Homeschooling young boys

I think homeschooling young boys is a realm of its own, and for several reasons, but the biggest is that I was doing it wrong.

homeschooling is one of the most patient growing endeavours I will ever do, with motherhood in general coming in second. Still, I am sure that homeschooling boys has made me about 17 times as patient than I was 6 years ago when I began.

I have four boys so far, and they make up the elder three of my homeschoolers, so I do feel now that I am getting an idea of what a girl is like at the homeschool table, that I had a sort of baptism of fire, not that my boys are at all bad learners, I just approached them not as boys.

(note, this post contains some of my failures in homeschooling, ones I am sad to have made, but glad to have learned from, I wrote them here so you could too)

I started teaching them too early.

that was my first major mistake. I began school at school age. that was right, that was normal, it’s the done thing.

it sucked.

I learned quickly though that what I was doing wasn’t working. I switched up the curriculum and made it more ..fun.

I was expecting a massive improvement, I was working my butt off to get these kids engaged.

nada.

I felt like a failure.

then I just did what I could. I went on to have three more children after my two eldest boys in three years, and the third was born a year after I began homeschooling.

I was a wreck, so quietly, not wanting anyone to know of my failings, I began just doing school for no more than an hour a day, and by now my eldest was 8 and still not reading.

I blamed myself, but what could I do?

I kept up the curriculum, and I kept coming back to what I knew would work, but for a long time it just didn’t, I pushed and pushed, we turned letters into colourful pictures, we painted, we drew in the sand, we made shell letters, we make Christmas cookie letters, we tried to make words from icing, I was always asking, what sound does “p” make?

“pirate!” he would call out. I would smile, but inside I was wondering what the heck was wrong, we were still a the beginning stages and he was 8.

I kept going, and then eventually he got it, we moved through the lessons, we passed page after page, and we were on our way! what had changed?

he’d grown up.

the approach of flashcards we had tried for years now was suddenly working, he was reciting, recalling, he was …reading.

by the age of ten, he was a reader, that is late. I know. I was sure it was me, It was my inability to teach.

but then there was the second child. another boy. I was consistent, I was keeping it simple, I was doing what I was sure was right.

but he struggled, so I decided to wait, I pulled back this time.

I tried again in six months. he was almost 9. Finally, we began to make headway.

we were doing it. I began to think ..

was I starting too early?

I have another boy, my third child, and this school year he turned 7 (Feb). I haven’t even begun any reading before the middle of this year, I know the sign better this time around (aug) he is bright, he finds maths easy, and he is imaginative, but for a little while he lacked confidence.

this …

build confidence first.

I knew in my third child I had to get his confidence up, he found the written word intimidating. so we began oral lessons, clapping when we heard a rhyming word, stamping our feet when we heard the sound “a” and soon he was loving it, it didn’t seem scary.

so off we went, at almost 7-1/2 years, we began, and he’s moving quickly.

I realised I had missed a step with my first two boys. Boys want to be things. they want to be strong, they want to be motorbike riders, or racecar drivers or BMX riders, but most of all, they want you to be proud of them, and so I realised, I had to make them feel like readers before, so they would try as hard as they could.

it might sound weird, AND I KNOW, confidence isn’t exclusive to boys! but my daughter, my fourth child who is six, just hasn’t needed that kind of affirmation, she sits and we quietly do our reading exercises and she loves to paint and talk to me as we talk about history or just the world around us, she doesn’t need so much encouragement.

Boys are a little different, and as mothers, and more importantly, as women, we need to understand that our boys want us to be proud of them, they want to be great in our eyes, for my first two, I didn’t get this, and I do know that my lack of knowledge on this made our reading road MUCH longer.

Keep it simple.

this is my mantra to all homeschooling in the first 6-7 years.

we aren’t making time for learning each day, we are building learners all the time.

this is made even more important when dealing with boys. (I know not all boys are like mine, some are keen, learn early and are very academically minded at a young age)

My boys want to get in, get their school done as quickly a time as possible and get right back to what they were doing and I am okay with that.

We do math, writing, spelling, reading, a history read-aloud, reading the bible and the odd project here and there.

60-90 minutes tops.

That is the simple school rhythm until grades 5-6, and then slow and steady, as they are ready, I add a little more until they will have a high school work quota each day.

Build up their competence.

I learned this not long ago, listening to a podcast, about an older woman who had homeschooled 11 children, she spoke about creating competent children to create confident children.

boys especially want to try new things outside the home, and while I was and still am, with babies and toddlers, I struggled to leave the house to take them to sports, not to mention the fact that we live out of town and it’s a 40-60 minutes round trip depending on the road, and the time of day (kangaroos are bad on the road at dusk and night).

but I want my boys to be confident, and that means I need to help them be competent, so I have on the agenda things like soccer in the backyard, cones and balls, basketball hoops and table tennis, just things that kids can learn, so when they are older and want to join sports teams and activities, they are confident enough to do so.

It means I have to get out there with them, kick the ball, do ball and cone exercises, and thrash them at handball, but it is all part of my job.

Don’t talk too much

this may just be me, I love to talk. but I do see a glazed look of acute boredom and desire to leave the vicinity when I get going on a history lesson, the book is down and I am yabbering on about the Trojan horse and how the German who excavated try may have been lying and just how tall the walls would have been, how bad the greeks were and that Helen never should have left her husband if the story is true.

maybe in the future, my boys will appreciate my willingness to really explore what we read, and what we think about, but for now, they just don’t care for it.

I realised I couldn’t make them care.

I can still read aloud, and I can answer a question when they ask, but I don’t need to pour all my words out now.

with boys, the opportunity seems to rarely come or at least not enough for my liking, and so I feel it important to spew about as much information as possible in order to properly educate them.

I want my boys to be smart, I want them to be intelligent, and I have to sometimes step back, and remind myself there is much time yet, and they will learn when they are ready, for now they are doing well, and I need to be content with that.

why can’t I make them sit and listen to me?

well sometimes I do, I will demand they stay for just another few minutes, even to just ask any questions they may have about the topic, I want them to practice diligence and discipline with learning, but I also know you can only lead a horse to water, I do enough to know I am doing what is required, and they are being given the building block education they need.

the rest will come, I know this, like a gut feeling, (plus, I was homeschooled myself, I know that as we get older, we get genuinely interested in different subjects and we pursue them, that will happen, just not now when play is so much more interesting) but sometimes I waiver, and that is when I talk too much, and they are bored to …almost tears.

so, if you are a mother to boys and you are feeling a little defeated, then I hope this post encouraged you, keep going, and try implementing some of the things I learned.