Eleven years ago, I was a mom with a toddler daughter and I knew nothing of child development. I typed a lot, and I typed quickly. She wanted to copy me, so I found a broken keyboard and put it on a child-sized table beside my desk. She had her chair and could copy me, typing while I typed.
Soon she pointed to keys and asked, "What's that?"
I answered her by telling her the letters of the alphabet. It became a game. Somehow, by way of a broken reject keyboard trashed by my former office, my daughter learned her alphabet. We didn't need the best electronic toy to teach her, didn't need a full series of flashcards, and didn't rely on complex lesson plans.
I didn't know better. With time, as I told her the letters, I told her what sounds those letters made. It was never during formal lesson time but in the course of conversation during playtime.
Then I began to want to homeschool. But I knew I couldn't do that because I never took an education course and knew nothing about teaching children to read. That had to be a hard task to master, and reading was too important for me to do anything but leave it to the experts — the trained professionals — which I certainly was not.
Somehow, my daughter learned to read without my realizing how or why. It just sort of happened. We did some phonics with her, but mostly it was something that she did on her own or as part of the natural course of her playtime.
With fear and trembling, after three bad days of private kindergarten, we pulled her out to homeschool as an experiment. I was still scared. We didn't know another family that homeschooled. I didn't know the name of a single publisher, co-op, support group, or contact. I thought my children would grow up lonely and isolated at my kitchen table as I drilled them with workbooks. Except I didn't know where to find workbooks.
So I went to Sam's, bought a comprehensive curriculum book and a "what your kindergartener should know" book. She did 6 pages a day in the workbook and we read books upon books from our library. I still didn't know what I was doing. Somehow, by guess, by golly, and of course by God, she became a reader.
That same year, my biggest concern was my three-year-old son who scored off the low end of the scale in articulation. He was in speech therapy four days weekly and music therapy once a week. I was too worried about his speech and language to be concerned about him reading. His therapists gave him small paper bags for different sounds to master and put on the front of each bag the letter and a cue word picture. We filled the bags with other words that started with those sounds so he could practice saying them.
For two years, my life revolved around those paper bags of cue words and a letter a day — targeting sounds in the hope that if he heard them he would repeat them. The average child needed to hear a sound 8 to 10 times to repeat it. In his subgroup of late talkers, the average child needed to hear those same sounds 75 to 100 times to repeat them. With my son, in those early days of speech therapy, I calculated it took 750 to 1,000 repetitions of a sound for him to repeat it. For months, we read B books, did B finger plays, and more. Finally, two months into speech therapy, he had a Helen Keller moment. As he looked at a picture book about Halloween, he pointed to a picture and said, "Bats." It was his first spontaneous "b" word and was as thrilling to us as w-a-t-e-r must have been to Annie Sullivan.
His next "b" word wasn't quite so thrilling. As I took the kids through the grocery store, my 5-year-old daughter pointed to a sign in the meat department, reading, "Pork butts!" My son, sitting in the grocery cart, went through the rest of my shopping expedition shouting, "Butts! Butts! Butts!" I did not stop him because we had worked so hard to get that "b" sound, and I ignored the puzzled stares of other customers.
His speech eventually came, and I realized he would need a more formal phonics program, one with auditory discrimination, so we went with Saxon Publishers. The daily lesson plans helped me reinforce his speech sounds while hammering home those ever-so-valuable phonics rules. A friend sold the used curriculum to me.
As we started the rigorous phonics, I realized his speech therapy for 2 years had more than prepared him for phonics. All by way of some simple paper bags with pictures in them.
The most important thing I have learned as a homeschool mother is that we need to use the tools we have — the ones God has already provided for us. For my daughter, it was a broken computer keyboard. For my son, it was a set of paper bags from the therapists and then a used, discounted phonics program. Two children — two different needs. Sometimes we can use the same methods from one child to the next. Other times, we cannot.
The tools we have may not be as important as how we use them. Do we use them thoroughly and aim for mastery of material? Or do we set a goal to quickly get through the workbooks and call that mastery? A combination of those two perspectives will give our kids the most balanced education. Is our goal to finish 6th grade language? Or is it to give our children the tools of language so they can read, write, speak, think, and act in an educated manner?
Last spring, I worked through how best to prepare my daughter for her 8th grade year. Which language book would I use? As I struggled, I remembered that last summer, I ran into a homeschool father who handed a book to me and said I might make use of it one day. I had no intention of using it but had thrown it on the shelf and forgotten about it. When I remembered, I opened it and found exactly what I needed. God provided it for me last summer, a year before I needed it or even knew I needed it.
If you struggle with what to use, remember to first make the best use of what you have. The rest will follow.