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You may have noticed that one of my purposes for this blog is to share with you my mistakes so you won’t have to make them. However, I know that no matter how many blogs you follow, no matter how many books you read, you will make mistakes. I want to encourage you: you don’t have to be perfect to homeschool your child well. Classroom teachers aren’t perfect, and you won’t be either. It’s okay. What better way to encourage you than to share my own homeschool fails with you? I’ve honestly made so many, I can’t even remember them all! I made mistakes as a classroom teacher, too. Here, however, are my three biggest homeschool fails. Perhaps you can relate. #1 The Phonics Nightmare Between my three kids, I have used five different phonics curriculums. Every time I have switched, it has been because the previous experience was an unmitigated disaster that I feared had made my children despise reading forever. It’s never good when your child starts to cry as soon as you get the phonics book out. With Luke, my oldest, I first tried Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. Let me tell you, there was nothing easy about it. Every lesson was supposed to take fifteen minutes. It took us three times that. They used this weird way of writing the letters phonetically that made no sense to Luke (or me, for that matter). Then he was supposed to write certain letters several times, at which point he would throw his pencil and writhe on the ground like he needed an exorcism. He was delayed in his fine motor skills and was only five, so I don’t know what I was expecting. The day he screamed, “no!” when I got the book out, I knew it was time for a change. (I felt like screaming myself). We switched to Explode the Code, which wasn’t great, but he at least didn’t scream when he saw the books. Even though they were workbooks, I reduced the amount of words he had to actually write (a lot of it was circling the correct words or letters). Even though his phonics experience wasn’t the greatest, he’s now reading voraciously, and on a college level. The first book I tried with Haley, my middle child, was Phonics Pathways. It didn’t have weird phonics symbols or a writing component, so I thought we’d be okay. Wrong. She never screamed. No, she cried. Sobbed at times. Eventually, just seeing the book was enough to elicit tears. It got so bad, she started struggling to breath just looking at the list of words she was supposed to sound out. At first, I made her a glitter calming jar to shake when we did phonics. Then I suddenly thought, “What am I doing?” She loves to draw, so I looked for a phonics curriculum with an art component, and discovered First Start Reading by Memoria Press. She began to have success with it. It still wasn’t perfect and had way too much writing, in my opinion, but it seemed to be working. As the lessons got more difficult, she started to hyperventilate again when she saw long lists of words to sound out, so we just went really slow, reading only five or six words at a time. Haley now loves to read and is reading on grade level. The entire experience of teaching my first two kids to read was humbling in the most agonizing way. Everyone assumed it was the easiest part for me. After all, I was an English education major. Here’s what nobody understood: when you get a degree in teaching middle and high school students English literature, the assumption is that your students already know how to read. I didn’t know anything more about how to teach a child to read than the next mom. An older homeschool mom gave me the most encouraging piece of advice during this time period. She said, “There are two great mysteries in parenting: potty training and learning how to read. You think they’re never going to get it, but somehow, they do.” (I was also potty training a toddler when she told me this - I seriously started crying!) When it came time to teach Ian, my youngest, to read, I was on a mission: find a phonics curriculum that didn’t require any writing or workbooks. I also didn’t want to pay a small fortune for it. (Why do so many phonics curriculums cost hundreds of dollars?) I discovered Simply Charlotte Mason’s Delightful Reading Series. We have absolutely loved it! My older two always complain, “why didn’t we get to do that when we learned to read?” I know that every kid is different, and that there’s no perfect phonics curriculum, but of all five that I have tried, this is the one I recommend the most. You can check it out on their website here:
#2 The Tragic Ballad of Dusty and Princess
When my oldest two were in first grade and pre-k, for science we just checked out the Let’s Read and Find Out science books from the library. The series has all kinds of topics from the five senses, to how a seed grows, to how a tadpole becomes a frog.
Now, when we read What’s It Like to Be a Fish?, I had already had one semi failure with one of these books. When we read How a Seed Grows, it tells you to plant beans in an egg carton, and dig a different one up each day to see how it’s growing. One seed you let grow for two weeks, and you get a little bean plant! I am the worst gardener in the history of the world, I promise you, so I was pretty proud that this little plant survived. The question was, now what did we do with it? Luke and Haley didn’t want it to die, so I thought maybe we could plant it in the backyard.
I went to my friend Amanda, a fantastic gardener, to ask her what I should do. As she talked about proper soil, the right place in the yard to get the perfect amount of sun, and getting a bean pole to support the plant, my head spun. I did a sneaky mom thing: I threw the little plant in the garbage and hoped the kids wouldn’t notice. However, when What’s It Like to Be a Fish? suggested getting a goldfish, I thought, “how hard can it be?” So we went to Walmart and Luke and Haley picked out two goldfish whom they named Dusty and Princess. I was shocked at the cost of aquariums, so we just got a bowl. Again, how hard could it be? Famous last words.
Taking care of a goldfish in a bowl, you know, without the filtering and stuff on a nicer aquarium, is a pain in the neck. The water gets disgusting fast, so you have to clean it every few days. Unbeknownst to me, you also can’t just put the fish in a baggy, wipe out the bowl, then put them back in new water. Oh no, the little guys are sensitive to the temperature of the water, so you have to use old water in their little bags, then let them sit in their bags in the new water for a little while, then, when the temperature is perfect, you can release them into the clean water.
I’m sure you know where this is going. Yes, I killed Dusty and Princess. In my defense, I did keep them alive for about a month. But one fateful day, sick and tired of cleaning out the bowl, I didn’t wait as long as I should have to reintroduce the fish to the bowl. Princess went into shock immediately, poor thing. Dusty lasted about a day. The worst part is, I was secretly glad because I didn’t want to clean that stupid bowl anymore. My children weren’t particularly attached to the fish, so I flushed them down the toilet without saying anything. It was weeks before they noticed. Actually, they noticed the empty bowl in the garage first. We had a beloved dog at the time, so I don’t think it really affected them all that much. Scout was far more fun, after all. You can’t cuddle a fish or play catch with it. Hopefully, they at least learned some science despite their mother’s touch of death. Speaking of which . . . #3 The Ant Farm of Death
Apologia’s Young Explorers Series: Flying Creatures of the Fifth Day recommends a few hands-on activities with living things. One of them is getting an ant farm and watching the hard working little guys go about their lives. I ordered one from Amazon, despite my misgivings. We had skipped so many of the experiments, I was starting to feel guilty.
Here’s the thing: an ant farm doesn’t arrive at your door with ants inside. You either have to go outside and catch some ants yourself, or you order the ants separately. Since I certainly wasn’t about to go ant hunting, I ordered ants.
I can’t believe I just typed that. You might be a homeschool mom if . . . Anyways, when the ants arrive, you can’t just put them inside the farm because they’ll crawl all over the place instead of going inside. (And yes, they can bite you. They aren’t fire ants, but still . . .) So, you have to put them in the refrigerator for a little while to put them to sleep, but not too long or you’ll kill them. I put the little tube they were in inside the fridge, but I was paranoid I would kill them, so when I got them out and started dumping them into the farm, they started to wake up. I started screaming as I frantically dumped them into their home. Things only went downhill from there (no pun intended). The other thing we discovered is that you have to keep your home at a certain temperature if you have an ant farm. If the ants get too cold, they will die. The instructions said to keep it between 65 and 75 degrees fahrenheit. No problem, we thought. Well . . . It was spring when we got the ant farm, and spring in the deep south where we live is very confusing. It could be fifty degrees when you wake up in the morning, then be eighty that afternoon. So we would start the day with the heat on, then have to turn on the air. One night before bed, we forgot to turn the heat on. We woke up to a freezing house the next morning. And a lot of dead ants in the ant farm. However, once the house warmed up, some of the ants started perking back up. We breathed a sigh of relief. We also got a rather macabre lesson in ant colonies: they have a burial room. We watched the poor little ants carry their fallen comrades to a special section they had created in the farm. Over the next few days, we sadly watched more and more ants succumb to death. We made sure to turn the heat on each night, but it was already too late. Soon there was only one poor ant carrying dead bodies. All alone. It was probably the most depressing homeschool lesson possible. Epic mom fail. My kids still to this day talk about the last ant left. I’m suddenly getting very emotional about this memory. God, I probably scarred my kids for life. These three stories don’t even cover all of the times I’ve been too lazy to do an experiment in science or a hands-on project in history. It doesn’t outline the times I’ve gotten confused explaining something, confusing my children even more. There are also the epic fails I made as a classroom teacher. Like an activity on the Holocaust where I had all my ninth graders take their shoes off and put them in a giant, messy pile only for the fire alarm to go off. You know that scene in Kindergarten Cop when Arnold Schwarzenagger’s class comes running out of the building during the fire drill screaming in chaos, and the entire rest of the school is standing there waiting for them? Yeah, that was my class, but without shoes. I hope by sharing some of my most embarrassing moments as a teacher and a mom, it’s helped you be a little less hard on yourself. Someday, we can all laugh at our epic fails. While shedding a tear or two for the ants. (But not the fish. God, I hated cleaning that bowl.)
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AuthorHi, I'm Melanie! I'm a homeschooling mom of three kids ages 13, 11, and 9. I have a BS in English Secondary Education from Asbury University plus 30 hours of gifted certification course work. I've taught in just about every situation you can imagine. Public school, private, homeschool hybrid, and private tutoring. The most important thing I've learned? One on one, individualized instruction can't be beat. Archives
July 2022
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