leora lymphoma: from our front porch lookin' in...: Homeschooling Through Vision ...

I started homeschooling when my oldest, Sammi, was 5 and ready for Kindergarten. That was back in 2007. She was the only person in my life that I'd ever attempted to teach to read.

It did not go well.

My first assumption, of course, was that I was just incapable of teaching reading.

Progress would come... but it was painfully slow. None of concepts tied to reading were "clicking" for her. And we tried everything.

Since then, I've briefly alluded to Sam's issues. Ultimately, I heeded the advice of several older & wiser homeschooling mothers, who told me to take a step back... to give Sam breathing room and to avoid pressuring her to meet my schedule?of reading development.

Sammi is so bright! She is creative, crafty, and has a working vocabulary that is about a grade level or two above her current grade. Her memorization ability is also quite good, so the continued slow progress through learning to read just confounded me.

In November of 2010, I got the chance to attend a talk entitled?"A Critical Link Between Vision and Learning" by Dr. Genia Beasley, at our local homeschool group's Parent Workshop. It didn't take long before the handouts she gave us during that meeting had the hair standing up on the back of my neck. Of the twenty-four symptoms listed as signals for a visual processing disorder, I checked off nineteen of them as fitting Sam. After meeting with Dr. Beasley, it become clear that Sammi was indeed a good candidate for further testing and most likely some form of vision therapy.

The bad news was... none of it would be covered by our insurance(s). Neither our vision insurance nor our medical insurance.

For us, at the time, that was that. We just did not have room in the budget for something like this. So I buckled down, did my research... learned what we?could do to help improve her vision and we set out on a path for the rest of that school year with deeper understanding of what Sammi was dealing with and how we could help?accommodate?her. Her reading continually improved and even began improving at a faster and faster pace, which was extremely encouraging to us.

Then came this year.

And while her reading was still steadily improving... {and?she was falling in love with books!} we hit a whole new brick wall: Math.

I never even saw it coming. Granted, she had struggled a little with adding and subtracting three digit numbers... but when we attempted to toss in multiplication and division, all bets were off. When I was checking her work, it was clear that she was understanding the concepts?of multiplication, but it was almost like she could tell which problems were to be added and which were to be multiplied!

Of course, because I was now aware of the potential visual processing deficiency that she was working with, that was the first thing that came to mind. Not knowing what else to do, we just quit trying to move forward in math. In the meantime, we switched from Singapore Math to Math-U-See {at the suggesting of some more very helpful homeschooling friends working through similar issues...} and began making more concrete plans to get Sam evaluated and treated, regardless of the cost. {Of course, it helps that we've also recently paid off some previously binding medical debt.}?

Today is Step 1. Sammi is going in this morning for an exam with my eye doctor, who is?covered on our vision insurance and we are praying {and wouldn't mind others praying with us!} for answers or at the very least... direction.

In the meantime, I plan to blog about this because a) it's completely foreign to me and blogging it all out helps my mind to cope with the details of it all and b) because if I had to venture a guess, I'd say that there just might be someone out there experiencing similar issues with their child and something that I write might just be the very thing they need to read at the moment they happen upon us here. A least that is my hope.?:-)