Our Homeschool challenge

Never let it be said that God doesn’t enjoy giving us variety!

My oldest son was a problem reader. Turns out he had problems visually and was more of a kinesthetic learner, so when we hooked up with a wonderful reading tutor, (a specialist with a Ph.D. in reading) it took us about 14 months or so to get him from a first grade reading level to a functional adult level. He may never love reading but he can handle his school work and that’s a blessing.

We saw this same specialist today for a check up on my other two school age sons and she picked up some problems with son #3. Gabe is reading pretty well, but he does not sound out words and he is an horrific speller. I’m not quite sure what he does – I think he is more a whole language type of kid, but anyway he doesn’t have a visual problem (darn – I know my way around the optometrist, vision therapy stuff now) but she thinks he needs intense speech therapy which is a totally new thing for me! O.K. the kid does speak like he was raised a Kennedy on Hyannis, but that odd speech pattern is making it impossible for him to differentiate between short e, i, o, u, and sometimes a, although he gets that most of the time.

So what’s a mom to do! I did contact my school system today to see if I could plug into their resources and they sounded less than thrilled in taking a homeschool family in. I wonder if showing my property tax receipts would be persuasive? I’m probably going to end up paying for this out of pocket which is a little distressing as we just had the water heater and the transmission go out within 30 days of each other!

Still, I feel a strange sort of peace about it. This type of stuff on our journey always takes us somewhere interesting, with people we wouldn’t have known otherwise – I just wish I could see God’s plan in all of this and maybe I will when I’m not so close to it.

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