Weird! Why Homeschool if You're Not Religious?
A Naked Narrative with Early Literacy Resources
[To learn more about how the Science of Reading could impact your writing, read my blog post Everything I Know About Writing, I Learned From the Science of Reading at The Naked Page.]
1Life has thrown another curveball my way.
I’ve come full circle, landing back in my home state surrounded by the uber-religious and conservative. And while I may not be as liberal as I used to be, I’m still very much a live and let live kind of girl.
I never pictured myself wading through the future I’m currently in.
Homeschooling is my latest foray into the world of fringe living.
For all intents and purposes, I would define our family as a secular homeschooling family. We have (sporadically) returned to church for the sake of my daughter. She’s singing in the church choir and in need of every social opportunity she can immerse herself in as she’s the most extroverted human who has ever graced the Earth. But we aren’t particularly religious.
You don’t need church to find God, I always say. But don’t tell my neighbors. I’ll be sent packing and I doubt they’ll even give me a to-go plate from the potluck.
Like going to church, homeschooling was not some long, thought-out goal of mine. Or even some extension of my upbringing. It felt foisted upon me.
I was quite happy to send my 2 ½-year-old off to her little Montessori school back in 2019-2020 while I stayed home and wrote. But God said, hold my beer.
What’s the quotation?
“Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.”
And the COVID happened.
So, my mini demon returned home not completely potty trained, while I returned to what had been my own slice of hell for the previous 2 ½ years. My husband, my daughter, and I all worked and lived on top of each other. My health was improving but stuck at home during the pandemic it began to deteriorate again (Read my article Insomnia to find out why).
COVID policies dictated schools shut down, reopen, go hybrid, and shut down again. After nearly a year of this, I decided since I had a degree in education, there was no reason I couldn’t teach my little hobgoblin some preschool skills at home.
When I first started teaching her in 2021, my daughter wasn’t alone. Zuzu had met a neighborhood friend, and I recreated a preschool for the two of them. There was a mini table with tiny chairs, the alphabet across the top of the room, and a blackboard on the wall—generously painted by the dad of the other child.
It was a lovely first attempt at homeschooling.
Unfortunately, my health didn’t hold up. I was overwhelmed by a barrage of symptoms from insomnia to brain fog to full-body pain. I decided to stop teaching the neighborhood kid, so I wasn’t setting anyone up for failure. Yet it was a major blow, and I felt like a failure.
But I never really took homeschooling off the table. Zuzu was just three, so most of our days consisted of play mixed with some learning. An afternoon watching Tumbleleaf was sometimes all I could manage, but when I felt up to it, I’d investigate various curricula and professional development lectures. Teaching reading became my new way to get beyond the brain fog.
Then I noticed something strange.
I started using a kindergarten reading curriculum with single-page, tear-out booklets. To my surprise, Zuzu was reading these stories with ease. Until I paid closer attention. She wasn’t tracking the words on the page. Nope, her little eyeballs were jumping above the words.
The reality: She wasn’t actually reading.
She was memorizing some of the words and figuring the rest out with a little help from her friends—the pictures on the page.
I needed a new plan. Some kind of phonics program to help her correctly interpret the sounds of the letters.
I reflected on how I learned to read and couldn’t recall any phonics being taught. Remember the Hooked on Phonics commercials (do yourself a favor and go watch the new one) back in the 80s? Oh, how we made fun of those. I always thought they were for kids who couldn’t read the “normal” way.
But what was the “normal” way to teach reading? Was that even a thing?
I remember my mother telling me to sound out words.
“Wed-nez-day,” I can still hear her voice in my head.
But I only recall teachers shoving books in my face with little recollection of any of them using an explicit system for sounding out each letter and tying those sounds together in any systematic way.
But I am a writer, right? And as a writer, I care about readers.
Time to experiment.
When I removed the pictures and gave Zuzu just the words on the page, she couldn’t read them. This required more research on my part and sent me even further down the rabbit hole of homeschooling.
I soon hit on the Purple Challenge (If you haven’t seen the video, watch it now). It mirrors the test I did with Zuzu but with even more precision. Soon after I began noticing the phrase The Science of Reading almost everywhere. Please note: The Science of Reading isn’t a teacher prep program or curriculum, but a body of knowledge that uses evidence-based best practices to inform how we teach reading.
Then the fights started. The mud flinging and finger-pointing. No, this wasn’t daytime TV. This was the ongoing news from schoolteachers and parents accusing certain curriculum developers like Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins of making money—big money—from programs that didn’t teach real reading and left dyslexic kids completely in the dust.
The failing grades in literacy were staggering and showing up everywhere. Many school districts had been using these materials since I was a kid and publishers were making bank as more schools mandated their usage—yet this curriculum wasn’t backed by any reputable science. Basically, the kids were left with a sink-or-swim methodology.
As a writer/editor married to a writer, my husband and I assumed we’d have an avid reader on our hands. But that didn’t happen. My child seemed mostly disinterested when it came to learning her letters and she fought with every fiber of her being against learning to write out those same letters.
Math was a different story.
I was teaching her introductory concrete math. You know, the kind of math where you use real objects like stuffed animals and beans as counting tools. Midway through the preschool curriculum, I walked into our makeshift classroom to find she had written out a basic equation on the board. 2 + 3 = 5.
She was 4.
So, maybe math would be her thing. And early literacy was going to take more effort.
I threw my brain-clouded head into every free and inexpensive professional development class I could find. I looked up the best educators under the umbrella of Science of Reading: Louisa Moats. Wiley Blevins. Linda Farrell.
I researched and read.
I surveyed and studied.
I stopped using some tools and replaced them with better tools.
I spent all our disposable cash on curriculum.
I learned about the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope. And I finally found the best and most accessible ways to address the 5 pillars of reading: Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension.
Meanwhile, we knew we had to get out of our home and had been looking in the Flagstaff area. But as COVID came charging in so did the Californians with deep pockets. And they bought up much of the inventory in the tree-dappled region around Northern Arizona University. We watched property values soar as 3-bedroom homes went for more than half a million.
“What do you think about moving to Atlanta?” I asked my husband.
I had always sworn I’d never move back to the traffic capital of the South out of fear of dealing with nonstop gridlock. But he was working from home and if I ever had the opportunity to return to my writing and editing, I could easily do that from home, too.
We decided it was the most economical choice.
But one delay after another set us back. It took us two years to get out of our Phoenix home. Yet I couldn’t imagine putting my child into a school when we may have to rip her out in a matter of months.
I made a decision.
I quit writing to ensure she’d be kindergarten ready at home.
We finally made it to Atlanta in February of 2022. It was such a weird time to arrive—winter in the middle of a school year. I had no idea what the best schools would be for her come fall. I hadn’t lived here in 20 years. And with all our unpacking and settling in, I missed the opportunity to apply for schools outside of our district. We’d be stuck with whatever was nearby.
With a little more investigation, I discovered most of the schools in and around our county were based on Balanced Literary—not the Science of Reading. Balanced Literacy is where public education tries to sprinkle a little phonics into an otherwise worthless system. Where they tell kids, “Look at the pictures” and ask “What makes sense here?” as they cover up the words.
Yep, Balanced Literacy uses the skills of poor readers.
The local school’s literacy scores were abysmal.
Within less than 6 months of our move to Georgia, 29 states—including Arizona—had shifted their thinking and were now legislating some form of Science of Reading-based skills to be mandated into the classroom via teacher training, curricula, and/or assessments.
(Note: The above article was written on June 20, 2022. More states have adopted this policy now. In June 2022, Georgia was not one of the 29 states. As of June 2023, Georgia is now legislating evidence-based literacy practices.)
I was sick when I looked up curricula at her potential elementary school only to find Fountas and Pinnell assessments and Units of Study by Lucy Calkins among their chosen curricula. Boy was I angry. I wasn’t about to send my child to a school where they used something like the 3-cueing system and then I’d be forced to reteach her reading skills. What sense did that make?
On a library trip, Zuzu made friends with a little girl who was homeschooled. Her mother helped me find other homeschool activities and I continued to homeschool through kindergarten. Georgia doesn’t require kindergarten, so I’d have until 1st grade to decide what would come next for us. But attending the Southeast Homeschool Expo cemented my plans to homeschool long-term.
Kindergarten was my most intense year of research and implementation. I found programs to address each component of reading and signed up for every professional development workshop I could get online.
After one year of teaching Zuzu using high-quality, evidence-based literary materials, she started reading CVC words. Today, she’s reading words from billboards and signs with patterns she hasn’t yet learned.
Nothing’s safe now. Not my cards and letters. Not my text messages.
But I’m delighted to say when she can’t sleep at night, Zuzu reads to herself. Something her father and I couldn’t envision her doing just a year ago.
“I told my husband we’d need more bookshelves,” said a woman standing in the checkout line behind me at a used curriculum sale, “He tried to tell me I should stop buying books, but I told him no we need the books. Homeschooling is our lifestyle now.”
And I couldn’t agree more.
Homeschooling has opened a door to doing things a different way. My child is surrounded by books, but she’s also surrounded by activities like gymnastics, keyboard, choir, ninja, and various playgroups throughout the week.
The nice thing about homeschooling is it’s one step at a time for each child. You might be able to move math up a grade level as you concentrate on lower literacy levels. And that’s okay. Plus, as a secular homeschooling family we’ve been exposed to all kinds of interesting people both religious and not-so-religious—we’re not judging.
I understand how demanding homeschooling can be and I know it’s not for everyone. But for our family, I still love to operate as a teacher even though I haven’t formally taught inside a classroom in a decade. And I love to see my daughter achieve new milestones, especially ones she may never achieve in a public school environment.
I can’t say I’m thrilled about my next foray—relearning higher-level math concepts, but I’ll do my best to knuckle down and figure that out, too. “God willing and the creek don’t rise” or insert some other quaint Southern idiom.
The challenge with incorporating the Science of Reading umbrella of knowledge into your homeschool curriculum is that most of the structured literacy is intended for classroom teachers. It’s challenging to find affordable and accessible resources to implement at home.
Here are my favorites for daily early literacy curriculum:
Heggerty: An online program utilizing 5-10 minute listening games in phonemic and phonological awareness.
From Phonics to Reading by Wiley Blevins: An excellent comprehensive curriculum that incorporates lots of spelling and writing exercises.
Tara West’s Guided Phonics + Beyond: One of the few literacy curriculums on Teachers Pay Teachers that walks its talk. Excellent curriculum for early or struggling learners.
Wit and Wisdom: One of the best classroom curricula for comprehension and vocabulary, but it’s not easily available to homeschool parents. Because I’m in a grey area of teacher/parent, I find the various modules at resale bookstores and tailor them to our needs.
The Writing Revolution: The best curriculum for writing across subjects.
.The Writing Rope: The other best curriculum for writing across subjects but for students a little older than my daughter.
Other excellent resources for learning more about the Science of Reading:
And the #1 podcast you must listen to before you attempt to teach your child to read is Sold a Story by Emily Hanford.
[To learn more about how the Science of Reading could impact your writing, read my blog post Everything I Know About Writing, I Learned From the Science of Reading at The Naked Page.]