Sometimes you just have to back off!

I am such a type A personality, a scheduler, a doer. What ever you want to call it. I have a goal and I stop at nothing to achieve it. That is why I laugh when people tell me they don't have the patient to home school. Because I don't either. It has taken so much work to just learn to back off.

I just realized how important this really is recently. My 6 year old daughter is such a good student. I tried to classify what type of learning style my kids have and with her she is any of them really. You hand her anything and she will do it.  Well with boys in general and my 5 year old especially, he is not as focused and driven as his sister. Which is not a bad thing at all, it just means they have different personalities. Which is great.

It is up to me to recognize that he may not be ready for reading right now. I started Isabelle with Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons  when she was 5 and she did fine with it. Owen made it up to lesson 62 and he would do great if he focused but being his boyish 5 year old self, it was evident that he was just not ready to continue. It took me 3 days of stress (on both parts) to finally realize TO JUST BACK OFF! We are on day 3 of just doing his math lesson and playing reading games on starfall.com.

I personally have never been a fan of "unschooling" So I am not going to just put an end to his sit down work. But I  am going to make sure he learns and has fun at the same time. School should not be stressful for me or for the kids. Now when he goes to bed he asks (as he always does) "are we going to have school tomorrow?"  But now instead of the "Ohhhh" answer I used to get I now get a "yea" answer. Now both of us are happy just because I learned to back off.