Homeschool Mondays – Always Ask

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in homeschooling my children is to never assume anything, I always have to ask to be sure. The child who nods her way through a religion lesson may not understand a thing I’ve said to her, and the child who gets everything wrong on his math may understand it perfectly. You have to ask your children what they mean. Your child who is failing might not have a lack of understanding, but be an out of the box thinker.

My sweet #5 is that way. For example, his math problem last week said “You have a plate with 4 cookies on it. If Sally eats one of your cookies, draw what you have left.”

My son drew

I counted up the dots on the plate and marked it wrong. There were way more than 3 things on that plate.

When I handed him back his page, with every drawing marked incorrect, he started to cry. So I sat down and showed him that there were a lot of cookies on that plate.

“Those aren’t cookies.” He told me. “They’re crumbs.”

“Where are the cookies?” I asked.

“I ate them,” he answered. “They were chocolate chip so I ate all three of them because I like chocolate chip cookies.”

I explained to him that he hadn’t given the answer he was supposed to give, so he asked me to read the question again. He shook his head and said “They asked it wrong. They should have asked me how many I had after she stole my cookie, not how many I had left, because I wouldn’t have any left. I would eat them.”

I had to admit that he had a point.

A few months back, we had similar issues with a worksheet on what doesn’t belong in each group..

That book showed

and my son picked the juice.

and he picked the dog.

and he chose the island.

He got them all wrong…the entire page. I sat there thinking about how to explain this concept to him an a new way so that he could get it, and I was at a loss. That’s when I sat down next to him and said “Why the juice?”

“It’s the only one that’s wet” was his answer.

“The dog?” I asked.

“It’s the only one that’s breathing, and has fur, and can jump.”

I smiled as I asked “The island?”

“It’s the only one that you can’t move.”

He understood the assignment perfectly. He just didn’t see it the way the book writers had intended for him to see it. I explained to him what the “correct” answers were, and then gave him a gold star. He had gotten them all correct after all.

One of the beautiful things about homeschooling is that we have the time to sit down with our students and actually figure out how their brains are working. Sometimes it’s an opportunity to help them when they’ve gotten lost, and other times it’s a chance for us to see the world the way that they do. That chance to learn to understand them is too often undervalued when we are busy teaching our children the regular way of doing things.

There is a challenge there for us of not teaching them to see things only the way other people do. The thinkers who see things in new ways are the inventors and innovators who change the world for the rest of us. It would be a shame if we trained that out of them.