Week 3, Thursday

Today was kind of a difficult day.  Ciara took an extra long time to do her Discovery homework this morning.  We are really working with her to correct her pencil grip.  We have been working on it for over 2 years now, but she staunchly refuses to grip the pencil properly.  Most of the time I just let it be, as long as she is doing her work, but since we are doing Discovery I know that Verina will insist that she grip the pencil properly.  I think that it improves her muscle control in her hand and will hopefully help her to write more neatly.

When it came time for math, Ciara was unresponsive.  The exercise was changing mixed numbers into improper fractions and vice-versa.  We have been working on this for about a week now, but this morning she just couldn't do it.  We took a break and had a long discussion about her responsibilities when it comes to homeschooling.  I told her that if this arrangement was going work, she needed to put in a little more effort.  She agreed to not get frustrated and give up so easily.

She was kind of luke warm during her Discovery session with Verina in the afternoon.  Verina thought that maybe Ciara was getting distracted by the fact that she may be going back to school (at least part-time) very soon.  It could be.  Not knowing the fate of our homeschooling these past few weeks has really been a distraction for me.

In any case, after the boys came home from school, Ciara went swimming with them for about 30min.  We came back to the math that we hadn't finished this morning.  This time, she was completely willing to do the work and even wanted to do it independently.  Sometimes with Ciara, it's all a question of timing.  We all need structure and schedules in our lives, but learning happens when the child is feeling good about themselves.   

I am learning that my most important job is to help Ciara gain self-confidence.  She needs to know that she can learn and accomplish difficult things.  I used to think that Ciara just had an aversion towards doing work.  Now I think that it's more of a fear of not being able to understand, of not being able to succeed and of being ridiculed.   It was this fear that made it impossible for her to participate in school and the more anxiety she felt, the less she learned and the farther behind she fell.   Homeschooling this year is all about taking the fear out of education.  Of course, this has to start with me working through my fears :)

Week 3, Tuesday

This morning, at 9am we had a meeting with the director of the American School of Barcelona to talk about how we could get Ciara registered in school and still homeschool at the same time.  The meeting went pretty well.  The director is supportive, but will not sign a document saying that Ciara is attending school this year, when she really isn't.  So he came up with a compromise:  we register Ciara and she attends school part-time and then I homeschool part-time.  We agreed that this could work for us.  How exactly it will work, we won't know until the director meets with the elementary principle.  Since grade 6 is pretty full, she might have to work with the grade 5s.

In any case, I am kind of relieved that we at least have a solution in the works that will allow me to continue homeschooling while also allowing us to comply with Spanish laws.  Ciara may benefit from attending school part-time as well.  It will mean that I will have to redo our awesome homeschool schedule, but at least I wrote it all in pencil.

Today we continued to work on improper fractions, this time the questions were word problems.  Word problems are a difficult for all of my kids.  Nathan, who works so hard in math, just can't seem to figure them out.  When Rylan and Ciara encounter a word problem they just look like deer caught in the headlights.  The word problems we did today, were pretty difficult.  Ciara has the skills to solve them, she just has a hard time determining which equations to use.  We did all of our math work on the chalkboard so that we could draw pictures and break down the problem into small steps.

For social studies, we are still looking at Greek mythology.  Ciara is fascinated with the stories about the Greek Gods.  Today she learned about Pandora's box.  Ciara was so excited about Pandora, that she had to recount the whole story to Verina when they began their Skype session.

Tonight, I took Ciara to her judo class again.  She was a bit apprehensive as we entered the gym.  I think that she always feels a wave of anxiety whenever she enters a crowded place.  Since she liked her first class, we signed her up and bought her a judo-gi.  She felt good about wearing her new judo-gi and when I picked her up after class, she said that she had a good time.  I was so relieved.  Nathan also decided to try a judo class and he liked it too.  So we will probably have two kids in judo.  I also signed Cole and Rylan up for swimming lessons at the local rec. center.  I feel like we are really broadening our horizons.  This is the first time any of my kids have attended extra-curricular classes outside of the school.

Why are you Homeschooling?

I think this is the first question I would ask anyone who is currently homeschooling.  I am always interested to know why a parent would take on this challenge and what brought them to this decision.

For me, ever since my daughter Ciara started grade 1, I considered homeschooling her.  We knew that she was a bright girl, but at school she refused to participate.  She also made a fuss about going to school almost every morning. Her teacher was confounded by her lack of desire to do any work, when most kids that age are very eager to learn.  This was back in Canada.  She was in French Immersion, and picked up French faster than any of our other kids.  By the end of grade 1, Ciara could converse in French like it was her first language.

Since she was obviously learning something in school and she had plenty of good friends, we kept her in school for grade 2.  While in grade 2, her teacher tested her reading ability and told me that Ciara was below grade level and needed to be put into the remedial reading program.  But after only a few reading sessions with the volunteer, it was clear to them that she could definitely read at grade level.  The reason she was evaluated so low by the teacher is because Ciara gets nervous when she is being evaluated.

Flash forward to grade 3.  Ciara began to really dislike going to school again, mostly because she didn't like her French teacher.  She also had English and French on alternative days, which made it difficult for her to stay organized. Her English teacher requested a meeting with us and said that she felt that Ciara should be tested for learning disabilities.  We really respected her observations because she knows our family and has lots of experience in special education.   So at the end of grade 3 Ciara went for her psycho-educational evaluation, which required two afternoons over two weeks.  It was a fairly positive experience for Ciara and at the conclusion we found out that she has a processing delay.

This diagnosis answered some questions for us, such as why she hated school so much, even though she was a smart girl and had lots of friends.  With a processing delay, day to day school tasks became overwhelming.  She did not want to participate or speak in class because she often didn't know what was going on.  Next, we had to decide what to do about it.

We have a family friend who is a certified educational therapist through NILD (http://www.nildcanada.org/).  She was able to do personalized sessions with Ciara, to help her overcome some of her learning difficulties.  She started from the basics of reading, writing and math to make sure that Ciara had the skills she needed to learn more difficult concepts.

We also got the news while Ciara was in grade 3, that we were going to be moving to Barcelona.  This was a pretty big shock for the whole family as we had never moved outside of Brampton, Ontario since the kids were born.  For months after my husband accepted the delegation we never quite knew when we were going to move.  At first we thought it might be in July 2012, then Sept 2012, then December 2012, then January 2013, then March 2013.  When it became apparent that we were not going to get our visas until after May 2013, I decided that the kids might as well finish the school year in Canada and we would move in the summer.  Ciara continued to do educational therapy during grade 4 and I took her out of French Immersion to make things a little less complicated for her.  The kids also started to take Spanish lessons after school.

My husband moved to Barcelona in May 2013, but the rest of us didn't come until August 2013.  We decided to put all 4 kids in the American School of Barcelona.  We were not sure if the school would work for Ciara, but as we needed a school that taught in English, we didn't have a lot of options.  At first, Ciara seemed to be doing well.  She was making friends and although she was struggling academically the teachers were very helpful and she received quite a bit of one-on-one instruction.  But as the October became November, things were starting to get worse.  Ciara didn't want to go to school and resented the fact that we had brought her to Spain.  She was negative all the time, didn't want to go anywhere, didn't want to eat and would spend hours in her room alone.  I began to worry that she was becoming depressed.

December 2013 was a low point for Ciara.  It was around this time that I decided that Ciara needed to be homeschooled.  My husband was not so sure that I would be able to do it and urged me to really consider all of our options and do a lot of research.  I think that he was most apprehensive because I don't really have the personality of a nurturing homeschooling parent.  Ciara and I have quite a contentious relationship because I like doing things MY way and so does she.  But I figured that if we were going to survive another year in Barcelona we would have to try something new.  We decided that we would let Ciara finish the school year and I would take the next few months to really get prepared to homeschool.

In May 2013 we officially told the school that Ciara would not be returning the next year.  It was a very exciting day.  Now it was no longer a big secret, her teacher and principle were aware, Ciara could talk about it with her friends and I started looking for other homeschooling families in Barcelona.  I soon discovered that we were pretty much on our own.

I am surprised at how much I wrote today.  I have talked with others about why we are homeschooling Ciara, but this is the first time that I have written it all down.  I'm sure my subsequent post will be a lot shorter.