have a homeschool why listen to the episode [42] we did with Candace Kelly explaining the need for a why, or write down why you chose a homeschool in the first place. As you look at that to-do list, make sure it aligns with your why. My homeschool why has always been to foster the love of learning in my girls.
Janna Koch (02:20): There are times when I realize I’m doing just the opposite. If I allow the list or the curriculum to dictate my time, am I really fostering joyful learning? To be honest, I’m usually killing their desire to learn anything. So, keep it simple. Let your why fuel your day, not the list. If you have a hack you’d like to share, please go to bookshark.com/podcast and leave a comment.
Janna Koch (02:49): Gretchen, thank you so much for being here.
Gretchen Roe (02:51): Oh, it’s my very great pleasure to have the time to spend with you today.
Janna Koch (02:55): Now I know you and your history, but for those who don’t know, why don’t you go ahead and share a little bit about yourself and talk about what’s keeping you passionate about homeschool, after all these years.
Gretchen Roe (03:08): I had no intention of homeschooling. In fact, I had no intention of having children. We have six and we homeschooled 21 years. Four of them graduated homeschool from high school. And then our fifth was homeschooled to high school and our caboose was homeschooled to middle school. And it was the most joyful 21 years of my life. And I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. I have worked in the homeschool community and positions of homeschool advocacy now for 15 years. And I love the fact that we have the ability to guide our children to adulthood in all aspects. And so, I continue to be as excited today about the homeschooling journey, even though it’s not one that I’m taking right now. I just enjoy walking alongside other parents as they take that journey.
Janna Koch (03:57): So, how long have you professionally been involved with homeschooling?
Gretchen Roe (04:02): I became a homeschooler overnight in the middle of an academic year, when a teacher told my third grader, she didn’t need to memorize her multiplication tables. And I said, “Nope, that’s a wrong answer.” Something’s got to be better out there. And I really only intended to homeschool her from March to June. And it became a glorious adventure that didn’t end for a long time. And she turned 36 yesterday, so I think we did okay.
Janna Koch (04:31): Now how about your partnership with Demme Learning?
Gretchen Roe (04:36): I have known Steve [Demme, founder of Demme Learning] for 15 years. We spoke on a homeschool circuit together and a little over eight years ago, they asked me if I wanted to come aboard professionally. And I said, I wondered when you would ask me to do that because I loved the product. It was a complete game changer for me. When I came to work for Demme Learning, it was Math-U-See and they had just launched Spelling You See.
Gretchen Roe (05:01): The end of the pool, where the language arts happens, is my favorite end of the pool to swim in, and so I was really excited to see Spelling You See come aboard. But Math-U-See was a huge game changer for me. I’m not a confident mathematician. I think math is spelled with four letters for a reason, but I loved the fact that Math-U-See made it possible to educate my kids. So four of my kids are Math-U-See kids, and I never looked back. It’s been amazing.
Janna Koch (05:44): Gretchen, a lot of parents ask me when I talk about Math-U-See, “What is a mastery-based type of learning?” And it definitely is not the type of learning that I had in traditional school or even in my homeschool years. So, it was very unique to me as I became aware of your product and started using it in my home with my children. So, could you just walk us through this philosophy of what this actually means and what it will look like for parents?
Gretchen Roe (06:15): Sure, absolutely. So, there’s two kinds of ways to teach mathematics instruction. One is incremental, that’s the one, most of us are familiar with. Someone pre-determines how many times you will see an individual concept, and so perhaps they present that concept three times and then it falls out of rotation or sequence. The challenge with that kind of learning is if you’re not solid in your understanding, then your understanding is incomplete. And there’s no way to assess that incompleteness as you go further.
Gretchen Roe (06:50): And because math is sequential and cumulative, it becomes really essential for us to get it right. And that is one of the reasons that I love a mastery-based program. At Math-U-See, we say we are student-paced. So. As a student can demonstrate their understanding to a parent or an instructor, they can move forward in the curricula. They’re not bound by a predetermined number of math problems per se, and that makes a tremendous amount of difference.
Janna Koch (07:22): It does. Now, when you found out about Math-U-See and fell in love with this program, what differences did you see in your children as you started using it?
Gretchen Roe (07:33): One of the things I think that’s really important is my background is in child development and child psychology. I actually was enrolled in a PhD program when I found out I was expecting my eldest son and so he’s my PhD, but I love the fact that I can bring more than one sense to the table. Not all of us play on a level field, as far as our understanding, we all have different gifts, but if I can teach a student in as many modalities as possible, it makes it possible for a student to learn. So, I can teach a gifted learner, I can teach a struggling learner and they can all have a level playing field because they are bringing their talents to the table in as many ways is possible.
Janna Koch (08:22): Now I was a family who came into the program later on. So, my daughter was 12 when we started using Math-U-See, because I started to notice that other programs just weren’t cutting it for us. And by that, I mean, it was taking over an hour and a half and there were tears every day. And so I thought, not only is she miserable, but I’m miserable as her mom to see her struggling. And I’m also miserable as the teacher, going “I don’t know how to say it a different way. This is how I learned it.” I was unwilling in a sense to learn a new way of teaching because it works for me, why doesn’t it work for her? And it worked for her two older sisters, which is really what threw me for a loop as a homeschool parent. Why this last one is this not working for? What am I doing differently? And we’ve talked about this in the past.
Janna Koch (09:07): So, when she came into it, she’s not using the manipulatives a lot of the times. And part of me is like, well, if you’re going to do it, you need to do it right and yet she is seamlessly moved into the program and working through it beautifully. So, the type-A in me that’s struggling with there’s manipulatives for a reason, you must use them. I can’t be the only parent that appreciates your program and yet uses it and adjusts it to my child.
Gretchen Roe (09:38): Sure, and isn’t that a definition of homeschooling, we adjust to meet the needs of our child. The truth is in a Math-U-See experience, the manipulatives hold a very special place. And the place that they hold is they allow a student to bring as many senses to the table as necessary to fully understand and grasp a concept. And the other thing that the manipulatives allow us to do is to take a concept that a student understands and give them the resources or the tools to teach that concept back to a parent. If they don’t have the language to do that. At 12, both our daughters, because I came into Math-U-See at the pre-algebra level. So, my daughter was 13 and they pretty much have a well developed language resource at that point, but a six year old, maybe not. So, that’s where the manipulatives help us in that process.
Gretchen Roe (10:35): You’re not going to walk around with plastic blocks in your pocket. As Steve says, the blocks serve a tool to allow us to step along a continuum from the concrete understanding of the initial exploration to representational understanding what do you know in your head to the abstract end of the equation, which is really those Arabic numerals that we force kids to understand math. And so they serve as a tool to help a student facilitate their understanding. And they’re a tool as long as they’re necessary.
Gretchen Roe (11:09): Just like you said, if your daughter is getting the concepts and teaching them back to you and not needing the manipulatives, then she’s moved beyond them. I do have to say sometimes I encounter older students who stepped away from the manipulatives because manipulatives… “We don’t need no stinking manipulatives.” And the truth is they shouldn’t have, because they didn’t have that full conceptual understanding that really allows us to put it in our heads. And what the manipulatives do is they allow us to put that learning into our long term memory in the proper place. So, it can be retrieved later. That really is the goal of the manipulative experience.
Janna Koch (13:14): Well, what about parents who say my child is artistic? My child is a writer. My child is, and math isn’t their strong suit. And so, we’re really not pushing math or we’re really not looking to change for them to just get through it, to just get by, because we know that they’re not a math person, we are not math people. And I’ve been guilty of myself as saying it, but as I’ve matured and grown older, I understand that is so not true.
Janna Koch (13:47): So, you were explaining that in your younger years, your child psychology and so math wasn’t necessarily your thing. But now you’ve been working with this company for eight years and you’re very passionate about math. So, help me understand as a parent who maybe I shouldn’t worry about my child really understands algebra or not, why we need these higher types of learning in these processes in order to make it a better experience as adults.
Gretchen Roe (14:20): Sure. The truth is math is like death and taxes, you don’t get away from either one. And we have developed a culture here in the US of thinking that math literacy is not a necessary skill set, and because of that payday loan companies thrive. It’s up to us to keep the doors open for our kids mathematically. And I would’ve taken that argument to the wall with you 15 years ago with the kid who brought me to Matthew, see, she’s now 30. And she was 13 when we found our way here. And we had been through two different curricula and really struggled. And I said, those very same things, well math just isn’t her thing. She’s my daughter, blah, blah, blah. But the truth is as parents, our goal is to keep as many doors open as possible for our kids. We don’t know what the future holds for our kids.
Gretchen Roe (15:17): And if we make suppositions, we narrow their ability to be flexible. And if I’ve learned anything since 2020, it is that flexibility is a great sign of intelligence, so we need to keep those doorways open for our kids. And as a matter of fact, we have this misapprehension that if you are artistic and you’re creative, you’re not mathy, and that’s not really true, Leonardo da Vinci comes to mind. And I think the important thing is we don’t know what the future holds for our kids. So why would we start narrowing the pathways? Let’s keep the doors open wide and regardless where they choose to go academically, they have the wherewithal to be successful. I’m glad I kept the doors open for that particular child because that non-mathematical artsy kid is a research biologist today. And if I’d closed doors on her, she wouldn’t view where she is today.
Janna Koch (16:24): My daughters were in their guidance counselor’s offices and he was explaining that they didn’t have to continue on to a higher level of math anymore. They’d accomplished what they needed to according to the standards, and so they were like, yeah, free ride, we’re done. And I loudly interjected and reminded them that the reason they needed a parent there for these sessions is because I am the voice of reason. And I said that very thing. I said, “You don’t know your interests are going to change. You could read one book, you could hear one lecture and it could change your life and the trajectory of what you want to do. Do not shut that door by saying, “I’m not going to take college algebra now because I’ve completed what I need to complete.” And we’ll see, jury is still out if that was helpful or not. But I think the other thing is, as a society, I have noticed that we tend, I’ll speak for myself, tend to take the easy way out, the path of least resistance.
Janna Koch (17:22): So, if something is a challenge in a fixed mindset, well, then I don’t want to do it because I don’t know how it’s going to turn out or if I’m going to do it well, but with a growth mindset, it goes, this is something I’ve never learned. As you were talking, I was thinking I’ve never done calculus. I think maybe I might just pick up some Cal. I want to, if I’m sitting here teaching this to my children, I want to be demonstrating to them as well. That’s what they’ll be like, why you only did mathematical investigations when you went to college and your master’s degree had no math, which actually is not true because there was some finance and business and statistics that I had to take. So, you have to know how to do those higher processes of math, but I don’t want them to limit themselves.
Gretchen Roe (18:08): Well, I chose my college degree based on what I thought was the least amount of math necessary to get a degree, looking down through the course catalog, not realizing I’d have to have two years of psychological statistics. And then I made it worse on myself, I split those two years by a seven years, summer vacation. So, you don’t know what the future will hold. And I always say to parents, what are your students’ plans? And parents are like, well, he is a 13 year old boy. Great. That’s awesome. Let’s keep the doors open then because we don’t know what he wants. And kids’ desires change as they age. And I think mathematical literacy is as important as book literacy and it’s part of our educational process. And we, as parents, are obligated to teach our children to be self-sufficient in society. And that means we have to have mathematical literacy.
Janna Koch (19:09): I have never heard the term mathematical literacy before, and I think-
Gretchen Roe (19:12): It might have just made it up, but you know what?
Janna Koch (19:15): I think it’s beautiful.
Gretchen Roe (19:15): It’s very relevant. So I always am impressed with my own lack of mathematical literacy. When I sit down every year and I’m like, oh, taxes, I got to do this. How does this work? Because if you don’t do something with frequency, you don’t remember it. And here’s a tip, here’s another reason why mastery in mathematics is so important. In our world, mastery is demonstrated by teaching someone else what you know. And isn’t that the highest form of proving knowledge is to be able to explain to someone else why you know this particular thing works.
Janna Koch (20:01): Unfortunately, I think we have seen in our society a lack of mastery in so many things, because people don’t know why they do things or why they don’t know what they know, right? And so, I think as homeschool parents, it’s another privilege of ours to be like, hey, here is a very serious topic that is relevant and current in our society. Let’s talk about it. How do you feel about it? Well, what are your friends saying about it? Okay. What do you think about what they’re saying? It was one of my favorite things about being a parent, really, is being able to walk with my children through these hard things in life, and then seeing, okay, we don’t have all the answers.
Janna Koch (20:43): Nobody has all the answers, but let’s work the process at each step of the way so that we can gain a confidence in what we do believe, the decisions that we do make. And I think math is a perfect example of that. Like you said, if you don’t know, and you’re making financial decisions, I mean, we live in a country, we have so much freedom. We’re able to choose how we spend our money. If you don’t understand how money works, how adding and subtracting and multiplying, and God forbid, even like you were saying compound interest in all of these things, you’re going to be lost.
Gretchen Roe (21:20): Sure. Well, I think back I mentioned, my eldest daughter just turned 36 when she was 19 years old, she got a $53,000 SBA loan and opened her own coffee shop. And at that point in time, she had a little old ancient mercurial cash register that sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t and she found that she could only hire homeschool kids to work in the coffee shop. And the reason was because when the cash register went on, the fritz, most kids couldn’t calculate the change in their heads to know what change to give back. And so she very quickly learned that her staff was going to be homeschoolers because they could do that mental math. And so much of mental math is not part of the mathematical experience anymore. I’m glad it’s part of Math-U-See.
Janna Koch (22:13): I am too. I think one of the biggest things that annoys my teenage daughters even now is I will say, okay, what are they going to give you back and change? Don’t look at them. And of course my twins are 16 and they’ll be like, stop it. You’re embarrassing us. And I’m like, I’d rather embarrass you now with the safety net of me standing right here than when you have a job, like you’re saying, and something goes wrong and you can’t count it back to somebody. And then you know that anxiety, how that feels when you just don’t know what to do in the situation. It’s like, wow, as your mom, it’s my job to help you avoid situations like this by embarrassing you now so that you have the skills later. Might be the title of my next book, I’m here to embarrass you now.
Gretchen Roe (22:57): I like that book. That’s a good one. We could probably co-write that.
Janna Koch (23:00): Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Gretchen Roe (23:02): My husband always says our goal is to raise kids who have character who are not characters, so we’ll see.
Janna Koch (23:10): Yeah, well …
Gretchen Roe (23:10): Boat’s still out on the caboose and the train. We’ll see.
Janna Koch (23:15): It is fun to look at all of the different ones and their different personalities and how you think you’re parenting the same, but then birth order and different, multiple intelligences in different ways just really affect all of that, which is what makes us so unique and beautiful. And that is part of also expressing to our children that everyone is unique and has beauty. Let’s find it. What is beautiful about this? And I feel the same way about education. We love to read in this house. We love to discuss, we are all talkers, but where’s their beauty in math. Let’s talk about it. Oh my gosh, there’s patterns. There’s patterns all out in the world in nature and in math and math is just kind of mimicking that and it’s helping us understand it. So let’s look at it that way instead of, oh my gosh, I have to now do my math.
Gretchen Roe (24:03): Right. Well, and I think part of that is anybody who was raised in a public school environment remembers an hour or gosh, my son has a friend who is in a block schedule classroom situation. And her math is a 90 minute experience in a day. And you don’t love things that linger painfully for you. So, I think in some ways parents have to revisit their own math experiences and maybe shed some of that stuff, so we can help our kids be successful. At Math-U-See, we say, “If you’re in our Greek series, the colored books back here, you’re looking at 15 minutes a day, because your child has an attention span of their age, plus two to three minutes for new material. And so if you’re spending an hour a day doing math, you have 15 minutes of quality instruction in 45 minutes of obedience.”
Janna Koch (25:05): Mm-hmm.
Gretchen Roe (25:07): And that makes a tremendous difference for kids.
Janna Koch (25:09): Yeah. And for a parent, maybe even going a step further and translating it and saying, well, now you have 45 minutes of exercise of something that you actually despise, right? We’re not talking about paddle boarding, because if you told me I had 45 minutes paddleboarding, I’d be out there in a heartbeat. You couldn’t give me back off. But if you told me I had 45 minutes of running, how could I possibly psych myself up to do that? It just isn’t possible. And I think we do forget that even in that 45 minutes, like you said of obedience, that is exercise to them of something that doesn’t come naturally is not on the top of their list of boy, I want to sit here and do something for 45 minutes that I don’t necessarily like, but gosh, darn it, I’m going-
Gretchen Roe (25:53): Well, there’s a corollary to that as well because as parents, if we’re not fond of something, we look to shuttle it off. And I often have conversations with parents who will say to me at what age can my child do math all by themselves? And I annoy them when I say, well it depends because every child is different and mathematics is a language. You can’t learn it in a vacuum. And frankly you can’t learn it from a computer because a computer’s a tool. It’s not a teacher. So you got to be able to engage with someone in order to test your understanding and make sure that it’s solid and be able to move that forward.
Gretchen Roe (26:38): And that was one of the things that impressed me so much about Math-U-See is, yeah, a mastery math program sounded like a great idea, but he didn’t realize how understanding the process of mastery would translate into all of my kids’ other academics. Because if you talk yourself through something and you say, all right, what do I know? And you walk yourself through that process, that habit of learning to walk yourself through math then goes into your science and goes into your language arts and your history and those other things, and we become a more well rounded learner.
Janna Koch (27:18): Mm-hmm. I think that circles us back to Leonardo da Vinci, like what the Renaissance man, right. He was the epitome-
Gretchen Roe (27:26): That’s right.
Janna Koch (27:26): … of being well rounded. And yet unlike Leonardo, I say I’m the jack of all trades master of none, but it has suited me. It has suited me just fine in my endeavors in life. But I do love the idea of having mastery in all areas. Just like you, just like what I caught onto that word you said literacy. If we could look at math as a type of literacy as parents, then that would translate to our children as, okay, this isn’t just numbers, and we have to memorize and we just have to get through it.
Janna Koch (28:04): How can we start writing a story with math? And yes, you’ll use numbers because as a kid word problems were like, ugh, please. Not the word problems. They never made sense to me. I don’t know who the author of these were, but I’m thinking maybe another book we might collaborate on is getting a fiction writer to start writing our word problem, so that we can make them engaging with students, but that they can actually see that there’s two languages being woven together is math-
Gretchen Roe (28:36): Right.
Janna Koch (28:36): … and vocabulary and certain structure.
Gretchen Roe (28:39): Well, the hard part in most endeavors, when I talk to parents who are like, ah, yeah, I hate work. My kids are great on computational math, but they hate word problems. When math comes to us as adults, it’s a word problem.
Janna Koch (28:52): Mm-hmm.
Gretchen Roe (28:52): So, we have to give our kids a degree of facility. And one of the things that we say at Math-U-See is the word problems are where you prove your application and understanding.
Janna Koch (29:04): Mm-hmm.
Gretchen Roe (29:04): Because if you can take the conceptual understanding you developed in the worksheets and then apply it in the word problems, then you really have both sides of that mathematical coin.
Janna Koch (29:15): Yeah. And then their literacy would be even higher. So, [inaudible 00:29:20].
Gretchen Roe (29:19): Absolutely.
Janna Koch (29:22): I love [inaudible 00:29:23]. One more thing Gretchen, before we go, what would you like to say to a parent who is maybe struggling with several things, deciding whether or not homeschool has actually worked for them, really struggling with the idea of, are we going to re-up again next year? And maybe this is all coming from a place of, I’m not seeing the results that I set out to see. So, if you had a parent come into your booth and or call you on the phone, what would be your best words of advice for them for those things?
Gretchen Roe (29:56): Don’t read other people’s highlight reels. We all are involved in some sort of homeschooling endeavor where there’s the child who has every kudo and accolade going on. And we’ve got the child at home who couldn’t find their shoes to go to the homeschool co-op in the first place. And the truth of the matter is your journey is your journey and it is equally valuable, and this is a hard job. You’re going to invest a lot of time and blood and sweat and tears. And you don’t see the return on your investment right away. But it doesn’t mean you’re not making a tremendously good investment, but you are fully capable and equipped to teach your children and figure out what worked this year and celebrate that because it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Janna Koch (30:54): Yeah, man. And nobody wants to run a marathon, Gretchen.
Gretchen Roe (31:00): I know it. I know, but you find yourself there, you know what our kids are going to grow up. So do you want to influence them or do you want somebody else to influence them?
Janna Koch (31:08): Yeah. Well, good advice coming from a mother who has seen it from start to finish and is now helping other parents as they are along their journeys.
You might not be sure about homeschooling, not to mention child-led learning. I know that I had a skeptical reaction initially. As someone who came from a public school education, it only seemed natural that the teacher was the boss and that learning had to happen in the classroom.
But when it came to educating my own children, I quickly realized that this type of model did not work for us. So after homeschooling my kids for more than two years, I can confidently say that homeschooling is the best because it allows for genuine child-led learning.
What Exactly Is Child-led Learning?
In broad terms, child-led learning is allowing your child lead the way. The child has a say in what they want to learn and how long they want to spend on activities. It also means encouraging children to learn at their own pace and in a way that suits them best.
Your initial response to child-led learning might be that this seems impractical. You may think:
Children don’t always know what’s good for them. They need a varied and broad education, but would they choose that on their own? And if I’m going to educate my kids myself, isn’t it safest to replicate the public school experience at home?
Let me give you some insight into what child-led learning in a homeschool can do.
The Benefits of Child-led Learning
A child who learns what they want, is going to be interested, engaged, and motivated.
A child who has the time and encouragement to learn something deeply and fully, is going to become an expert.
A child who takes ownership of their learning is going to develop a sense of self-confidence.
A child who can learn in a way that suits them best, is going to be successful and is also going to develop a love for learning.
Don’t these benefits sound exactly like what you want for your children?
How Can I Move Towards a Child-led Experience?
Even though child-led learning is not just for homeschoolers, it is definitely easier to offer in a home-ed environment. Unfortunately our education systems have a long way to go yet. So my first recommendation would be to consider homeschooling as an option.
Then encourage your children’s learning journey:
Offer them many different learning experiences so that they can discover what sparks their interest. This could mean taking them on field trips, showing them documentaries, and allowing them to use the internet freely (but safely, of course).
Hand over a curriculum catalog and show them the programs that would be a good fit for their age. Then let them choose what programs to study for the year.
Show them where to find information and take them to the library. You could also give them the opportunity to speak to people who are experts in their fields.
Give them the tools they need to do what they want. This could be equipment, resources, curriculum, or travel.
Be supportive and encouraging. Praise their efforts to be independent.
Lastly, set aside your expectations. Let them lead and don’t try to force your visions or ideas on them.
Child-led learning does take a lot of involvement and energy from parents. But once your child has found their way and is deeply involved in an academic pursuit, you will see the magic of child-led learning happening.
About the Author
Charlotte Jones is a multi-tasking mom who works from home. She spends her days blogging at My Little Home School, homeschooling her twins, and teaching English online.
Her home is a small house in a quaint little town on the coast of South Africa. You can often find her swimming in the lagoon or hiking in the forest with her husband, special needs twins, and furbaby.
She loves her family, spending time in nature, running, red lipstick, and drinking too much coffee.
Think back to your favorite textbook growing up. You probably read it word for word, right?
The weight of textbooks in our backpacks is often more memorable than the textbooks themselves. Not that they aren’t chock full of information. On the other hand, books like the fiction and non-fiction literature that make up the BookShark curricula conjure up images, characters and narratives. Certain books are so meaningful and memorable that when recalling their stories, the characters feel more like real people who you knew in your life than constructed characters from lines of text.
What if one of those special childhood books took place during the Civil War? It’s likely that the reader would learn about the Civil War in a more intimate way than they would through textbook. A young reader would “meet” the characters that represent the opposition, the leaders, the enslaved, the soldiers and the women and children left behind. The characters become real, and the reader feels empathy for them. The reader also learns a holistic view of the Civil War, and can place the event in their memory quite clearly.
Why Literature-Based Learning Works
This notion of experiential learning through reading is the basis of a literature-based curriculum. Reading a novel or a biography allows students to become deeply engaged in a story, and understand a wide range of topics more intimately from a more intimate perspective.
The engagement doesn’t end with the student and the book. Great books spur engaging conversations between teachers — in this case parents—and children. Parents can ask questions about the books, add their own knowledge about a place and time represented, and easily see where the child has gaps in understanding. This interaction is core to homeschooling through BookShark’s book-based learning program. Students receive individualized attention, genuine verbal interaction, and easy engagement when taught with books. This even holds true when it comes to literature-based learning for science and mathematics.
The Proven Benefits of Reading
The value of reading for children and adults alike is tried and true. Here are some proven benefits of reading:
The Reality is Reading Has Decreased in Our Culture
But where did this reading, and its numerous benefits to children as they grow into adults go? The Boston Globe reports:
Only 30% of 13-year-olds read almost every day.
The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9% in 1984 to 19% in 2004.
The average person between ages 15 and 24 spends 2 to 2 1/2 hours a day watching TV and just seven minutes reading.
Only about a third of high school seniors read at a proficient level, a 13% decline since 1992.
Unfortunately, the quiet work of a person and a book is often replaced with social interaction online, streaming content, television programming and digital games. Computer tablets, chat windows on computer screens, and smart phones are an all too tempting and easy distraction from reading a book.
The decline in reading is a problem that homeschooling parents can actively counteract. Give your children the love of deep reading, and that love will prioritize their free time throughout their development. As we know, strong routines build habits that stick with us through adulthood. Do your child a favor and create a framework for them to develop that habit. In the meantime, they will be learning, and more intimately understanding history, culture, language arts, science and even mathematics.
freedom to choose the curriculum you want to follow
freedom to do schoolwork in the morning, afternoon, or evening
freedom to shelve schoolwork for a day and take a fieldtrip
You, as the teacher, are the one shaping your child’s education.
Yet most of us homeschooling parents, especially those of us who ourselves attended traditional school, have trouble letting go of the brick-and-mortar school mentality. It’s deeply rooted within us, and we may not even realize how much it is influencing us and our decisions when it comes to our children’s education. These hidden assumptions are demonstrated clearly in the many misconceptions people have about BookShark.
Misconception #1: BookShark Levels Are Equivalent to Grade Levels
Many people look at BookShark curriculum, and they automatically assume that each level corresponds to a grade, i.e. Level 5 is for a 5th grade student. While a 5th grader can certainly tackle Level 5, what most people miss is that BookShark gives an age range for each level. Level 5, for instance, is recommended for ages 10-13, which means it can be used for what is traditionally thought of as 5th – 8th grades!
I encourage parents to choose the BookShark curriculum along the upper end of the age range instead of the lower one. Using Level 5 for ages 10-13 as an example again, I suggest this curriculum is better suited for the typical 12 and 13 year old (the upper age range) than the lower range of ages 10 and 11. You know your child best. Is your child sensitive? Go with the upper age range. Is your child especially mature or gifted? Then you may want to try the lower range.
This rule of choosing along the upper end of the age range is especially valid for higher levels that include sensitive topics. For instance, my son used Level 5 in 7th grade at age 12. One of our favorite books was the read-aloud A Moment Comes which deals with weighty issues. While he would have understood the book at a surface level as a 5th grader, his added maturity as a 7th grader helped him catch nuances and implications that he would have largely missed at a younger age.
Misconception #2: Your Child Will Fall Behind If He Isn’t at the “Right” Level
Even after hearing the advice to teach your child using the BookShark Level where he is at the higher end of the age range, many parents just can’t do so. Why? They’re afraid that their child will “fall behind” if they’re doing Level 5 as a 7th grader. They worry that if their child is doing Level 7 as a 9th grader, he’s actually completing a middle school curriculum as a high school student.
Yet look at everything your child is learning. In Level 7, your child will read 26 novels. I’m sure that most brick-and-mortar high school freshman are not reading that many books, nor are they reading books of the same quality.
However, it is true that you may need to change some aspects of the curriculum if your child is at the high age range. For instance, a high school freshman is not likely in pre-algebra, which is the math curriculum used for Level 7. That situation is easily remedied by customizing your Math selection. Just choose the Algebra package instead. (By the way, for help customizing a package, just email or call BookShark.)
As a parent who loves BookShark and has seen what tremendous knowledge children get from being on the higher end of the age range, I say your child will not be behind his peers with this curriculum.
Misconception #3: Students Aren’t Learning Because They Aren’t Taking Tests
Here is the last, and perhaps strongest, misconception from our own school days—to learn something, a student must take a test.
Think back to your school experience with tests. Was it like mine? I crammed furiously, hoping the information stayed in my brain long enough to make at least a B on the test. Then I promptly forgot it all because I didn’t learn the information in a genuine way.
We all know that an A on a test doesn’t mean the information was internalized. An A could merely mean that the information was memorized, only to disappear in a few weeks or months.
Because BookShark students are learning in a genuine way that is more likely to pique their interests, they’re more likely to remember what they read. In addition, after every section of reading, there are questions to monitor your children’s reading comprehension and to dive more deeply into the events and ideas. These discussions about what you are reading is one of the best parts of BookShark, and they are a superior substitute for tests.
Students are learning more—without tests—because they’re learning much more deeply.
If you bring a brick-and-mortar school mentality to BookShark (and it’s hard not to if that’s the way you received your own education), you may have these three misconceptions. But rest assured, BookShark provides a quality education, just in a different way than a traditional school. For me, that makes it a much stronger curriculum.
About Our Author
Melissa is a homeschool mom to three kids. BookShark is her primary curriculum, and she and her kids love it! When she’s not homeschooling, she’s either shuttling kids from one activity to another or working from home as a freelance writer. You can read more about Melissa’s homeschool journey at her blog Moms Plans.
When you first make the choice to homeschool, what you need and want most is support. And naturally, where do you look first for that support? Family, and almost always, your parents. Now if grandparents have been unsupportive and critical of your parenting decisions from the start, their criticisms of homeschooling probably won’t surprise you. But if, on the other hand, you are used to unwavering support for your parenting choices, opposition to homeschooling may come as a shock.
Whatever your experience in the past, keep in mind that unless you are a second-generation homeschooler, homeschooling isn’t an obvious choice. As much as it has progressed over the years, homeschooling is far from mainstream. You are choosing an educational option that is far from vetted with no guarantees of a successful outcome—at least in their minds. You are putting their precious grandchildren’s future at risk, and they probably won’t keep quiet about it.
Personally, my parents are former teachers and administrators in the public school system. They seem to love the fact that my kids aren’t exposed to the (what they call) garbage of public schools, Common Core, and the non-stop standardized testing. But at the same time, they often make comments about homeschooling that seem a bit disparaging of my choice.
So what can you do when grandparents voice their criticisms and concerns of your choice to homeschool? For all of you dealing with more extreme opposition, my heart goes out to you. Homeschooling is hard enough without grandparents hating it. While the interactions I’ve experienced haven’t been that extreme, I want to offer you the tips and advice that have helped me thus far.
1. Remember Grandparents Want What’s Best for Their Grandkids
While this isn’t always the case, most grandparents love their grandchildren and want the best possible outcome for them. When they express concerns—directly or indirectly—it comes from a place of love and concern. They probably don’t want to pick a fight.
2. Resist the Urge to Engage the Negative Comments
When the negative comments and questions come, resist the urge to engage in a debate or lengthy conversation. It’s kind of like politics on Facebook: pretty much no one everhas changed their mind because of a political debate in a Facebook thread, right? We share things that reinforce what we believe to be true, and other side does the same.
You are probably not going to change their mind about homeschooling with a conversation. Hopefully that will happen when they see evidence in the superior outcomes that your style of education provides. Choose to quickly move past the comments and change the subject. If they insist on returning to it, see the next tip.
3. Devise a Canned Response
In the heat of the moment, it’s easy to say things we regret. Or worse, in my opinion, to get flustered and look like an idiot just when you want to impress them with your witty response. Instead, choose a predetermined response that leaves no room for debate or discussion. Here are a few I keep handy:
Homeschooling is the best choice for our family right now.
I’m glad regular school worked best for us growing up. Homeschooling is working really well for us.
I appreciate your concern, but right now, homeschooling is working really well for us.
I’m sure you can come up with better ones, but make sure they are not baiting, sarcastic, or defensive. Make it short and sweet, polite but firm, with no room for further discussion.
4. Set Boundaries with Grandparents
Depending on how antagonistic—or passive-aggressive—the grandparents actually are, you may need to set firm boundaries about what they can and cannot say to your kids. For example, have you noticed that certain people love quizzing homeschooled kids? They are determined to prove that homeschooling is a poor educational choice.
While some kids can take that kind of interrogation without batting an eye, some kids will walk away from a Q&A session extremely anxious, wondering if they measure up. Other times, grandparents might suggest to your kids all the fun things about school they are missing out on:
“Wouldn’t you love to see other kids every day?”
“Buying school supplies is so much fun!”
“Putting on the school play was one of my favorite memories from school. Don’t you wish you could be in a play?”
Whatever grandparents might say to your kids about homeschooling or traditional school, make sure you have a conversation with them to establish guidelines for what is okay and not okay. Those guidelines will likely vary based on how anti-homeschooling they actually are and how confrontational they tend to be. It doesn’t need to a be a long conversation, but you should be clear about a few main points:
You hear and understand that they don’t love homeschooling.
You are the parent and you will continue to make the best decisions you can for your kids, including the educational ones.
You hear and understand that they don’t love homeschooling.
They cannot undermine your decision via your kids. And if they persist in their attempts to do so, you will need to set stricter boundaries about how often they interact with your kids alone.
Surround Yourself with Supporters
When the people closest to you don’t agree with your choice to homeschool, you can start to doubt your decision. Those first few months of homeschooling can be so tough. You don’t really know what you’re doing yet. You haven’t fully found your footing, and you desperately need to believe that you made the right choice.
You need to surround yourself with like-minded homeschooling parents—both newbies and veterans. You need cheerleaders, parents who will encourage and support you. Whether you find that those people in person or online, make sure to set aside time to find them. You’re going to need a place to vent, a shoulder to cry on, and a pat on the back to let you know you’re doing great.
Final Thoughts on When Grandparents Disagree with Homeschooling
Change is hard. Change is even harder as you get older. When our society has so normalized school that any other choice is taboo, you need to expect questions and stares and criticisms, even from those closest to you. People fear what they don’t know. Grandparents might also have experiences with homeschool families that are less than ideal—the ones who give homeschooling a bad name.
Either way, remember to stay humble in all of this because honestly, we don’t know our kids’ educational outcomes either! We can do all the right things, but we still cannot guarantee a fantastic educational outcome for our kids, any more than traditional schools can. The schools just happen to already have the benefit of the doubt. As homeschoolers, we are still earning ours.
Grandparents might eventually come around, when they see homeschooling really working for your kids. But it may take them longer than you’d like. Hang in there while you wait. And whatever you do, don’t let their negativity make you question your choice to homeschool.
You will always find people who don’t love your parenting choices. You can choose to let the questions cripple you, or you can choose to let them strengthen your parenting muscles and increase your confidence. The choice is up to you.
About Our Author
June loves deep discussions about homeschooling, parenting, and minimalism. When she’s not homeschooling, decluttering, or blogging at This Simple Balance, she loves to enjoy perfect silence while sipping a hot cup of coffee and thinking uninterrupted thoughts—which, of course, with four kids ages eight and under doesn’t happen very often!
You can bring that knowledge to life even further by supplementing BookShark’s curriculum with hands-on learning experiences and culinary delights. Whether your child is using BookShark Level B for ages 6-8 (1st Grade) or Level 6 for ages 11-13 (6th grade), they’ll enjoy these extra world history activities. For older kids using Level 6, let them take more ownership in the planning (and clean up) of the projects. For younger kids in Level 1, you’ll need to take the lead.
Ancient Greece: Activities
1. Create a LEGO Parthenon
For the LEGO fans in your home, why not create the Greek Parthenon? Find photos online for inspiration, and enhance your building with LEGO minifigures from the time period.
2. Create a Physical Map of Greece
Form self-hardening clay into the mainland of Greece and all the many islands. Do this inside a 9 x 13” glass baking pan or deep sheet pan. After you let it completely dry, pour a pitcher of water dyed blue over the model. You’ll have the beautiful Greek mainland and islands as well as the Aegean Sea. For older students, you can create flags attached to toothpicks and insert them in the land masses to identify each of the islands.
3. Make a Greek Vase
You can make your own vase with papier mache, or you can simply buy a plain terracotta vase from the store. Then all you’ll need is a pencil and a black marker or acrylic paint pen. Search the Internet for actual Greek vase designs as inspiration. Sketch out the design in pencil first, and then go over it with a fine-tipped permanent marker.
4. Star Gaze
Learn the Greek constellations and then go out after dark to locate them in the night sky. Lay down a blanket for comfortable star gazing, use a mobile app to help you begin your search, and bring out some munchies like popcorn.
Ancient Greece: Foods
What better way to learn about a people than eating the foods that they typically ate or are most famous for? For your Greek feast, consider these culinary delights. If cooking really isn’t your thing, look for a local restaurant where you can take a mid-day field trip to try the dishes.
1. Gyros
Cook lamb and make gyros. Simply cook and slice the lamb thinly and place on a pita along with cucumbers and tzatziki. You can buy the tzatziki ready-made or mix up your own with yogurt, cucumbers, garlic, salt, olive oil, and herbs.
2. Greek Salad
Serve a Greek salad with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, olives, and feta cheese. Add a drizzle of olive oil and lemon juice over the whole salad.
3. Make a Greek Salad Skewer
Don’t have time for a full Greek feast? Why not make a Greek hors d’oeuvre? Simply skewer one grape tomato, one slice of cucumber, half of a black olive, and a cube of cheese onto a toothpick. This is a quick snack that will give your kids the taste of Ancient Greece without hours of preparation.
Round out your Greek meal with hummus, goat cheese, and olives. For a fun dessert, you can serve baklava.
Of course, you don’t have to do all of these activities. Choose one or two that fit into your schedule and your child’s interest. Your child will likely remember doing these activities for years to come, and in turn, they’ll remember their study of Ancient Greece.
Historical fiction is a big part of our homeschool. I believe that reading historical fiction greatly enhances both our understanding of history as well as our retention of facts from history.
That being said, you would be surprised how that flame got lit. It started long before I ever had children, long before I ever got married. In high school I had a history teacher who used historical fiction to teach. We would learn about a topic from the textbook, but we also had to read one historical fiction book from each unit. We wrote about these, we listened to each other present theirs, and we learned a ton. In fact, my favorite book to date is one I read that year for history.
Needless to say that my history teacher, and his means of teaching, really stuck with me. I encourage you to consider reading historical fiction as a solid and valuable means of learning history for the following reasons.
Historical Fiction Makes History Matter
When kids can get involved in a story by mentally putting themselves in a historical setting, they glean a whole new perspective on the names and dates on the page. Historical fiction makes history seem relevant and personal.
Historical Fiction Offers Food for Thought
Reading historical fiction gives kids a chance to learn empathy and compassion. It helps them to see the similarities that lie just underneath our differences. When they can sport similarities and difference in historical movements, time periods, and people, it helps them to dig deeper and think about the bigger pictures in their life and times.
Historical Fiction Brings Dates, People, and Facts to Life
Historical fiction makes the facts come alive. It gives the heroes and villains from history varied facets, bringing to life what was once only names and maps, printed in black and white.
Historical Fiction Brings to Light Multiple Perspectives
When reading from a textbook you typically get one perspective with the author’s or editor’s bias. When reading various works of historical fiction pertaining to a person or time period, children get to see multiple perspectives. For instance, when we were learning about the Titanic we stumbled upon a book called Ghosts of the Titanic. It was told from their perspective of those sent out to clear the bodies from the water, as opposed to from the side of someone on that voyage. This is a side we had never seen or even knew existed. Reading that book offered us a chance to see the situation from a different point of view.
For these reasons I encourage you to consider a literature-rich curriculum or at least to to include historical fiction in your plans for history. Even if you just include a book here or there as a supplement to your history studies, it could very well be the thing that lights a fire of interest, or open up a new perspective for your child.
About Our Author
Heidi Ciravola has been married to her husband for over seventeen years. Together they have three children with whom they began their homeschooling journey with in 2006 when their oldest was beginning second grade. Heidi is a mother, taxi service, and homeschool parent by day and an avid reader and homeschool blogger whenever there is time left over. You can visit Heidi at her blog Starts at Eight where she blogs about homeschool products and unit studies, homeschool organization and general tips, and homeschooling high school, as well as many book reviews, lists, and unit studies.
The idea of reading stories aloud to our children is almost as old as the idea of parenthood itself. Long before printed books were available, children learned history, language, and more simply by oral retelling.
Now that many of our children are exposed to technology at a young age, reading stories aloud can seem a bit outdated. But using read-alouds with our children, especially children who have ADHD, can be wonderfully beneficial.
Why Read Aloud to Kids with ADHD
Since children who have ADHD may have problems with executive functioning, they may have trouble processing information and understanding how to use it. If you have a child with auditory processing issues, for example, he or she may not hear speech correctly, process it correctly, or understand how to turn it into action.
And that’s where reading aloud can help. As you read aloud to your children, you may be able to spot auditory processing issues at an early age. You can even use reading aloud to strengthen their auditory processing skills.
Reading aloud also serves another purpose: it can make your children more interested in reading. Since reading requires sustained attention, children who have ADHD may find it difficult to sit still or concentrate long enough to develop a love for reading on their own.
With read-alouds, though, you can make stories fascinating simply by the way you read them. Your children might become fans of certain characters, which could inspire them to seek out and read more books about those characters on their own.
How to Read Aloud to Kids with ADHD
Now, the big question is howdo you read aloud to kids with ADHD? Simple. Bring the book to life as much as you humanly can. Remember, the goal is to keep your kids interested in the story. So do whatever you can to make that happen.
Here are a few tips to try:
Use different voices for each character.
Stand up and act out a scene or two as you read.
Have the kids take turns helping you read a passage.
Dress up in a costume based on one of the characters.
Let your child choose the book you read.
Give your child something soft to fidget with or squeeze as you read.
It’s also helpful to stop every now and then to do a short review of what you’ve read so far and to build interest for what’s to come. Simple questions to ask:
Tell me what happened with (character) in the beginning?
Did you hear what (character) said to (different character)?
What do you think will happen next?
Do you think the story will have a happy ending?
Afterwards, ask your child what he or she liked and didn’t like about the story. Use those answers as a guide for choosing your next novel. Depending on your child’s age, you could do an extension activity such as drawing a picture of an event in the story or writing an alternate ending.
Reading aloud to children who have ADHD can help them develop listening skills, retain information, and learn to love reading. Adding read-aloud books to your homeschooling curriculum is definitely worth the time and the effort.
And who knows? Your child may even end up reading stories aloud to you in return!
Homeschoolers are record keepers! Depending on our state’s requirements and personal preference we fill folders and boxes, create portfolios and transcripts, write lesson plans, make charts, take hundreds of pictures, maybe even blog.
Here in Indiana, even though I’m not required to turn records into the state, I keep my children’s projects, encourage their goals, and document their learning. I want to capture our time together. I want my children to see and remember their progress. And when doubt sets in as to whether or not I’m doing enough with them, my records remind me that yes! Yes, I am.
A number of years ago I came across the work of Ryder Carroll. The creator of The Bullet Journal, Carroll offers an analog method to, “track the past, order the present, design the future.”
I love journals and organizing, so I immediately took to bullet journaling my grocery lists, to-do lists, goals, the books I read, the books I wanted to read . . . When I found that many of my pages included bits and pieces of our homeschooling days, I realized we needed a homeschool bullet journal.
I won’t go into specifics as to how to bullet journal, since you can find out everything you need to here. But remember that the point of bullet journaling is to make life easier, not harder. I have not found that keeping my calendar in my bullet journal is especially helpful.
I prefer an actual calendar and don’t have time to write our daily comings and goings multiple times. Instead, our homeschool bullet journal captures our past, present, and future more thematically.
Your BookShark Instructor’s Guide could serve as a basis for your journal, but you may find it too bulky and inflexible for day to day record keeping. If you want to use bullet journaling, you’ll probably want to use a separate notebook. A homeschool bullet journal typically goes beyond lesson planning and incorporates the extras from your larger family life.
Once you set up your homeschool bullet journal, you just have to remember to use it. Put it on your bedside table and spend time each night recording and reflecting. Or put it by your coffee pot and use it to begin your day. Pull it out to help you plan for the week, month, and semester. If you have older children, let them add to it and check off the things they accomplished.
It can be challenging to organize all the information and remember all the things. A homeschool bullet journal won’t shrink your child’s LEGO model of the Seven Wonders of the World, but it will remind you they made it. It will keep your book lists, goals, grades, achievements, and reminders safe and sound and all in one place. They are both easy to create and to use. Give homeschool bullet journaling a try.
About Our Author
Kelly left teaching middle and high school English to homeschool her children and reclaim how she and her family spent their time. Followers of interest-led learning, her family’s days rarely look the same, but they tend to include a lot of books, art supplies, and time outside.
Kelly facilitates local writing circles for women and children and blogs about nurturing the love of learning on her blog, Curiosity Encouraged. She loves to journal, read memoirs, hike, and travel. She seeks quiet mornings and good coffee daily.
