Growing In Grace

Parenting ADHD: Appreciating your child when you can’t enjoy the moment

June 12, 2019Tracy

There are moments in parenting that are amazing, that fill you with admiration for your child and with wonder that you have the privilege to be in his or her little life. There are sweet, cuddly moments filled with all the warm fuzzies we mommies dream of. And then there are other moments, moments when parenting is hard, moments that make you question everything in your life. Parenting ADHD, much less multiple children with ADHD, is filled with both moments. In one moment, I am in awe at the imagination, energy, and innovation of my kids, absolutely stunned by the 50+ million thoughts a day that pour out of their brains. And then there are moments that rock my world, that shake the core of all by beliefs, and I’m left in the ruins of impulsivity and emotional dysregulation. Parenting ADHD is awesome! And parenting ADHD is stinking hard.

Then comes the sage advice to “enjoy the moment” because they grow up so fast. But honestly, there are some parenting moments that I just can’t enjoy. Some moments, honestly, we just survive. So how do you appreciate your child, even when you can’t enjoy the moment?

5 Ways to Appreciate Your Child When You Can’t Enjoy the Moment

Homeschool Math Help with CTCMath: a review

April 17, 2019Tracy

Math is not our best subject here, though we’ve settled into some solutions for our family. I am keenly aware of our deficits and learning gaps in math, so when the opportunity came to give CTCMath a try, I excitedly jumped at the opportunity for some homeschool math help.

I was thrilled with both how easy it was to use and how excited my kids were to do math!

Tapestry of Grace DE or Stages: a review

April 12, 2019Tracy

I have used the Tapestry of Grace curriculum with my family for nearly seven years and own all four years of the DE or Digital Edition of the program. We love it! I love the richness and depth of the Tapestry of Grace curriculum, and the ability to customize a weekly plan that fits our family and our life. So when their new Stages product came out, I was curious. What was different from what I currently had? Which product should I recommend to others interested in starting Tapestry? Would having my plans and teacher notes divided into the separate Stages or learning levels solve some of the confusion I sometimes ran into when planning?

How to customize your homeschool curriculum to fit your child’s needs

February 27, 2019Tracy

For all those well-laid plans and carefully selected homeschool purchases, it happens. You get into the homeschool year and realize that what you have and who you are teaching just aren’t a match. What do you do? Do you throw out all of that curriculum and start over? Is it possible to make adjustments to your homeschool year that will actually make a difference? Sometimes the problems warrant starting over from scratch; there’s just not enough going well to make a curriculum worth keeping. But many, many times it’s possible to modify your homeschool curriculum to fit your child’s needs. Here are five steps to help you customize your homeschool curriculum.

Our experience with Heart of Dakota (pros and cons)

February 21, 2019Tracy

This past year, I decided to break from the curriculum we’d been using from the very beginning and try a few new things. I was trying to find relief during a particularly busy stage of life, and trying to wrap my head around my son’s 7th grade year and his changing academic needs. So we took a detour from Tapestry of Grace and tried Heart of Dakota for a few months.

All in all, we used Heart of Dakota (three different guides) for about 14-18 weeks, one child going a little further than the others. I dropped my youngest’s guide first: the pace was just too slow. Months into the program, and our Pilgrims still hadn’t left Holland. Compared to what we were used to (Story of the World and Tapestry), it felt like a snail’s pace, and my voracious first grader wanted more. So did I.

I hung on a little longer with the older two, trying to adapt the guide and make changes that fit us best. But the Heart of Dakota guides really aren’t made for the kind of customizing I was wanting. The changes made the guide confusing; it was just too restrictive for our style. So here’s a little more about Heart of Dakota, and why we ended up right back where we started—with Tapestry of Grace.

3 Reasons your Homeschool Curriculum Fail was the Right Choice

January 24, 2019Tracy

It’s a terrible feeling, to sit around a pile of curriculum—beautiful curriculum you paid good money for—and to realize there’s no way it’s going to work. To realize that all this effort and investment is one big homeschool curriculum fail. And failure of any kind often feels personal. It’s tempting to look at the pile and think, “I’ve failed.” Yet, there are three good reasons why your homeschool curriculum fail might have actually been the right choice.

Recently, I left our tried and true curriculum to try something new, only to realize that shiny new investment was the absolute wrong choice for us. Or was it?

4 small adjustments to your homeschool year (that make a BIG difference)

December 11, 2018Tracy

My daughter’s dyslexia has created a lot of anxiety for her over the years, which means a lot of meltdowns during a homeschool day and week. Homeschooling a child with learning anxieties is no small feat. In fact, this summer we couldn’t even discuss the start of school without my daughter emotionally shutting down for the rest of the day. I knew we needed to make big changes this year, but I’ve been surprised at how small the adjustments were that created those big changes. Little by little, we’ve tackled our homeschooling in different ways to try to help her in this area, each year making more progress. And this year, it’s been the best yet.

The adjustments we’ve made this year were largely due to some of my summer reading, particularly a book called The Self-Driven Child. (Check out more reading suggestions on homeschooling ADHD here.) I loved this book because it helped me to understand her stress and the remedy—giving her more control. The 4 small adjustments that have made such big changes to our homeschool year largely include giving my child more control of her day, not necessarily more independence but more control. Here’s what that looked like for us.