Gates? Michelangelo? Einstein? Abraham? WHO?
The week I first started teaching my oldest to read was the week I got the best education of my motherhood. I was trying to teach this very active four year old boy to sit still for 30 minutes while I taught him how to read. We were going to start with the vowel sound as outlined in the book that was opened to page one on the kitchen table. This was going to be the BEST!
In the background were two little brothers playing with the things the boy at the table wanted so desperately to play with. His littlest brother was eating his latest Lego creation, just like an 18 month old was suppose to be. His just younger brother was coloring in "his" coloring book, and he colored just like a two year old; totally making the page black because you have to use every color in the box.
Now, In my mind this was going to be the best school day ever! I was ready. The two toddlers were busy with "their" thing and I had a book ready to go. Oh, let the education angels start singing my praises.
I want to know who gave my four year old son a will of his own, a mind of his own and to top it off a time table that didn't even come close to matching mine. My mother calls that "sweet revenge," but I couldn't have possibly been anywhere near that bad, now could I?
Needless to say I only got about one sentence our of my mouth when my student bolted from his chair to save the LEGO spaceship from "Monster Mikey" and then had to stop and rebuild it. He then noticed that the landing strip was destroyed by "Bigfoot Jason" who came to find out what the shrills from his little brother were all about. It just turned into a disaster. No learning took place that day, or did it?
Something I hadn't learned yet was that I was missing two very important things that day. It wasn't a book, it wasn't the fact that my two toddler sons where busy and out of my hair (at least for the next 30 seconds.) What was missing was a goal.
It really doesn't matter why you are homeschooling and what method you are going to use until you come up with the answer to this question, "What are we raising?" (Notice I put the "we" in that question. I sure hope you approach homeschooling like you do parenting, a partnership with your spouse.)
You may think that a silly question but many moms and dads start homeschooling to raise the next baby Einstein, the next Nobel Prize winner, the next Harvard valedictorian in Law or Medicine. As a wonderful man once said, "Michelangelo, Beethoven, Bach, Galileo, Plato, Franklin, Lincoln, Frost, Berlin etc. were born; they weren't made." Yes, their schooling (learning, education etc.) helped them, but they weren't taught those Divine given talents that make them such "great" people; they just enhanced them.
I learned that very hard lesson as tears flowed down my cheeks that evening as I replayed the scene for my husband. See, he was the wonderful man who said we were raising the next generation of Blandings, not the next Irving Berlin, Galileo, Bill Gates, Benjamin Franklin and Beethoven. We have no idea what or who they will be. We only have to take what we have been given and help mold it to what they are to become.
I went to bed and still didn't fully understand this and it wasn't until we asked the question of what kind of children we wanted to have as adults did we ever settle down, become relaxed and begin educating our children to THEIR potential. We decided we wanted to raise well adjusted, well educated, wonderful human beings.
I highly recommend before you get too far into your journey that you see what the end picture should look like and then make the plan necessary to make it there. As I like to say, "I'm not raising children, I'm raising adults, slowly."
P.S. That active four year old didn't learn to read until five years later....he was nine, but within two month of putting it all together he was reading three grade levels above his peers. I just sit back and watch in amazement and it has been fun.
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by Doreen Blanding
please contact her at waldsfe@hotmail.com for permission to use
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