Every Journey Begins with a Single Step

My son took a logic class online last year. As I was cleaning, and listening, I remember his teacher saying, “In order to understand what someone is saying, it is important to understand where they are coming from.” So I thought I would share a piece of my homeschool journey, so that you can understand where I am coming from.

Off to a Good Start

I have four children—two boys and two girls—ages 15, 13, 12, and 5. My oldest was extremely easy to homeschool. He just seemed to magically understand everything with ease, and really enjoyed learning. I wasn’t very consistent with schooling him when we first started and I hadn’t really established a good rhythm in my home. I was super sporadic with his lessons, but he was fine. He remembered what we had learned, and was able to build on that—even with the lack of consistency. I thought I was doing pretty good, and that homeschooling was so fun! I kind of wondered why some of my friends struggled.

Then came my second child

When she was five, I used the same, basic, $30 Alpha-phonics workbook that I had used with my son. Just a black and white book with phonics to practice. No bells, no whistles. Worked fine with my first, but it was NOT working with my daughter.

“That says CAT! ‘kuh’ ‘ah’ ‘t.’ Get it?” She just yawned and said her brain was tired, and she didn’t understand.

A friend of mine, who was a tutor and was trained to diagnose dyslexia, told me that my daughter was probably dyslexic. So I read everything I could on dyslexia and started to try to implement things. I colored all the word endings that were the same—thinking this would help her see it as a whole—and blend the word. It didn’t work. I got a tutor for awhile, then I thought I could just buy curriculum and do it on my own. So I cancelled the tutor and bought dyslexia specific curriculum.

But I was very impatient. I had easily learned to read, and so had my first child. So my expectations were off for my daughter, and when the progress wasn’t moving as fast as I thought it would, I would jump ship and buy a different curriculum.

It was a stressful time. I misjudged her. And even though I knew she had dyslexia, I still thought that she was just lazy and wasn’t working hard enough. Little did I know, because of the way her brain was wired, she was working very hard, but with little reward. She was starting to hate school, and I wasn’t enjoying it much either.

Making School Fun Again

What was I going to do? At the time, we were using a reading program. It was a good one—based on the Orton Gillingham approach—but she hated it. She hated trying to memorize rules, and reading word lists, and reviewing with flashcards.

I also used the Elson Readers, which are filled with rich stories of fables and fairy tales, and historical events. They were very interesting, and I noticed she read better when reading those, rather than the lists of words she was to practice with her other program. I believe that was because she had a reason to want to read those—she wanted to know the story.

I was afraid to give up the hardcore basics, the fundamentals. But I did, because I could see she was losing her love of learning, and I was losing my love of homeschooling. So we just read daily from the Elson Readers, and I would help her sound out words, and I would point things out about phonics that I knew. Slowly, but surely she progressed, and most importantly, the joy came back.

Building on Strengths

I also believe that this way of learning built on her strengths. She is a typical right brained thinker: very creative, imaginative, and she loved stories. When she was four years old, I read Heidi to her (which is not a small or beginning chapter book, in my opinion) but she loved it. Her brain doesn’t think in linear lists and rules. She just wanted to get at a real story, and that is what helped her.

We had a honeymoon period and I was happy that we had worked together, even though we struggled. Even though some days weren’t so pretty, we overcame. That was a great feeling, and humbling lesson.

But I could see that she was also going to really struggle with math, especially as it got more complicated, and with spelling and writing. I could see she was very intelligent in many ways, but I just didn’t think that learning should be that hard for her, or anyone. So I went looking for answers to how I could get her brain to work “better.”

Connecting the Dots

Integrating reflexes on a client in 2019.

I came across a website that had a symptom checklist, and I started noticing a lot of these symptoms in my daughter. These were symptoms that I didn’t even think were related to her learning issues.

I had a phone consult with this woman, and she said something that really stuck. She said, in regards to my daughters dyslexia, “the brain was never meant to process information in that way.” It just really made sense to me after watching the ease with which my son learned, and then watching how my daughter struggled so much.

This woman lived out of state, so I couldn’t have her work with my daughter. But,I started researching the Primitive Reflex Integration that she practiced and claimed could create new neural pathways in the brain to help it work more efficiently.

The information was fascinating and it gave me such hope and made sense to me in regards to my daughter. No one in my area did this work. So I decided to get trained myself, and being an RN, I was able to do so. I traveled all over the country taking classes, and learning so much information, and then trying it on my daughter and my youngest son, and I just saw such improvement and profound results in both of them. Even Though she had been reading, she never would pause for commas or periods, and still guessed and mispronounced a lot of words. Well, overtime, her reading improved. Her handwriting, spelling and math also improved. She was able to remember things better. She could not play fast card games with us before, because her brain could not process information that quickly. Now she beats us at those same games. Her motion sickness and posture has improved and she is a lot more calm now, because her body was in a state of fight or flight before because of the primitive reflexes being unintegrated. So once I saw these results in her, and more results in my youngest (which I will probably talk about later), I wanted to help others, and that is why I started Brainfit Mama.

So I wanted to share with you, a bit of my story, so you can see and hopefully learn from my struggles. So you can understand why I think that the atmosphere in which we learn is so important, and I learned that the hard way. But I am so thankful for the struggles, because without them, we do not grow. I probably could have taught 10 kids, if they were all like my son, but I never would have grown like I did with my daughter.

I also share this story, because I want to give you hope that the brain can change, that we can make new neural connections, and our brains can work more efficiently. I do not believe that children should struggle with learning, although many do. I believe in putting forth effort, and in doing difficult things, but it should not always feel like it is so hard, like you are always walking up a hill at high altitude, and there is not much oxygen. I have learned so much the last few years, and I hope that some of the things I share with you can strengthen and encourage you on your journey!