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Homeschooling Update

September 19th, 2012 at 12:21 am

DS has finished all of his placement testing and he's been able to do all the introductory lessons that teach you how to get around the WAVA system and the live interface that he needs to use for an hour a week with the actual teacher. Mostly it was like before, but they have changed a few things since the last time he was homeschooled. He has also been able to start on history and math since those textbooks are available online. And the first art lesson was as well as the first science lesson, so we are at least able to get his hours in and do some work.

His books should arrive on Monday. They were shipped yesterday and it says 4-5 business days. Whether or not it actually will show up on time remains to be seen, but we are hopeful. I still think it would have been less work to make my own curriculum, and more fun, too, but he wanted to do this and it is free so we'll try it for at least the semester.

I still kind of feel like homeschooling him is going to be the death of me. He can just be so difficult to get to do anything when he decides he's not capable, even if he really is capable. He is brilliantly intelligent, with a genius level IQ, and probably the smartest person in our family, but he has always learned differently than the standard methods teach things, so he gets it in his head he is stupid because he can't always learn from that method of teaching. And he's impatient so doesn't always want to wait for me to find the method he needs. But once I do and once he gets it, there is no stopping him. There is just so much frustration in getting over that hump.

It is more stress than I really want to deal with, but I don't really have a choice. It's either homeschool or put him back into the middle school where he was assaulted, given a brain injury, and they didn't do a darn thing to help him, or put him into the middle school with a major drug problem, or put him into the midle school with a power-tripping principal that by all accounts is worse than the one we had to deal with, or put him into the one that would be 40 minutes of driving every day, which my leg still cannot handle. No thank you.

7 Responses to “Homeschooling Update”

  1. snafu Says:
    1348017060

    Is DS mostly a visual learner or auditory? What suggestions have you found/tried from internet for gifted children/teens? Have you looked at Kahn Academy which is a rich learning resource for kids of all ages and subject matter. Does DS respond well to challenging material? How does he respond to earned [not faked] praise for new learning?

  2. creditcardfree Says:
    1348017774

    Glad the material is close to showing up!

  3. FrugalTexan75 Says:
    1348019652

    Hopefully with the materials you have /have coming, he'll be easier to work with.

  4. LuckyRobin Says:
    1348028263

    Snafu--He's mostly kinesthetic with auditory as his next. I'd say a 60/40 mix. He is not much of a visual learner, in fact it took him a long time to read well. He would memorize pages long before he could read them. Now he does, but I think it was 5th grade before it really took off for him and that was because we were using books on CD with the physical book to follow along. He has almost perfect recall of things he has touched and taken apart once and is able to put them back together. We had to be very careful when he was small to not do anything in front of him that we didn't want him doing. It only took once. I had to hide how I opened the baby-gate or the baby-proofed cabinets. His mind operates in 3-D extraordinarily well, but he has very little patience with anything one dimensional.

  5. Linda@DTS Says:
    1348056782

    I am sure your son is really glad that he is learning and at the same time being with his love ones. I have a problem of getting my son focused on something as well. I can see he is trying his best and both of us are being patient. Keep up the good work.

  6. laura Says:
    1348071712


    We have had great luck with the auditory books fo my son. It makes his learning so much easier; his struggle with dyslexia is somewhat difficult for me to bear at times because his esteem seems to be tied up in his ability (or difficulty in his ability) to read. Thankfully we've had the support of teachers and our school now has a reading specialist; if he wasn't in this environment, he'd be home with me. And probably all my sons would be too, since the rest follow with his academic difficulties.

  7. LuckyRobin Says:
    1348092465

    Laura, I view it that if we lived in different times my son would totally be the one who had the oral history of the tribe memorized to pass down to future generations and any realistic artwork that depicted it that could be carved or molded with his hands he would make. He would not be the one scratching marks on pots or the walls to make writing! Fortunately he does not have dyslexia. We were worried about that early on because DH's sister has it badly, but turns out she's a very kinesthetic and oral learner on top of it.

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