Tackling a Challenging (to you) Subject

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When many of us begin on the journey of homeschooling, we may have concerns over teaching ALL the subjects we want to cover with our kids. Beyond just how to fit them all into the day, there is the concern over whether we can ‘handle’ teaching particular subjects. After all, we each have our strengths and weaknesses.

This is the focus of this week’s TOS Blog Cruise:  How do you teach the challenging and advanced subjects if you struggle with them yourself?

I will admit that my biggest struggle to date is more about fitting everything into the day than whether I feel capable of covering the particular course.  But, that could be related to the boys NOT being in high school yet.

If I had to pick my most challenging subject area to teach, it would be language arts.  I was terrified of goofing up and having boys that could not read.  (Silly mama as this family is full of readers!)  Spelling seemed to be a challenge as R struggled so with it. But, that was ‘fixed’ with the introduction of All About Spelling.  Grammar is so ‘formula’ like that it was not a big concern.  Handwriting is a modeling approach, but one that the boys do not do super well.

But, writing is where I currently struggle with  all the boys. 

While I am not the best writer on the planet, by far, I also know that my skills are not too shabby.  Somehow I learned over time how to put ideas into words.  Yet, even with some great writing resources, I can’t seem to get the boys to the point of writing well.

Ask P to write a paragraph about a particular topic and he’ll almost always have the first sentence be “This paragraph is about X.”   Getting to the point of a short research like paper seems like a nearly impossible goal at this point.  Yet, that’s exactly where he should be if he is going to begin high school level work.

R can usually dictate a reasonable paragraph, but if he has to write it onto paper the struggles with handwriting and spelling get the better of him. 

D just goes into the ‘why do I want to spend my time on this’ mode and will fight doing an assignment.  When he does sit down, he’ll be brief and often not do a good job.

Then, I suffer from how to even grade the work the boys are doing.  It’s really hard to critique their work at times.

How am I tackling this weakness in my teaching?

Well, to begin with, I am trying to find different ways to approach their learning.  P likes the IEW program, so he’ll continue with it for now.  But, R and D are using a different writing program which we are reviewing for the TOS Crew.  So far, R likes it a lot and D is not too sure about it.  It’s too early to say if it will really help or if the boys are just responding to the novelty of it all.

The second thing I am doing is to NOT give up.  Sounds simple, but it is not!  There are days when I’d much rather put it aside.  But, avoiding the work is not going to solve the problem and for P it is essential to continue working on a regular schedule for writing as well as other subjects.

Finally, I am trying to incorporate the skill of writing into other subject areas like history and science.  For D, we might try to do some prompt based writing assignments.

What I have NOT done, but am considering for the future, is to outsource the teaching.  Whether an instructor led class or a cooperative learning environment, finding an outside party to be ‘in charge’ or even just the grader of work could help take the weight off my shoulders a little.  While art, math, music and science classes are the ones I usually think about for outside instruction, I have heard about a few writing classes in our area.  There are also online writing ‘classes’ with a teacher who critiques and grades their work.

A final observation I have to share… All this worry about language arts has had me spend far more time on that area than others.  So, subjects like art, music and science get the short end of the stick sometimes.  That is something else I am trying to tackle so that concerns over weaknesses do not get the better of me.  And, we’ll be doing some quick back peddling this week to beef up our portfolio for reporting in these subject areas.

You can read what the other TOS Crewmates are saying about this week’s Blog Cruise come Tuesday morning by clicking the button at the top of this post.