Even as a homeschooler, the sudden shut down this past spring for Covid-19 was a huge shock to our daily routine and family life.
Before Covid, we spent about two mornings a week at home and split the rest between our homeschool co-op and other classes. Our afternoons were filled with with music, arts and sports. Saturdays were the busiest with conflicting sports events or classes that often left my husband and me scrambling in order to get each child to the place they needed to be.
But we were homeschoolers! We were supposed to be sipping tea and reading piles of books in our backyard, or spending full days in our PJs working on marble runs. Right?!
Sure we had some of those moments, but they were the exception to our days. I yearned for more slow days, slow learning, and slow living, but I also felt we should be doing a variety of activities to stay “well-balanced.” Plus, our homeschool group plans were spent in the peaceful, idyllic hills of our local parks, so how could this not balance out all the driving to and fro I did the rest of the week?
For the last three years my eight-year-old son has been struggling with anger issues and tantrums. He had very little patience when he came up against frustration. He would storm outside and we would be done for the day. We were often late to our classes or activities because he refused to get in the car. Lessons at home usually ended in tears for us all. While he had incremental improvement with dietary changes and peaceful parenting techniques, it wasn’t enough to bring balance to our family and homeschool life.
When we suddenly found ourselves at home with large stretches of time, it wasn’t long before I could see him more clearly and observe that actually so much learning was happening with him every day.
We have always been a read aloud family, even as our oldest daughter began to read on her own. So during quarantine, we read after breakfast, during long stretches in the afternoon and before bed. While my daughter finished her group classes online, my son would retreat to the couch to pour over his favorite graphic novels for hours. He rediscovered his Lego collection. While I made dinner, I would watch him lingering in our backyard hammock, lost in thought.
We slowed our school time down, not worrying about hitting every single topic each day. We did a few projects around his favorite books, he learned how to make a stop-motion lego film with his sister and we played lots of board games. He and I had time alone to do a lovely math block around Robin Hood, where we spent more time pretending we were catching thieves in Sherwood forest than actually doing much “grade appropriate” math.
Slowly, I began to see my son relax into himself. Without the packed schedule of school and activities, much of his anger began to melt away.
As the weeks wore on, I saw a happier and more resilient kid emerge. Kim John Payne in Simplicity Parenting advocates for parents to allow kids to take short breaks from all of their activities to cope with general overwhelm, what he calls a “soul fever.”
For us it took a pandemic, and several months at home to give him the time he needed to heal from the stress and anxiety of the world I had thought would be “best” for him.
One day I was reading aloud to him and paused to talk to my daughter. He nudged me and said, “mom keep reading because the next chapter is called The Adventure Continues." Due to his resistance, the only phonics instruction I had shared with him was short vowel sounds for three-letter words and a few sight words last fall. He had taught himself to read on his own timeline.
He owned this new skill and seemed to stand taller.
I had read and heard stories about children learning to read when it was made sense for them, whether that was at age 5 or 10, and even though I agreed that this seemed like the most respectful way for a child to progress, I still felt pressure from my own expectations of school, the normal reading requirements for 1st graders, but when we paused, lived more slowly, and rested, the reading came.
Before the pandemic, I might have tried to figure out what one thing was making the most difference. Was it the food? Maybe I should double-down on healthy meals? Maybe I should quit our homeschool co-op? Or the baseball team?
The shutdown helped me see that my children’s wellness and learning life are deeply intertwined in such a way that I can’t diagnose and treat the symptoms alone.
I can’t point to one factor in my son’s journey to reading because I believe it was a combination of so many things that happened during this time at home. This gift of time has reminded me that, when life’s pace is humming along, I need to check the view from 10,000 feet to really see how everyone is doing, and not try to do it all during each season of our lives.
Above all, nurturing the whole child over specific skills lays the foundation for the wonder of learning to happen.
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