Homschool Rookie - A Call for Insight on Language and Phonics

My partner and I always knew we were going to homeschool our daughter, Sofia when she was born. With us living in the US Virgin Islands, the public schools were not very good and the private schools were incredibly expensive, the decision was always definite on choosing the path of homeschool. Either way, if we could afford private schools, I still would not have opted for us to homeschool.

We moved to the USA when she was 1 year and 9 months, not old enough for us to even think about putting her in school but the subject came up time and time again and even though the public schools in the midwest were a bit better than the island schools, it still did not feel right to consider another option other than homeschool so that was always the final decision.

Sofia is fiercely independent, creative and an imagination that would put Disney to shame 😉. She would sit hours and hours and play with toys switching back and forth between her characters (toys) with up to 6 different dialogs and perspectives for each different character.

Her stuffed animals and our dog were the guinea pigs to her vet escapades.

Cotton Candy needed an emergency C-Section to save her puppies

Blackie has a bad case of the "stickerpox"

Even Charlie Horse got special treatment

Oh no!, Ozzy is hurt bad

He needs lots of love, care and don't forget bandages!

And the vet herself was a puppy or cat 80% of the time and would wear puppy ears, or outfits for weeks on end.

She absolutely loved arts and crafts, painting, creating anything to do with puppies and kittens. She could jump for hours on her small trampoline and that seemed to be her go to when she had a lot of pent up energy.

While we nurtured and promoted her interests in creating things, play and imagination, we started to introduce short curriculum hours of numbers and language when she was 3. It was very obvious that she will excel in Math as she was already adding by the time she was 4 and that was with only a couple of flashcards of numbers addition once every other week.

Language Arts and Phonics was a different story and struggle for me. Her attention span for that was about 3 minutes and she complained it was “so boring”. So I haven’t made that a priority and set it on the side burner until lately, as we have moved to Mexico where we are now in a different country with a different language than English. There are now 2 language we must learn to speak, read and write.

She is 6 years old and her interest in reading, letters, words and sounds is still next to nothing. The curriculum we had didn’t work for us at all. I’ve tried different approaches and different apps, tried to create games out of it all to no avail. I am getting a bit defeated and intimidated as I seem to be out of my league and thinking maybe its me and I’m not using the right way or I'm the right person to teach her. At this point I am seriously wondering if she would do better with other kids in school than just with her boring mom (I know its a discouraging thought and probably a little bit of mom guilt)... at least with the phonics and reading part. I even talked to my partner about enrolling her in a year of school in Mexico where at least she can get to learn speak, write and read the Spanish language.

I am totally new at homeschooling and I imagined it wouldn’t be easy but this is a challenge I have not overcome. We really want to instill a love of learning and reading in her but I am at a loss for how to go about with teaching her how to read. She loves when I read books and will pretend she is reading the books she has memorized by heart but when it comes down to the nitty gritty of actually learning the phonics I totally lose her. Also what I find curious is that if it's a word that is important to her like dog and cat, she recognizes the word and knows how to read and write it.

So to all the homeschool moms and HomeEdders out there that have found solutions to things that their child showed no interest in but was sorta vital to learn in the real world, any words of wisdom, techniques or advice on my perspective or what else we can do to make it fun for her, then feel free to give it. Maybe I am missing something as I am a total Homeschool Rookie and feel like I am the student more than she is. And maybe if I stop overthinking (I tend to do that from time to time) and if I forget about it for another year, she will eventually find interest when her time comes. Afterall, what is the rush. She has a whole lifetime ahead of her. Her interests will peak when she is ready, right?