It’s Working!

My oldest daughter has struggled for years with reading. She has always on the lowest levels of where she “should” be. When I decided last year to take her out of public school and give her the one on one attention that she really needed, reading was one thing I really worried about. I am not a trained teacher or specialist, how was I ever going to help her? Would I do more harm than good? Would she get even farther behind than she already was? I struggled with this question a lot and after a lot of soul searching I came to a conclusion and you can read about it here.
This weekend Dadzoo and I took all the kids to the book store to pick out a book to read. They had been working on some goals and all of them had done an amazing job and as a reward they got a book. Punk #1 picked out her all time favorite book. They funny thing about this book is that she had never really read it all the way through, in fact, when she had tried to read it before it was way too hard and she had to give up. A year ago when she was in school she belonged to a reading group and they had picked this particular book and she loved listening to the other students read the story, she talked about it all the time, however when it came to her turn to do the reading she couldn’t, and so her teacher switched her to another group and she was devastated! She was able to borrow the book from her teacher so we could read with her at home and honestly she couldn’t read it at all. When we started to homeschool the book was returned and while she never finished it, she talked about it all the time.
When we were paying for our books Punk #1 confessed to Dadzoo that she was afraid that it would still be too hard for her to read, he told her that he was sure it would be fine and that we would help her if she needed it.

Today when it was time for reading I assigned her two chapters in her new book and while she was in the middle of her reading she blurted out “Hey Mom, I CAN READ THIS! It is kind of easy!”

I said a silent prayer of thanks…..

8 thoughts on “It’s Working!

  1. So happy for you but even more happy for your daughter! How exciting.

    I don't know if you are interested in reading it but I started a blog to write about homeschooling. Mostly just what I am doing with my kids. I know my kids are younger than yours but check it out if you'd like.
    http://leadguidewalk.blogspot.com

  2. Remember that when you are wondering if you made the right decision and you will be reminded that you did.

    Erika