Читать книгу Homeschooling For Dummies - Jennifer Kaufeld - Страница 91

If you get the famous “huh?” reaction day after day when you attempt to present a particular skill, or you see your child’s stress level rise as she tries to apply knowledge that she’s supposed to have, you may need to back off a while. On the other hand, if you get boredom signals day after day, maybe you need to skip a few problems or speed up the process before your child falls asleep on you. If you realize later that you went too fast through a topic, you can always back up and reintroduce it later. (That’s one of the bonuses you get from owning your own schoolbooks!)

We covered second-grade math for four school terms at my house — with one child. By the fourth year I didn’t care anymore — I was willing to teach basic addition and multiplication through high school if that’s where my student topped out. We used everything I could think of — Cuisenaire rods, M&Ms, counting chips, dots on the paper, crayons, pictures — I was out of ideas. Then one day, my child got it. The light bulb went on. She ran into my office giggling and showed her brand-new skill. And we were off!

She needed to grow to the point that multiplication and division made sense. Now they do, and my daughter flew through the second-grade math book and halfway through a third-grade book before she slowed down. Did we make it out of third-grade math? We did, and she made it all the way through high school and college, thanks to second- and third-grade math class.