Sometimes its hard. Learning to Deal with Each Other. Learning to be Disciplined. Learning to be able to say – I Don’t Know to something we think we should. Willing to learn from others.  (Side Note – I was asked last week how the kids would ever learn to work as a team. Are you kidding me?  We have to work as a trio 24/7/365. We can’t switch partners. We can’t “tell the teacher”. Sometimes we tell dad.)

For my youngest, it’s reading. He wants to just KNOW how to read, not learn how to read. We’ve given him alot of time in this, but bottom line is, I know how to read and he doesn’t, so I might have something to give.  The tears and agony of him not knowing a word. It is more of a pride/selfish issue than an ability issue. Pride keeps him ignorant.

Today, for my eldest, it was math. He has always had a natural bent towards math. A slow beginning, then a zoom through all of the Miquon Books. Then a Zoom through the Saxon 6/5 book. He can do the problems so quickly, even long drawn out story problems, in his head. But seldom can he articulate how he arrived at the answer. This year is Saxon 7/6. We took some advice online about allowing him to take the tests until he got a few wrong.  Skip the intro lessons, we did that. I also read some advice of letting him work through the DIVE DVD alone.  Work on the practice problems, as long as he got them right, move on.  But then we moved, and skipped quite a few days.  When we hunkered back down, he took a test of where he should be, and got about 20% right. Without the instruction, he had forgotten how to do the problems. So – we have been working, painstakingly, to do each problem together.  Yesterday was a melt down of all melt downs.  I could feel the pride and self and frustration and anger oozing from him, well he was crying so I could see it oozing.

I have learned in learning – that you never cry over the discoveries that you are seeking.  The name of that bird, the location of that town, the color of that rock, the smell of that food.  It is a joy to want to know and seek it out. So why. Why didn’t he want to learn these simple math problems?

We prayed. Dad Called. We walked by the lake. We took breath. I swept. We prayed.  Nathan said – because he was supposed to know them. He liked the game that has always come before that it takes mom so much longer to find the answer. Now that the answer doesn’t come to his head instantly, he’s done. Pride and anger takes over his desire to learn from me.  We prayed. He was humble. He wants to learn.

The last few lessons we have sat side by side, working on paper, me almost screaming at him to WRITE IT DOWN!!! But he wont. We learned that he can’t really see the paper and follow and know how to copy work, as he’s never done it.  So we taped up about a yard of newspaper end paper on the wall – (Our white board got Sap on it at a Camping Trip which is an entirely different story) – and we took it down to basics, the teacher writing on the “chalkboard” while the student at the desk copies and works out parts on his own.

He started to like the game of doing it by hand faster than I could transcribe it on the board, and the game was on again.

Our last question of the day was the time is now 5:03. What is the difference between 3:46 and 5:03.  We actually started at 4:15, how much time was spent pouting? 29d mins. How long did it take to do the lesson as a team? 48 minutes. How long did we wait to do math? ALL DAY LONG. Sigh.

What strategies have you used when a child really does need to learn the next step, but just doesn’t want to. And the answer of giving it a break for a while has already been used. . . . . .