Lemony Webbles

how it's going

I've noticed that I have almost no time for one-on-one instruction with Georgia, and if we're going to homeschool, I've got to figure out how to deal with that. Especially for reading. I'm sure this will always be a need because when you get to the edge of what you know and start looking at unfamiliar things, I think you need a guide, especially when you're five...but also when you're thirty-two. I could certainly use a mentor for all this. Not a pushy one, just a good listener that's knowledgeable about homeschooling. Anyways, we've taken advantage of well-timed Teresa naps for reading lessons, but those don't come often enough for me. I have been feeling like she needs more time. I want to keep up the momentum with it and let her know she is supported. So one idea we're trying this week is to use weekend mornings for focused work on reading (and phonics for Maya) since mornings are good fresh times for the kids and Billy can be there for Teresa. Like all new ideas, it is taking some getting used to to feel our way through the weekend differently than normal, but I think it may be a good habit for us so that Billy can stay connected to what the kids are doing during the week. This first year of homeschooling, and I'm sure parts of others, will be dedicated to figuring out how to tailor a workable schooling experience for our family and each child's needs.

Back to the mentor idea, I'va always just wanted a person to show me how to do things, instead of sitting in a class and hoping that the parts that I want to know get covered. This desire has grown over the years to the point where I find normal school settings almost intolerable places to learn things. I remember wanting a mentor in graduate school, and luckily I found one in Dr. Wayne Dickerson, an academic leader in pronunciation research and a really wonderful teacher and person. I loved all the immediacy and real life applications of sounds in language and ended up teaching pronunciation for him. He showed us exactly how to teach the material and we got to practise right away in our classes. That really worked for me because even though we didn't have much creative input in lesson planning, I really got to understand his system very deeply and then I could decide later whether I would want to teach that way or not in the future. I just wish I had gotten such great hands-on experience in the other areas of language learning.