Homeschooling Success?

Looks like we're making progress!  While there have been times where I feel like I'm wasting my time, bashing my head against the wall with a child that cares nothing about learning, in the end I'm finding it's worth it.  My daughter is actually learning.  She's just trying to make it as difficult as possible for me in the mean time!  At least, that's how it feels.

I suppose some of it is my fault.  For a variety of reasons it's been six months since we've done any homeschooling at all.  Before that we kind of went at it with no sense of regularity.  We kind of picked up now and again with no schedule, no sense of routine.  We picked up when it was convenient and made up lessons on the fly.  Our time was totally unstructured and chaotic.  Because of this, I shouldn't have been surprised that homeschooling turned into such a nightmare.  Of course she wouldn't want to sit down and do the work!  She hadn't had to in so incredibly long!  Isn't it more fun to play anyway?

For the past couple of days I began to consider putting my daughter in school.  She wasn't learning at home.  It was clear that I hadn't been doing my job and now she was incredibly far behind.  Every day was a fight over kindergarten level work, something that should be easy for her.  She didn't know her letters!  Can you believe that?  At seven years old, she didn't know her letters!  She barely knew her numbers!  I was thinking I had really made a mess of this!  Maybe I should have started her back on preschool!  It had been this way since we started the school year.

As the days went on I realized that it wasn't so much that she didn't know her letters.  She didn't want to do the work.  She was fighting me every step of the way because she didn't want to do the things she was required to do.  It wasn't that she didn't know her letters.  She just didn't want to be bothered with it.  It wasn't that she didn't know her numbers.  She just didn't care to do it right.  I will admit, knowing how to spell words wasn't exactly something we had gone over, but she did know the basics of reading, and had been able to read a decent amount, all considering.  That was the point where I was ready to send her off to school.  I just couldn't take the fight anymore!

Well, we're starting to sink into a routine, finally.  It took doing nothing but school work all day yesterday to get her to co-operate, but we're there.  She's not fighting me today as bad as she was yesterday.  She's readily identifying letters and sounds that she knows.  There's still confusion with similar looking or sounding letters, but she corrects herself pretty quickly.  There's none of this tantrum of "I don't know!"  I'm sure we'll still have problems, but at least the day is off to a good start.

I know part of this comes from her dad.  I can't count the number of times where he would get frustrated and give up on her. She would bother him and throw a tantrum until he couldn't take it anymore and would give up.  He'd tell her to do whatever she wanted and not care anymore.  After that, she's learned that if she throws a big enough tantrum, she can get out of anything.

Yesterday was our stand-off, my daughter and I.  She was determined not to do her school work.  I was determined that she would.  We started around nine in the morning.  We got off to a roaring start, literally, her roaring in a tantrum because she didn't know her letters.  (Lo and behold, later in the day she proved that she really did know them all along.)  We kept at it until almost 9pm!  That's twelve hours of schooling!  All she had to do in that time was ten pages in each of her four workbooks.  I know forty pages may seem like a lot, but that's only a little more than what she has been doing every day, and it's kindergarten work, which should be incredibly easy for her.  In all of that, she ended up going to bed with the last ten pages not done.

Today things started off just the opposite.  We had a roaring start in just the opposite way.  My daughter cruised through ten pages in her phonics book in near no time at all.  She's been working on her writing book today.  While she's slowed down a little, that's largely in part because there's a lot of drawing in today's work.  She's drawing things she can observe with her five senses.  What that has to do with writing, I'm not entirely sure, but it's something a little more fun.  I have a feeling she's going to cruise through the work we have for today.  She's flying through today without so much as a complaint.  It feels like we're making progress!  Perhaps we can actually get to the fun arts and crafts stuff by the end of the day!

So, while I was thinking I was a total failure at this whole homeschooling thing, I'm starting to realize I wasn't such a failure at all.  I know part of this was my own slacking.  If we'd gotten back on track sooner, or kept better structure from the start, there wouldn't be so much fighting it.  Better still, I'm coming to realize this work really is too easy for my daughter, and not just the math!  She's always been about on grade level with her math work, if not ahead.  Reading and writing, on the other hand, I've always thought perhaps she was falling behind.  Now I'm starting to wonder if I'd completely underestimated her.  She knows a good deal more than she lets on!  So maybe I am more successful at this whole thing than I thought I was.