2023 the Year in Perspective [Show]

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Gretchen Roe: 00:00:04.509
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Gretchen Roe, and it’s my very great pleasure to welcome you to this episode of The Demme Learning Show. We’ve had quite a year. We have talked about a wild variety of wonderful things. And I have to tell you that I can honestly say that I have learned something with every adventure we’ve experienced. And I have asked my esteemed colleagues, Amanda and Lisa, to join me today to recap some of those things, the things that we learned and maybe the things we hope you’ll take away so that your 2024 year is the best ever. By way of introduction, I am joined today by Amanda Capp:s and Lisa Chimento, and I will allow them to introduce themselves momentarily. And ladies, how about you introduce yourselves and then we’ll get to the meat of the matter. Amanda, let’s start with you.

Amanda Capp:s: 00:00:58.239
Hi, I’m Amanda Capp:s and I’m coming to you from Northwest Arkansas. I’m a second-generation homeschooler. I’ve been with Demme Learning for almost 14 years now and have played various roles within the company, but landed in customer service and have been very happy there supporting our families and fielding calls and concerns and questions and challenges. I am a homeschool mom of eight. I have graduated my oldest. I have a senior this year and then six coming up behind that daughter. And so that’s an exciting and busy time. I am married to a first responder, so that adds a fun element of chaos to the mix. And I’m thrilled to be here.

Lisa Chimento: 00:01:44.200
And I’m Lisa Chimento. I am a customer success consultant and placement specialist here at Demme Learning. I’ve been working with Math-U-See in the company for about 15 years. I homeschooled. My husband and I homeschooled our four children for 25 years. We used Math-U-See during those years. And it’s a pleasure to be here. I enjoy speaking with customers daily. And I love what Gretchen said at the beginning here that we have learned. If anybody thinks that we’ve got it all figured out, let us correct that assumption because we are learning every day, not only from each other on this team, but from our customers, from the users of our curriculum as well, from other homeschooling parents who have had their own experiences. And it is a joy to continue learning.

Gretchen Roe: 00:02:36.192
Absolutely. I have to say, this is the highlight of my week to get to have conversations with fascinating people. And so we’re going to explore some of those conversations. And as we begin, I’m actually going to do a very nepotistic thing. I had the opportunity this fall to interview my second son. My husband and I have six, three boys, three girls. I’m an only child. I wanted the Brady Bunch, so I had them. And he had hiked the Continental Divide Trail this summer. I want to leave you with a quote that he gave us because I think this sets the tone for our conversation today. And here’s what he said, “Life is going to give you options. It’s going to always give you doors and opportunities. You just have to keep your eyes open. When adversity comes, there’s always another route. Be ready to look for the positive and don’t let your internal monologue be a deterrent to finding a path forward.” And I think that is so true and such wise words for us as homeschool parents because sometimes it’s the internal monologue of I’m not doing enough or I’m not doing it right or I’m not doing it the way I see on Instagram or on Facebook or whatever social media platform you choose. And your path is your path and we’ve tried to convey that this year. We’ve got a lot of things to share with you today and I think I’m going to start with Lisa because in polling the CSRs, the customer service representatives, saying, “What kind of advice do you share?” I think long division and talking about the foibles of long division was probably one of our most shared episodes. So Lisa, can you tell me why the episode was relevant and what a parent’s takeaway would be? Now, let me say as an aside, before Lisa shares this, all of the links to everything we’re going to talk about will be included in the show notes. So if you’re happening to listen to the podcast and something is said and you want to go find that show, we made a cheat sheet for you. The show notes will have all of that for you. Lisa?

Lisa Chimento: 00:04:53.221
Yeah. The long division webinar that we did was really, really inspiring to me because I came with some things that I wanted to share, but Sue Wachter brought some things that I hadn’t anticipated, and so I learned a great deal even during that webinar. I think that in some ways, long division stands as a milepost between computational skills and higher level abstract concepts. And so what happens very often in long division is parents get their eyes opened. They start to see things that they hadn’t anticipated. They hadn’t realized that there may have been some– there may be some gaps in some foundational skills. Well, long division is where they often show up. And so parents will say, “Oh, my child’s having a problem with long division.” That might not actually be the problem. So it’s an opportunity at that point. And if you’re not sure what to look for, please give us a call because we’d love to talk through some of this. We’ll ask some questions, get a discussion going, and see if we can pinpoint what’s happening. But this is where computational lack of mastery will show up because there’s so many steps and it creates an interruption in the process of solving those problems. So it’s really important. The thing that I took away the most was what Sue Wachter had to share. And it was about the importance of the skills of rounding and estimation. They are really a key to success with multi-digit division. And I see this all the time when I assess students and they send in the assessments. And I can see hundreds of multiplication problems going on on the sides of the page because the student isn’t aware that they can round that divisor and dividend and estimate before they have to do a million multiplication problems to figure out how to get started. So I really highly recommend going back if you can and finding that webinar in long division and take a good listen.

Gretchen Roe: 00:07:02.774
Absolutely. And I was that parent who blew off the skill of estimation because I didn’t quite understand it so I didn’t think it was relevant. And this is kind of like the snowball that rolls down a hill and it gets larger as it rolls further. You don’t realize the import of skipping things in the early stages and how they’ll come back to plague you later. So I think that’s a very valuable episode when you have the time to listen to it. Amanda, I want to talk to you about our discussions in grading because I think we all learned a lot in that conversation. And I know you have some great things to share with us.

Amanda Capp:s: 00:07:48.711
So that is definitely something we get a lot of inquiries about in customer service specifically is, “What is the grading recommendation? Do we piggybacking off of that. Do we allow calculators or when do we start encouraging the use of a calculator? So grading is one of those things that we love to have a discussion with parents about, but we’re going to be very hands off because we feel that the parent themselves is going to be the best person in this process to kind of know, “You know what your student knows, you know what they don’t know. Some people just grade the tests, some people grade all of the work and kind of do more of a curve grading system, but ultimately, there is no right or wrong way to grade as long as it is fairly representing what your student has put into the work.” And there’s some different angles that you can look at. The time that the course took. I mean, as far as the actual how many hours did we spend on the course? How well they show their work. That can be a factor. And sometimes it’s a good idea to start encouraging them to show their work because, especially at the collegiate level, shown work can be a big part of your grade. It’s also a great opportunity to really foster good studying skills and to utilize both our symbols and tables page and our glossary which are wonderful tools that often get overlooked, but all of those together can really help you create a good grading process. And then as far as calculators, the only level of Math-U-See at this point that requires a calculator is the pre-calculus. But, again, students are starting to prepare for pre-ACT and SATs, sometimes even as early as the pre-algebra, algebra 1 level. And so just like anything else, those devices need to be learned. They need to be familiar and students need to be comfortable with using them. You don’t want to just say, as they’re walking out the door to their ACT, “Oh, here’s a calculator. Have fun figuring out how to use that while you’re sitting in a testing environment.” I mean, nobody would do that. I might have actually accidentally not communicated to my daughter that she could use a calculator in her test and she missed it in the prep thing. So she may have done hers without one completely. It’s fine. She did fine. No big deal. Anyway. But for your benefit, maybe go ahead and look at all those directions, maybe make sure that your child has the tools that they need to be successful and to feel confident going into those environments.

Gretchen Roe: 00:10:46.653
Absolutely. Wisdom is somebody else’s experience. So it always is great to be able to learn from each other. Lisa, I wondered if I could get you to talk a little bit– I know that just in the last week, you have had some adventures in the island of word problems. It is an island where we find ourselves stranded frequently, and we don’t want parents to linger there. But by the same token, we don’t want parents to just be like I was at one point in time and say, “Can’t we just do computational math and let’s not worry about word problems?” [laughter] Why is that a bad attitude to have?

Lisa Chimento: 00:11:30.127
Yeah. Word problems. That’s a universal conversation topic, isn’t it? When you’re talking about math, it really kind of goes globally. This was something that was an eye-opener to me when I found Math-U-See with my firstborn. Because I was strong computationally with math, it was kind of like solving a puzzle, but I really struggled with word problems myself in school and never knew why. And it wasn’t until I started using Math-U-See, and I realized that there is a very big difference between the ability to memorize facts and formulas and plop them into place when you’re doing math and understanding those underlying concepts. And when the underlying concepts are not strong, it is much harder to solve a word problem. Word problems are life application of math skills. And it’s really the first thing that Steve Demme talks about when he introduces math, you see. We’re learning math because we have to be able to do word problems in life. So when I began using it, and I recognized the value of understanding, not just the how to do work, but the why it made sense, why it was working that way, why you had to do it that way. Suddenly things clicked for me. So here I was teaching a first grader, and I was learning math all over again myself. The manipulatives are especially key if we’re talking about word problems because they do bring the concrete and the representational to an abstract dilemma. And so when you’ve got that, it helps you to understand the concept better. And then the word problem makes more sense. But the Word Problem webinar is really, really helpful because beyond that kind of theoretical conversation, we give a lot of practical help. We talk about things to be watchful for. We’re talking about reading through those word problems out loud, multiple times, recognizing what is it asking for and what is it not asking for, and be able to just cross out things that have nothing to do with the answer because sometimes they’re thrown in there just to kind of trick you. I’m sorry to say, but it’s the truth. In any case, I think that it’s important to take a listen if you can when you have time. One really nice thing is that we’ve got the option now of either watching these as webinar videos or you can listen to many of them as podcasts as well. So if you don’t have the opportunity to sit down and watch an hour-long video, plug the thing in your ear, and do the dishes, and listen and learn as you go. The word problem one is really, really helpful. And if you have manipulatives, use the manipulatives while you’re working the word problem. It will make things come to life.

Gretchen Roe: 00:14:22.697
Right. Often parents will say to us, and I know they’ve said to you all as customer service staff. They’ll say, “Well, I didn’t understand how to use manipulative. So I just taught it the way I was taught,” which is a valid way to do that. But if you’ve invested the time and the money and the materials that are behind me, I think it’s really super-duper important for you to recognize that a lot of creativity and design went into making your child’s math experience easier than perhaps yours was. And so those manipulatives are a fulcrum to make that happen. Before we move on, ladies, I had several people mention to me. See, we pulled the CSRs, and Lisa was kind enough to do that last week while I was out. And then I asked some further questions. And several folks mentioned to me the webinar is aim as an intervention appropriate for you. And I think now is probably the perfect time here in December where maybe you’re going to step away for a little while and you’re going to take a break to sort of assess what Sue Wachter says is observe and watch and learn from your children and to see if maybe an aim intervention might be helpful. So Lisa and Amanda don’t know that I’m going to ask them to do this, but they’re good baseball players. So when I say bat or swing, they’ll get it. I want you ladies to tell our listeners why it’s important for them to assess whether an AIMS intervention would be a good place for them to start 2024.

Amanda Capp:s: 00:16:15.731
So this is a fun one because I talk to so many parents about AIM specifically because we’re talking about a lot of times an older student and trying to figure out where to get them placed into the program. And my lead-off question always is, are they counting in their heads? Are they counting on their fingers? Are they using some sort of an aid to get to a basic addition, subtraction, multiplication or division problem? Is that an issue? And so many times the comeback I get from parents is, “Well, I count. I still count on my fingers to get an answer. What’s wrong with that?” I cannot stress enough the benefits of fact fluency. It makes everything about math easier. And so it’s not that you can’t count because, yes, I get it, there are people that do. There are people that have not invested the time in really mastering the facts. But is that really a benefit? Is that a plus? Is that a positive? How is that working out for you as you are– it slows you down. It doesn’t allow you to quickly and effectively pull those answers. And so then when you get into upper-level math, when we’re talking epsilon and up, also division and bigger multiplication problems, there are so many opportunities for errors because if you don’t really solidify and know those facts, it’s going to mess you up. It’s really going to cause a lot of frustration.

Gretchen Roe: 00:18:04.716
And I just want to make an observation here. We’re choosing to homeschool our children because we want something better for them than what we had. And so if you’re a parent who counts, I was a parent who counted until I became a homeschool parent. Let me encourage you to explore this in a little bit of depth. Lisa, what are your observations?

Lisa Chimento: 00:18:27.737
Yeah, and I’ve heard that same argument too, Amanda. The truth is counting is a valid tool. It’s a necessary tool when kids are first learning to add and subtract, but it’s an inefficient tool. And as we grow in our math skills, we really also have to grow in efficiency. Because as the concepts become more difficult and abstract, and as the problem, the actual work becomes more multi-step, the need to stop and count means that you are interrupting the process. And with that interruption comes a couple of other things that we might not be realizing. The first one is it’s burning up unnecessary brain battery. So you are now expending brain battery and a mental energy to do something that you may not have needed to do. Well, a child only has so much mental energy to bring to a task. And if they’re using that up by stepping in and out of a problem to count for facts, then they’ve used it up too quickly and they become mentally fatigued much more quickly than they ought to. And then once mental fatigue steps in, now you’ve got a snowball effect of “I’m not thinking as clearly, I’m making more errors, and it just, it becomes really discouraging.” The other thing that happens, and I hear this all the time, is that parents will say, “Oh, we worked on this concept yesterday and he understood it perfectly. And when we came back to it today, it was like we had never seen it before.” well, that’s because their brain can’t be doing two things at once. If their brain is focused on those individual components of computing facts, then it’s not able to maintain and retain from day to day the concepts that they are learning and understanding. So what’s happening is we want to free their brain. So gaining fact mastery, and please hear me, this means multiplication too. You might be skip counting for multiplication facts. It’s the same as counting. So, yes, it will get you to a correct answer, but it’s another inefficient tool. We want to get them over that bridge, that skip counting is a bridge from addition to multiplication. Let’s get them cross that bridge so that they’ve got those facts mastered, they have automatic recall of the answer, and then they can move smoothly through a multi-step problem without interruption. They can maintain brain battery and now their brain is free. And now they can retain the new material they’ve been learning from day to day. So, yeah, the AIM courses have been a game-changer for many families. And you’d be surprised how many families will call us and say, “Oh, now my kids know how to add and subtract.” That’s not what we’re asking. We’re not asking if they know how. We’re asking if they know their facts without having to count. And you might be surprised that they are counting. So give us a call if you’re not sure, and we can give you an assessment that will help you be sure.

Gretchen Roe: 00:21:30.844
One of the things I think that’s really important is– and I’ve had parents say this to me, “Oh, you demand a 100% efficiency in fact computation.” That’s not written anywhere in the materials behind me. What we want is a greater efficiency than what your child may presently have. And if we can move the ball even 25% further down toward a goal of a mastered fact set, that’s 25% less time that they’re going to have to step out of a problem and count for facts. I have a child who to this day says eight and eight fell in the floor, pick them up at 64. They think it’s funny. They’re 29 years old, and they still say it that way. But they don’t do that for all of their facts. And that is the huge difference. Now you notice I said they. I didn’t identify whether it was one of my boys or one of my girls because they would be mortified if they knew I were calling them out in this particular context. So we’ll just leave it like that. But you might have that child too. You might be like I am where I have to say, okay, 7 plus 9, I know it’s 16, but I have to say 16. And it might take you a second. It’s not a circus trick. It’s a proficiency. And there is a skill in that. So our AIM for Intervention webinar may give you greater insight there. I want to move on, Amanda, and talk about this time of year is a great time for us to start second-guessing ourselves on switching curriculums. So let’s talk a little bit. We’ve had more than one discussion. I’ll include those webinars, both of them, in the show notes. But let’s talk about, yeah, what do you got as far as switching curriculum is concerned?

Amanda Capp:s: 00:23:36.941
Sure. So I mean, obviously, if we started kind of at the traditional start somewhere in August, maybe after Labor Day, by this point in a school year, we’re probably kind of looking at what’s working and what’s not. And then I think also we really have to ask ourselves some introspective questions that we kind of need to chew on for a minute and say, so is it the curriculum itself? Am I not using it or utilizing it the way it was intended to be used? And is that causing the pushback? Is this a subject where my child has no natural tendency and it’s just kind of a struggle for them? Is it catering to my learning preference or style, their learning preference or style? Hopefully, when we initially made the decision on the curriculum, we were kind of looking at those things before we made our decision in the hopes that it would be successful. But I think sometimes we just need to figure out, okay, is it a real issue? Is it worth actually scrapping and looking for something else? Or is this something that just needs to be retooled or reconfigured to fit our environment or my student better? Two of my children are dyslexic, and so it doesn’t matter what language art type curriculum I choose. They’re not going to enjoy it. It’s just not their natural strength, and that’s okay. But there are things that I can do as a parent and being aware of that struggle that can– if that curriculum at that grade level is requiring three paragraphs, I might only require one. So it’s just simple little changes or things that can help you to help a child be successful. Because if I know that three paragraphs is going to overwhelm them tremendously, and then this is going to turn into World War III at my kitchen table, I’m going to pull back and I’m going to say, what’s realistic as far as an expectation for this child? Are they even able to perform at this level or to complete this work? Other times I have done exactly the opposite. I’m like, “Okay, this kid is actually capable of more than they are being required to do. I should add some things on that are going to really push them to produce the level of work that I know that they are capable of.” So it’s a two-way street. But again, you as the parent are really the one with the rudder and hopefully you’re kind of assessing these things in real time and you’re making those decisions and kind of have that awareness as you’re as you’re going through and making these decisions.

Gretchen Roe: 00:26:46.693
I think one of the things that’s very important for us to keep in mind is when we begin a homeschooling journey, we are learning as we journey. And Lisa, I know that you have been very intentional to remind us of this in several of the adventures we’ve shared together. But can you talk a little bit about why being the best observer of your student might be the best investment of a parent’s time?

Lisa Chimento: 00:27:16.782
Yeah, we have a unique opportunity as homeschoolers. We’re not sitting in front of a large classroom of children that aren’t ours. We’re sitting in a very intimate setting. It’s a one-to-one tutorial setting, frankly. It’s the same as if you’d had a tutor in the house, but even more so in that you are these children’s parents or grandparents and you know them well and you love them. And you have an opportunity to assess them really on a daily basis and find out what’s going on. And it’s really important to do that because then you can help avoid some some of the pitfalls that happen when kids are in a classroom setting among a large group of children and there is a set schedule and they have to follow that, the teacher has no option. She has to follow the schedule and follow the program. And if kids get left behind, there’s very little recourse sometimes. And for kids who maybe need more challenge, they have to be keeping pace with that class. You don’t have to do that. You have the opportunity to let your child work at their pace. You have the opportunity to make those observations and become a student of your children so that you are observing as they go. And if you’re noticing, well, here’s an example. When my fourth child was working in Delta, we were doing division, and I started to notice a lot of errors suddenly. We hit a lesson and I was noticing a lot of errors. And I said, let me take a look at these. And I didn’t want to just red pennant and give him a grade, I went in and looked, and I started to notice that every single error was happening in his division work at the same place, in the same step. It was in the multiplication step, and it was happening every time he had to multiply a number by six, seven, or eight. And I have to tell you, those are the classic troublemakers. Ask any parent, right? So I said, “Oh, we need to stop. We’ve got to take care of this. You’ve forgotten some of your math facts here.” And so we didn’t have aim back at that time. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, but I remembered how much writing was an important thing for me growing up. And so I made him go back. And we spent three weeks writing out the six, seven, and eight multiplication facts until he had them cold. And then we resumed the lessons. Well, if I wasn’t paying attention, then I would have missed that. And that would have just continued on. And because math in particular is so much like you’re constructing a building, I would have been building on a gap. And then that gap ends up doing just like what a crack in a foundation does. It weakens the structure as you go. And the more weight you put on it, the weaker it gets. So I was really glad that I was able to do that. That might have been missed if it wasn’t me watching for it. So I think there’s probably a million examples of things I did miss. But that was one good example of something that I was able to catch. And so you have that opportunity to just be watchful, and also to be asking questions and finding out from your children, “Are you understanding this? What’s making sense to you with this and what maybe isn’t”? So you really have this unique opportunity as a tutor to your child rather than a classroom teacher.

Gretchen Roe: 00:30:53.358
I think that makes a tremendous amount of difference. And sometimes as parents, we assume the obligation, but we don’t also assume the latitude for implementation. We think because somebody wrote a curriculum, this is the way it should be done. And the truth of the matter is not necessarily. Now, I’m going to say that with a caveat. If you haven’t used the materials the way they’re designed, I would encourage you not to stray from the reservation yet because they may be thoughtfully constructed to help you accomplish what you’re trying to do. So I don’t encourage you to run off the reservation right at the beginning. But if, as Amanda said, you’re looking at materials and you’re not sure whether the child is in the right place, and you have done as Lisa has described, and you’ve carefully observed, and you’re not really sure, I’d like to encourage you to listen to the webinar I did a year ago with Janna Koch, and the title is Changing Your Homeschool Plans. And and it will be included in the show notes. And what she does is she takes the materials you have and gives you five different ways to approach those same materials and perhaps come up with a different answer to what may be your dilemma than just chucking the materials or doubling down on them. She was very thoughtful in that. And I think you’ll find that to be very beneficial. Jana’s webinar is actually one of the webinars I recommend most often because I find there’s an enormous amount of depth in taking her approach to a variety of things, whether it’s a child looking to begin a college pursuit or a child looking to get out of doing what you want them to do. And of course, nobody but me has children who are bent that way. But that having been said, we’ll move on a little bit. Lisa, I wonder if I could ask you to talk a little bit about Pam Barnhill because I loved what you said about Pam Barnhill’s webinar. And then Amanda, I have something special I want to ask of you.

Lisa Chimento: 00:33:16.483
Yeah, you did an interview with Pam Barnhill back in May of this year. And once busy season was over, I had the time to go back and listen to it. She said something, and I couldn’t get past it for a while. I had to stop the video and go back and play it again a couple of times. It took me a while to come back and then finish listening to the interview because what she said hit me so profoundly. And basically what she was sharing was that before you can expect your child to produce for you, you need to pour into them. I was amazed by that. And what she was talking about was not starting your day with the hardest thing or the thing they dread the most to get it out of the way. So some background here, and you’ll get this, Gretchen, you were raised by a German father. I was raised in a strict Italian household. You ate your food or you got nothing else afterwards. And that kind of stuck with me all my life. And so even when I was homeschooling, my thought and philosophy was, let’s get the hardest thing out of the way first since you don’t like it and then you can enjoy the rest of the day. But what I wasn’t considering was how that would set them up emotionally and mentally for the rest of the day. And Pam addressed that. And I was astonished by it. And it almost made me want to like, “Let me go and get another child so I can try this again.” [laughter] I said that to my husband a couple of nights ago and he was like, “You’re kidding, right?” But basically it was about not saving the good stuff for last. Start the day with something that fills their cup. And then it’s overflowing into the rest of their day so that when you do have to tackle the challenging material, they’re better set up for it. I thought it was brilliant.

Gretchen Roe: 00:35:15.974
Absolutely. There is a new theory– well, relatively new theory. Back in the day when I first realized that I had kids who had attention deficit disorder, the conventional wisdom at the time was do the most difficult task first. You get that done and then you get to move on with your day. We’re contemporaries as far as educational theory at that time. But what they’re finding now is if you can take a student who has attention and focus issues and you can get them to enter in and engage, then it’s easier for them to step in the things that are difficult. Step into those things that they find to be difficult. Amanda, I wonder if you could talk about a little bit about our emerging reader webinar because now I want to spend about 10 minutes with you ladies talking about the kids who struggle. And your story for Cooper is pretty powerful. And this came out of our emerging reader webinar. And I know that there’s somebody who’s going to listen to this retrospective and need to go listen to that particular webinar. So can you tell that story a little bit?

Gretchen Roe: 00:36:29.635
Absolutely. So I already mentioned that I have two students in my family that are diagnosed dyslexic. My husband also is dyslexic, so it’s highly hereditary. So 9 times out of 10, if you have a child that is diagnosed with either attention deficit disorder or dyslexia, and just to throw in some fun numbers, 50% of ADHDers are dyslexic. That can be a really challenging thing to bring to the educational table. Because let’s be real, most of the curriculum is not developed for the neurodiverse. It’s just not. And so that can really throw some red flags as you are going through and expecting certain milestones to be hit. And so with a reader, that is an especially sensitive. It can be very scary as a parent. It’s very frustrating for a student. And if you have reading and attention things going on, it’s just a double whammy. So I knew a lot about learning disabilities because I was raised in a homeschool family myself as the oldest of five. And my sister and one of my brothers had some learning challenges. So it was not a new arena or a new idea to me when I had my own family and I started noticing things. So I already knew right off the bat because of dad’s diagnosis and where I was going with that and I lost my train of thought is, usually, if a child is diagnosed, there’s a parent or an uncle or a grandpa or someone in the family that you go, “Oh, wait a minute.” This is making so much sense now. I’m seeing all the connections. So be aware of that. And sometimes it is you as the instructor. Sometimes it’s the mom that is trying to herd cats. It’s a lot of fun. It’s a lot of fun.

Amanda Capp:s: 00:38:31.041
So with Cooper specifically, I already knew about looking for vision as a mitigating factor as far as how it’s impacting school. So a lot of times people are like, Well, we’ve had regular eye exams. What do you mean? What’s the big deal”? Well, your eyes see and they see it as strength. And that is something that a regular optometrist can ascertain. And if you have astigmatism or you have near or farsighted vision, there are corrective lenses for those. And we all know that. I mean, that’s very common knowledge. What we don’t often know, and there are not as many providers that are aware, is what’s happening in your eyes. What are your eyes doing when you’re actually trying to focus and read and track? And there’s a lot more going on in that reading process than we really give it credit for. Because if you are just a natural reader, you didn’t experience any of that. And so you’re not going to be aware of just how derailing that can be in the reading process. So specifically, with my son Cooper, he had vision therapy. So that was one aspect that we addressed with him. But I just wasn’t seeing the emerging reader and the fluency that I was seeing with my daughter who also went through vision therapy. And I was very concerned and a little frustrated and reached out to Gretchen, and she recommended that I talk to Dr. Holinga, who wrote our Spelling You See program. And literally the best hour of my life. It was so inspiring and validating and encouraging. One, she was like, “He’s actually in a better spot than I thought.” So that was very, very good to hear. But she also gave me such valuable information about where kids derail, which is typically in that third, fourth grade level, which seemed to be where he was just stuck. And in my head, I just had this idea of, “It’s not phonics. He has his phonics. It’s not phonics,” but I didn’t know what direction to go. And she just said, “Look, this is where reading gets away from phonics. It’s looking at everything being about context in the reading process. And so if you’re struggling to read, and you’re not grasping context, that’s where the breakdown is occurring.” And so her recommendation was just Cooper hadn’t spent enough time reading words at that level. And let me tell you, it takes about 20,000 words. They don’t have to be different words. It doesn’t have to be 20,000 different words or 20,000 different books. It’s literally just the repetition and the reading it and doing it consistently. The other thing that good readers do is, if they bobble on a word, or they mispronounce something, or they say a word, and they’re like, “Wait a minute, that doesn’t sound right in the context–” because that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for them to understand context of what they’re reading. They start back at the beginning of the sentence, and they read through it again. And 99.9% of the time, their brain inserts the right word. It fixes it.

Amanda Capp:s: 00:42:00.684
And so getting them in the habit– because a dyslexic is not going to naturally track or naturally go back to the beginning of a sentence. They don’t naturally observe punctuation a lot of times. Their cadence is not smooth. I mean, those are some real things that you can notice. Their handwriting can be atrocious and off the charts. But I cannot tell you– I didn’t get to share this with you because this literally just happened yesterday. Cooper comes to me, and he goes, “So I read the daily proverb for today, Mom.” And I said, “Oh.” And he said, “Yeah, Mom, I read it. I understood it. It wasn’t hard. Took me 10 minutes, just powered through. And it was just reading, Mom.” It took all I had not to just burst into tears because we have worked so hard with him to get him to that point. And it’s literally just– I mean, to watch him not be like, “This was hard, and I hated it.” And I was like, “He read on his own. He just he picked something up and read it, and he was excited about it.”

Gretchen Roe: 00:43:13.593
And why is Amanda’s story here relevant? Because, in October, we did a webinar talking about when your child doesn’t emerge as a reader. And you heard the beginning of that story, and now you’ve heard the victory in that story. And the reason we want to recount these tales for you is because, if it’s not in your household, there’s probably somebody in your homeschool circle who needs to hear Amanda’s story. So we would hope that you would share that, share the webinar or share the link to the webinar or, at least, the conversation about the webinar so that they can go find it on their own. Lisa, I want to recruit you because I know I’ve taught you to talk to parents about what happens if vision is a mitigating factor. And Amanda brought that up. So can you give us some details? What are the kinds of questions you ask a parent when going through the placement process when you think vision might have been at play?

Lisa Chimento: 00:44:16.938
Yeah. So a lot of times parents will call either where the child is struggling with spelling words and they’re really struggling to learn how to spell. They’re often struggling to read, and they’re struggling with math facts, interestingly enough. And so during the course of the conversation, some things will kind of prick up to me and I will ask a few questions. One of them is about the child’s handwriting. And so we start to ask about whether or not that child is writing in hills and valleys and struggling to write on a straight line. Whether they’re jamming their words together and not leaving appropriate spacing. If they’re writing in all caps or if capital letters are popping up in the middle of words. If they are flipping numbers and letters, things like Bs and Ds and Ps and Qs. And even numbers sometimes. Twos and fives, things like that. Something that you’ve mentioned more recently to me, Gretchen, is this will also show itself with motion sickness. If a child is showing motion sickness. And what we’re talking about here is really a mechanical issue of the eyes. We’re talking about the muscles of the eyes. So as Amanda mentioned earlier, if you go to a typical optometrist, he’ll pull out that letter chart and he is checking for acuity. He’s checking to see if your child has 20/20 vision or not. But that’s not what this is about. This is about functional vision. It’s sometimes called binocular vision. And it is talking about how the muscles of the eyes are working, whether or not they’re tracking across a page together properly. Whether or not they’re converging on objects properly. And if they are not, then it is going to bring up these symptoms, if you will. You’ll see this kind of evidence in their handwriting. They are often sometimes struggling with reading and memorizing, because for whatever reason, and I’m not the brain expert here, it seems to be attached to working memory as well. And the good news is that if this is a factor and causing some issues with your child, it’s resolvable. It’s resolvable by either corrective lenses and/or vision therapy. And when it gets resolved, those things go away. Those things start to resolve. So if you’ve got a child and you’ve been banging your head against the wall and trying everything you know and you’re not seeing results, you’ve tried every method of memorization you know and that’s not happening and you’re seeing this be the way that your child’s handwriting is looking, we recommend that you take a look out there for a developmental optometrist. Your typical optometrist may not have the knowledge or the equipment to test for this, but a developmental optometrist will. And then, they can make a proper diagnosis and a proper recommendation for you.

Gretchen Roe: 00:47:15.677
I’m going to add one more thing to Lisa’s list. If you have a child who has a volatile temper. So in other words, you sit down at the school table in the morning and they’re happy and they’re easy, and then all of a sudden, something happens and they have imploded next to you, I recommend you get their vision checked. Nine times out of ten, what they’ve done is they’ve marshaled all their energies as much as they possibly can to attend and do what you’ve asked of them. And then, their fuse has fizzled right on out, and the dynamite has exploded. So before the dynamite explodes, take the time to look into this. You’ll find us talking about vision issues in several of the webinars we presented this year, but you can get some more information, in that emerging-reader webinar, that will be in the show notes. Lisa, Amanda, we’re coming up to the top of the hour here, so I’m going to ask Amanda to talk about her three things. I asked these ladies– I sort of set them up a little bit and made them do some homework. And I said, “All these things that we’ve talked about, all these lessons that we’ve gained, what are the three things you think you want to share with parents, most ardently?” And Amanda, would you do that for us?

Amanda Capp:s: 00:48:35.389
Absolutely. So we kind of already touched on one of them, about becoming an ardent observer of your student. I think that’s really important. And then, because I am in a season of having teens, it’s really important and really an opportunity to have those conversations with them and to allow them some more skin in the game, asking them for their opinion about a curriculum. They should have buy-in at this point. They should have an opinion. They should be able to look at something and say, “Yeah, this looks like something that I think I could accomplish.” Also, having those conversations about, “Okay, we’re going to do this. What’s your plan? How are you going to accomplish the work in the timeframe that we have?” Obviously, I have a senior, and so that’s transcripts. That’s getting all of those details and all of that documentation together. That’s making decisions about what tests to take. And so we’re also looking at the end game. This is where we want to end up. How do we back-plan to make sure that we’re hitting everything that we’re supposed to, to get there and to meet our goals and to be successful? The other thing I love to say is plan things around your oldest. Your oldest is the one you have the least amount of time left with. Everybody else, you’ve got more time. And so the priority needs to be that older student and be flexible. I mean, if there is anything, being the mom of a large family and a working mom has taught me, is stuff happens. It’s always going to happen on shift day, when your husband is unavailable. It’s just Murphy’s law. And so, having just an attitude of patience and acceptance and flexibility can keep you from blowing your top or just bringing a more stressful attitude to the learning environment. So the other thing– and I just had the opportunity to do this last night. I loaded up a group of friends. We all went out to my mom’s. My mom, obviously, is a former homeschool mom. She has graduated all of her kids. And we spent an evening eating snacks, drinking coffee, and literally, just talking about our families and our pros and the cons, of what’s going on in our school year. And two moms, who were former homeschoolers, were there, and they were just encouraging us and telling funny stories and things that they just didn’t even realize were going to make an impact. And it was just such a blessed time of fellowship and encouragement. And so your community is everything. Make sure that you find women, who are where you want to be. Maybe, bring your friends along with you, so that they can be encouraged, and everybody can learn together. But don’t underestimate the value of mom culture and pouring back into yourself, so that you have the energy and just the joy to give. Because you cannot pour from an empty cup. You just can’t.

Gretchen Roe: 00:51:58.342
Wise words, Amanda. Thank you for that. Lisa, you had some really great observations, and I wonder if you would share those with us.

Lisa Chimento: 00:52:06.526
Thank you. Yeah, I’d love to. And I love what Amanda shared. That aspect of a support network is so important for some women much more than others, depending on your isolation, if you’re in a very rural, far-off area. And, thankfully, we have online community now, too, so that if you don’t happen to have a local homeschool support group, you can find that support online. Please do reach out for it. I think we all need it. Dads too. There are homeschooling dads out there that need that support. Grandparents as well. My three things were something that we touched on a little earlier, and Amanda even mentioned about bringing the kids in and getting feedback from them. I think sometimes we forget, because we’ve got a lot of plates spinning in the air when we’re homeschooling, and we’re wanting to plan, and we’re wanting to buy this curriculum and get started and work out our calendars and so forth. And we forget that the kids may have some legitimate and valid issues with what we’re doing, whether it’s a scheduling thing or it’s the curriculum that we’re using or whatever. So I think it’s really a good idea to sit down before, during, and after the school year and sit with them and get their feedback. And in the middle, take a break and say, when you’re not schooling, of course, so that it’s not in the heat of the moment, but to be able to say, “What did you think about this? What’s your favorite thing about what we’re doing, and what’s the thing you like the least? What works for you and what doesn’t? If you could make a change, what would it be?” And begin to ask those open-ended questions. Don’t ask a yes and no question because you’ll just get a yes or no. You know that. Prompt them to feedback and let them know that you’re willing to listen and take into consideration what they’re saying. Ultimately, the parents have to make the final decision, but I think that what they have to say might surprise you, and it might really help as well.

Lisa Chimento: 00:54:10.890
Another thing that I thought was really important was that aspect of not expecting your homeschooling journey to look like a classroom experience because it’s not. Even if you’ve got as many or more than children than Amanda has, it’s still not a classroom. You’ve got kids of varying ages and different needs, but they’re all yours, and you love them all, and you know them better than anyone else on this earth knows them. Take advantage of that. What a privilege we have to still be able to homeschool in this country. Let’s not lose it while we have that. So there was a really good webinar we did. It was called Conversations About Grading. And it was back in February of 2022. And Jody Scott made some really excellent comments about this. If you have time to listen to that, I think it’s really worthwhile. She’s a wise veteran homeschooler as well and really had a lot of wisdom to share. And another thing that I’ve taken away from the webinars this year is something that Amanda brought up at our webinar in July of this year on, “Do I have what it takes to homeschool?” And she talked about a three-legged stool because, like she said, “Life happens. Things will come. Schedules get interrupted. The water heater breaks. Your dishwasher overflows. Someone dies. Someone is born. Somebody has to move. Things happen in our lives that often disrupt our schedule. And we can’t always get to everything we want to get done. Not to mention if you have kids that are doing extracurricular activities, sports and music and other things like that.” So think about what are the non-negotiables? What are the most important things they need to be able to learn for the rest of their lives. If you don’t pack it all in by the time they graduate, they don’t have to stop learning. They can continue learning if you’ve given them the tools for learning. And the most important tools there are the ability to read and to write and to do math. And so if you can’t get something, can’t get everything in in a day, get those three things in. If you can’t get everything in in a week, make sure you get those three things in and they’ll be good to go because they can fill in the rest along the way.

Gretchen Roe: 00:56:32.432
Absolutely. These ladies have shared an enormous amount of wisdom with you. And we have talked about not less than a dozen events that we’ve hosted this past year. We also ask our customer service representatives, “What were your personal favorites?” And we heard back from some of them. It is a busy time of year, but Stephanie wanted you all to know that the webinar we did back in February with Charlene Notgrass talking about history was particularly valuable to her. It gave her a different idea of how to think about history and you might find merit in that. And then Cindy had mentioned a tremendous response to the webinar I did back in October, not too long ago. It seems like it was eons ago, but it was really only about eight weeks ago with Jeannie Fulbright talking about Charlotte Mason and the seven keys to being able to create an independent learner. And I think you can find some valuable wisdom there. In closing, I want to share something with you that actually comes from a webinar we did the 4th of October. And it was from Katie Webster Roe, my daughter-in-law, who happens to be an occupational therapist. And right now, I want to speak to the parents who have a child who either has a diagnosis or a suspicion of a learning challenge. And I want you to hear what Katie had to say. She said, “Remember, never take a diagnostic label and say it is what it is. Our brains can rewire themselves with whatever we practice. Get involved in ways to overcome, to accommodate, and to work with the diagnosis you’ve been given.” And I really want to encourage you to think about that because how you speak about your child is how they see themselves. And I hope you are speaking about your child as a tree-climbing, dinosaur-loving, paintball playing enthusiastic embracer of life and everything. And oh yeah, he struggles to read. The struggle for him to learn to read shouldn’t be the way you should lead a conversation about him ever. And if you take nothing else away from this last hour of conversation, I hope you take that away, that you learn to define your child by their strengths and teach to their strengths so that their weaknesses can become their strengths. Ladies, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been a very great pleasure to go through this year with you all and spend so much time exploring so many things. There’s a depth of wisdom in these webinars, and I hope our parents find that. Thanks, ladies, for your time. This is Gretchen Roe for The Demme Learning Show. Thank you for joining us. You can access the show notes or watch a recording at demmelearning.com/show. And you can also find it on our YouTube channel. Be sure to rate, review, follow, and subscribe wherever you’re hearing this, especially if you really enjoyed it. And we’ll look forward to bringing you some amazing content in 2024. Take care, everyone.

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