ANOTHER LETTER

Here is another inspiring letter from a homeschooling mom (homeschoolfreestuff.com).

Reading Unleashed

Getting my son to write was a nightmare! I tried all the tricks. I tried having him draw pictures of what we would write about. Write in different colors, crayons, markers. I tried it all. Still he HATED writing. It was a day-long ordeal to get him to even write a few sentences. He would rebel and write in his worst possible handwriting, purposely misspell words, It was a constant fight.

The funny thing was that he LOVED to read! He read everything he could get his hands on. At age 7, he read all the Harry Potter series in a couple months. He got to the point where he would ONLY read books if they had more than 600 pages to the story. He LOVED reading.

Then it dawned on me. The way we got him to love reading was to let him read unfettered. We never forced him to read, and cultivated his love of reading. And it paid off!

So the BIG question was, "WHY were we FORCING him to write?" It went against everything we believed

I know why. It was that typical homeschool guilt. You know what I mean... my child is not up to speed in a certain area, so we must be lacking as parents.

So we let go. We let go of the guilt, let go of all the external expectations, let go of it all.

So we changed our approach completely.

We told our son to write. Just write anything he felt. We told him that we didn't care if it was neat, didn't care if it was misspelled, just write. Anything he wanted.

Then it happened. Remember that boy who could barely write two sentences without pitching a fit. His first writing filled two whole sheets of paper. Front and back! He tried to be goofy and funny. He wrote jokes. Jokes about writing.

So in a short time, he went from fighting to write two sentences to a four page humorous composition. Sure there were some misspelled words, but there a whole bunch more wonderful and funny words, and lots, and lots of smiles.

As a postscript, weeks later I caught him. He was looking up words in a dictionary to see how to spell words. As if I wouldn't find out. Sneaky boy :-)

~Sharon F.~