Last fall marked ten years of homeschooling for our family. And after a decade in, you begin to trust your instincts.
I have watched tears turn into breakthroughs. I have watched my children grow from beginning readers into students acing honors classes. I’ve sat beside them at the kitchen table long enough to know that struggle is usually part of the process. With enough patience, practice, and time, mastery eventually comes.
That instinct held true for my older two children. It has been true for my youngest, too.
But last year, the breakthrough I kept waiting for never came for my nine-year-old.
Instead of accelerating, his progress stalled—then receded. Effort produced more anger than confidence. One December morning, he looked at me through tears and said:
“I hate school. The numbers jump around on the page. I can’t remember the sounds the letters are supposed to make, or which way they go. Why is school so hard for me? Am I just a dummy?”
My eyes welled up as my heart broke. My sweetest, sunniest kid—the boy who almost never has a bad day—crumpled at the kitchen table, giving up on himself and begging me for help.
He did hate school. It was terribly hard for him. But in that moment, I decided I would not let that become his story.
The Slow Realization
Looking back, I first noticed signs of the struggle about two years earlier.
Asher was slow learning to read—much slower than my older two children, who have always been high-achieving and often worked above grade level. So when he lagged behind, I reassured myself with all the things parents say: He’ll catch up. Boys develop language later. Growth comes in bursts.
I assumed his burst was just around the corner, so we kept pressing forward. But by the middle of October last year, his progress was barely measurable. Worse, other areas began to unravel. School was no longer hard in the normal way. It was crushing.
We reviewed regrouping in addition and subtraction every day, but each morning it was as though we had never discussed it before. He could often solve the problems in his head, yet froze the moment I asked him to put anything on paper.
Handwriting became another battleground. While his six-year-old brother could finish two pages of copywork neatly and accurately in five minutes, Asher might manage two or three words in the same amount of time—sloppily and with great frustration. Rage-scribbles filled every page margin. His paper was often worn thin or filled with holes from stabbing, erasing, and trying again.
I cycled through every strategy I knew. Nothing seemed to work. He would make promising progress one day and take three steps backward the next. A word he read correctly at 9:00 a.m. would be wrong at 9:01.
By Christmas break, he was in tears nearly every day before we had even begun. His will to keep going was breaking, and that’s when I picked up the phone.
Finally, an Answer
I started with an optometrist and a speech-language pathologist.
His vision tests came back perfectly normal. But after a full battery of testing with the SLP, we finally had an answer: Asher is severely dyslexic. He has extreme difficulty turning written symbols into sounds. We also learned that he has dysgraphia, which affects his ability to write and draw.
He was not lazy or distracted. He was not “just a boy.” Asher was working harder than everyone around him, making half the progress, and eventually collapsing under the weight of all the effort.
Of course, I felt terrible when we received the diagnosis! How had I missed it? Why had I kept pushing when he needed something different? But the diagnosis also brought tremendous relief. It explained what we had been seeing and gave us a way forward. I am learning that you can be attentive and still not have the whole picture. You can love your child deeply, miss early signs, and still change the trajectory once you understand what is happening.
What I Wish I Had Known
Asher had many red flags for dyslexia and dysgraphia that I did not recognize at the time. Had I known what to look for—and understood how the pieces fit together—I would have sought help much sooner.
Even from a young age, he has always resisted anything involving a marker or pencil: coloring, mazes, dot-to-dots. The artsy things most little kids enjoy, or will at least tolerate, he just flat out refused to do. He went through a period of stuttering between ages three and four. He also had chronic ear infections as a baby, while language was developing. His mental math is unusually strong for a child who looks terrified when confronted with a page of math problems on paper. And even after years of phonics instruction, he still could not reliably read simple CVC words.
None of those things, by themselves, necessarily signals dyslexia. Plenty of children don’t like to color or have ear infections and learn to read just fine. But combined with his extreme and persistent struggle to decode written language, they formed a pattern. Dyslexia is common, exists on a spectrum from mild to severe, and often runs in families. It can also appear alongside other learning differences, including dysgraphia and dyscalculia.
Most importantly, none of these conditions says anything about a child’s intelligence.
Asher’s IQ screening placed him squarely within the normal range—which, of course, anyone who has met Asher can see. He’s bright, perceptive, and capable. Dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia concern how the brain processes and expresses information, not whether a person is intelligent. That distinction matters, especially for smart kids who notice that reading, spelling, or writing seems harder for them than for everyone else. Without another explanation, they often think: I must be stupid. I must be lazy. Something must be wrong with me.
Changing the Way We Learned
Asher’s diagnosis was a huge curveball for me. It turned our homeschool upside down in the middle of the year, and almost everything needed to change at once. My first priority was lowering every barrier. School needed to feel easy and fun again. He needed to read words and form letters he could succeed with. He needed easy wins—not forever, but long enough to remember that he could learn.
So we changed a lot.
Handwriting
We set aside our standby program, Handwriting Without Tears, and tried something more playful and supportive: Handwriting Heroes. It truly has been our hero! The program was designed with struggling writers in mind and uses songs, jingles, animations, and guided iPad practice to reinforce letter formation.
The approach is different, too. Letters are grouped by stroke pattern, and children learn to recall those strokes from memory. Instead of immediately copying full words, Asher fills in missing letters using visual cues—a picture of a lemon for the /l/ sound, for example.
Best of all, he loves it. He is willing—even eager—to pick up a pencil and practice!
Math
We moved away from our concept-heavy, worktext-based program, Math Mammoth, and into a multisensory, manipulative-rich curriculum, All About Math.
Asher needed to keep learning math without staring down a page of problems armed with a single pencil. We are gradually working back toward more written work with the goal of getting back into Math Mammoth, but until then, games and hands-on learning allows him to grow mathematically without the handwriting becoming an unnecessary roadblock. When he does solve written problems, I give them to him one at a time, usually on a whiteboard.
Reading
Praise God for the University of Florida Literacy Institute. Its UFLI toolbox is packed with science-of-reading resources. We used it alongside our Orton-Gillingham-based phonics program, All About Reading, to slow down and revisit the basics. The structure took pressure off. Asher could build mastery of simple sounds and words in a systematic, confidence-building way, while I could quickly find a game, decodable story, practice sheet, or slide deck targeting exactly what he needed. Best of all, it’s totally free!
Anything That Made Learning Feel Fun
Erasable pens. Dry-erase markers. Scented crayons. Pop-its. Fidgets. Squishies. Dice. Reading games. Stickers.
I went to Target and Dollar Tree and bought every affordable novelty item I could find. The goal was simple: make school as low-pressure, fun, and multisensory as possible so Asher could regain his confidence—and hopefully forget that he was learning at all.
Novelty lowered the friction. Manipulatives reduced the overwhelm. Small successes made it possible to try again.
Professional Help
The week after his diagnosis, Asher began meeting with a speech-language pathologist three times a week. It was a major change to our schedule. It has also been worth every minute. She met him where he was, gave him tools to move forward, and taught me how to reinforce those skills at home.
Moms in general often struggle with the feeling that everything rests on our shoulders. That hits even harder for homeschool moms, who have the responsibility of full-time education. When your child is struggling, that responsibility can become crushing, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Asher’s dyslexia is severe and accompanied by other learning differences. I am not trained to navigate all of that alone, and I do not need to be. My job was not to become the expert overnight. My job was to be his mom: to find the right expertise, curate the right resources, and build an environment in which he could learn in the way that works for him.
For our family, that meant welcoming outside help.
Access to Stories and Ideas
We leaned into audiobooks, Yoto cards, graphic novels, and podcasts—anything that allowed him to enjoy stories, build vocabulary, and encounter new ideas without forcing decoding to be the doorway to everything.
Audiobooks did not replace reading instruction, but they’ve preserved his love of language while he learns to read. I suspect they will always be part of his life.
The Results That Matter Most
After four months of intensive work, Asher moved to twice-weekly sessions with his SLP for the summer. Now, eight months after his diagnosis, he is like a different child. He can read more complex words and sentences, and is gaining speed and accuracy. He can spell simple words more easily. His handwriting is slow, but it has improved enough to support the basic letters and numbers he needs to put on paper for now.
I feel a million times more confident beginning this school year than I did the last. I am not beginning the year hoping that this September will finally be “the one where it all clicks”. I’ve accepted that it might never click for him, and that’s ok. His path to literacy will look different, but we are armed with excellent tools and an approach that is producing steady and measurable progress.
But the most important change isn’t something you can measure on paper. It is written across his face–a big, warm smile.
Since his diagnosis, I have not heard him say “I hate school” once. He smiles. He laughs. He looks forward to our daily work and his reading therapy sessions. He tries again. He believes he can grow. And when something is hard, he no longer assumes that means he is stupid, lazy, distracted, or failing.
Progress does not always look like catching up. Sometimes it looks like finding the right path forward, and I’m so grateful we found a better path for Asher.
A Different Path Is Not a Defeat
For children with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and other neurodivergent learning patterns, the problem is not a lack of effort or intelligence. They need access, support, targeted intervention, and a way into the material that works with their brains.
Even with the flexibility of homeschooling, early elementary education is built heavily around symbols. When a child cannot reliably decode or encode those symbols, or connect quickly connect them to meaningful sounds or values, school becomes a massive wall. That wall doesn’t disappear with more practice, time, or “working harder.” Too often, neurodivergent kids are shut out. Without the right support, they quickly internalize failure, often long before anyone identifies what’s actually happening.
The tools that have helped us are not “fixing” Asher, because he isn’t broken. They lower the barriers between his mind, his body, and the material, freeing his energy up for learning and building crucial neurological connections instead of just surviving the page in front of him.
And they are communicating something much more important than phonics patterns or math facts: You are capable, even if your path looks different.
This matters not only for academic progress but for a child’s sense of self. Children aren’t stupid; they know when they are falling behind. Without explanation and support, they often assume the worst about themselves. Over time, that belief can do far more damage than the learning difference itself.
Intervention, accommodation, and creativity preserve curiosity, protect confidence, and give smart, hardworking kids like Asher hope. They have taught him that difficulty is not the same as defeat—and that needing a different approach is not failing.
Asher may never learn exactly the way his siblings do. But he is learning. More importantly, he is beginning to understand that his brain is not a problem to overcome.
Year Ten was not the year I expected it to be. It did not follow the path I had planned, and it asked far more of all of us than I imagined it would. But I am so grateful we walked through it. Year Ten gave me answers, resources, support, and a better understanding of the beautiful mind sitting across from me at the kitchen table. Most of all, it gave Asher back his joy.
It may not have taken us where I expected to go. But it gave us everything we needed to make Year Eleven a much more hopeful place to begin.
Two Precious Stones 