Once you’ve made the decision to take the plunge and homeschool your child, you’ll only have begun to answer the myriad of questions about how and what you’re going to teach. How soon do you officially start? How structured will the curriculum be? How much should you emphasize academics vs. Funny activities? The list goes on.
A good place to start is to find out what the state requirements are for children the same age as your child. Those requirements aren’t necessarily going to be ideal for your child, but they do give you a foundation to work from. There has been a trend in schooling to boost academic subjects in children at an ever younger age. I was shocked to read about “the rigors of kindergarten” in a preschool handwriting teacher’s guide. But it is true. Today’s kindergartners are expected to read and write complete sentences and keep journals. Is your child ready for that kind of “rigors”?
The question of whether or not your child is ready for a certain amount and level of work is more complicated than it first appears. Many times, the reasons a child won’t or can’t do the job have little to do with her intellectual ability to do it. It may have to do with developmental or other obstacles that are part of the curriculum but not necessarily related to the subject.
Take, for example, the scenario of a girl who has reached the kindergarten age limit for one month and now sits down to learn her phonics. You take her step by step through each sound and letter, little by little. Through her choice phonics program, she introduces you to the principles of word decoding and sentence structure. Does her son of hers have the ability to capture all of that? The answer is generally yes, but it depends on how you present it. Phonetics is by nature a highly intellectual and structured subject. The most obvious way to do this is to sit down at the table and go through it step by step.
And that’s where you might run into issues that might make you think your child just isn’t ready for phonics yet, and what were those legislators thinking anyway when they decided kindergartners had to learn to read? But is phonetics really the problem? Many parents teaching a five-year-old to read have found that they pick up on everything you throw at them with astonishing speed, but often the focus isn’t there. They have everything except the attention span.
Turns out the problem was the sitting part. Children this young should never sit still at desks for more than ten minutes on a good day. They were meant to climb, run, play, move. Wise parents will find a way to incorporate more action into the reading lesson and more often than not find that their children become the model of focus.
A mother wrote all the sentences she expected her son to read in large print on separate sheets of paper. She then scattered some pieces of blue yarn down the hall to turn it into a raging river. Each piece of paper was a springboard that she could use to cross the raging river. Once she read the sentence, she taped it to the floor. The first time a mother tried this, her daughter read twenty sentences in less than an hour without complaint, whereas the day before it had been difficult to get her to read just two. She had a goal she could relate to, and she was able to run up and down the aisle putting up the rungs and taping them down.
Another potential hurdle with young readers concerns tracking. The ability to follow words across a page, one line at a time, is an advanced development skill that not everyone has when they start school. It has nothing to do with decoding words and sentences, but it can result in a child feeling overwhelmed when he sees a page that appears to be full of tiny black letters. The way to solve it is to rewrite or write the words in bigger letters; basically turning each sentence into a miniature billboard so your child can focus on decoding the words without straining their eyes trying to trace. Tracking ability will develop sometime between the ages of six and ten, but there’s no reason for that to delay the reading part.
It is possible that after making some adjustments to present the material in a developmentally appropriate way, your child may still have trouble with reading itself. At that point, it may make sense to step back and give your child more time to grow. But chances are good that your child is ready to read, but not to crawl or sit still for long. As long as you present the curriculum in a way that doesn’t require your child to sit still for too long or continue beyond her ability, teaching your child to read should be a joy for both of you.
