benefit #three-million-and-one

Sep 16, 2009

I love homeschooling. I love learning together as a family. I love seeing the fruits of our labors. Sometimes those fruits have been a little hard to find. There has been a harvest all along, but there have also been hard days. Days when I wonder how I can adequately teach my children what they need to know. Days, weeks, months, and years when I wonder if what I have been led to do is actually going to pay off in the end. If it is going to work and if so, WHEN!?!

Well, I am hitting the harvest season. Kind of like when you get those first bits of lettuce in your garden in early summer, and then you get some peas, and then you get some beans, and then cucumbers, and then whole garden is FULL of deliciousness and you wonder “how did this happen – look at all this food!?!”

After years of struggling with reading and writing and any requirements placed on her at all, my oldest daughter is embracing learning. She is relishing in it. She wants to plan out her days of study time so she can make sure she fits it all in – this is completely new as she has resisted schedules from the day she was born. She is in love with reading and writing. She is asking for help with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and definitions. She is reading constantly. She is studying Shakespeare. She is writing papers. She is writing a book. In fact, several books. She is full of ideas and she can’t wait to get them down on paper. She wrote a paper for her Shakespeare class today full of original thinking and then she re-wrote it to make it look nice. She cares about her handwriting. She cares about her spelling. She wants others to be able to understand her ideas. She loves discussing the scriptures at her seminary class. She creates worlds with maps, languages, and characters from another time. She is wishing there were more hours in the day so she can study more. She is thinking and growing and learning and she is happy about it.

I could not have required this child to learn any of this. I had to wait until she was hungry for it. I had to wait until her brain and her heart were united in a desire and a readiness to learn. Now, I can’t stop her. Now, I have to take away her books, take away her flashlight, and force her to go to bed. Now, it is easy to teach her.

My younger daughter is obsessed with the multiplication tables right now. She loves to work out math problems and is trying to learn all her multiplication facts in the next 10 days. She reads to me everyday. We read The Book of Mormon together and are also reading The Secret Garden and All-of-a-Kind Family. She is progressing quickly in violin and gets up everyday and practices right off the bat.

As a homeschooling mother I have had to learn how their different brains work. They are as different as can be and it is a struggle to know how to best meet their very different needs. But after years of working with them, the fruits are showing up. They both love to learn and know they can do hard things.

I knew this day would come, but now that it is here it is still a delightful surprise – just like that juicy peach or full-of-flavor tomato are when we realize we have grown something delicious.