For those of you whom have been around for a while, I posted a contest in October asking you to submit a blog post about a day in the life of your family. The winning family is to receive a set of Pink-Level Montessori Phonics cards. Due to circumstances, I wasn’t able to get around to posting the participating entries, so I am starting today.
Over the next few days, I will post each entry and ask you, our readers to let us know your thoughts on each post. Once the entries have all been posted, I will choose a winning entry based on your comments. If you are one of the participants, now is the time to get your friends and families to put in their two-cents worth!
Today’s entry is from Melissa Melvin of South Carolina.
I chose to withdraw my daughter from public school for so many reasons that it would be difficult to list them all. She is not a good test taker and the books she studied were not interesting or challenging and I found middle school a negative social influence. I was terrified at first and chose a structured curriculum from a leading online provider. Our first few weeks were strenuous and draining and I worried constantly that I was not doing a good job, or that I was not preparing her for high school or college.
One day we were so frustrated that we packed up and went to Discovery Place all day and did not worry about writing assignments or math or experiments. It was like being set free – we laughed and played and learned more without ever picking up a pencil or taking a test! For the last year we have experimented with various approaches but the one that works best for us is to have a plan for each subject with daily lessons (I can’t shake the security of some structure) but we allow ourselves the freedom to explore the subjects that interest my child. We are not afraid to abandon our lesson plan to go down a rabbit hole in search of obscure but interesting knowledge.
We attended a fun day with some other home school children awhile back that was a couple of hours away. In the car we talked about what it was like to grow up in the south in the 70’s, and I shared stories from my youth as well as passed on my grandmothers stories she had shared with me about what is was like to work in a cotton mill. We often end our day watching the news and discussing politics and economics – she knows more about each presidential candidate than most of my adult friends. She has met Mike Huckabee and knows which party stands for what.
This week we have been studying To Kill a Mockingbird and my 13 year old could not understand the concept or depth of racism in the 30’s. So, today we took turns reading to each other and finished the entire book together. I explained the nuances that she never would have gotten in independent reading, and interspersed stories of my own childhood which included attending a segregated elementary school and the prejudices that were so prevalent even in the 60’s in the south. She was deeply affected by the idea that there were no black judges in Alabama in 1935 and that blacks were forced to walk behind whites, sit in the back of the bus and the common usage of words that she has never heard me utter. There were times that I was reduced to tears by Harper Lee’s account of the treatment of blacks and my child cried with me. We ended the day renting the movie and wishing for the simpler times of playing in tree houses, rolling across the yard in an old tire and the idea of yes ma’am and how you treat “company”.
In a rare glimpse into history and the deep injustices people perpetrate upon one another, I connected with my child and in doing so she learned that mama is human, too. I would not trade the last year of my life for all the material riches in the world. At the end of our reading together she looked at me thoughtfully and said, “Mama, have you ever thought of being a reading teacher?” And there I went, crying again.
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