struggling with my daughter

You say you feel like a failure as a home school mom.  Let me tell you, you would be a failure if you didn’t take action and simply ignored the problem.  As far as her room is concerned, you might want to work on the habit of orderliness for awhile.  If you haven’t read Laying Down the Rails, that would help explain habit training.

I’m not sure if you meant school began at 9 a.m. and ended at 11 a.m. or p.m.  If it’s a.m., then you are not doing badly at all, except I would imagine that the high schooler would take a little longer on most days. For the rest, 2.5 hours is probably fine.

I don’t have time right now to give you any specific help with the 11-year old, but I just wanted to give you a word of encouragement.

@jeaninpa !!!  You are amazing and I thought your response here was so beautiful.  It’s so easy to forget that the RELATIONSHIP we have with our children is the most important thing we reap from homeschooling.  The emphasis on building confidence and encouraging what she is doing well is very very important.  A child who feels defeated, misunderstood, frustrated, stupid, etc. will not learn well and tends to exhibit more troubling behaviors too.  Thanks for inspiring me!

“I guess I just don’t want her to fall behind and look like a uneducated child around her peers. ”

I just want to respond to this, very gently, to say that your relationship with her is much more important than how she appears to others. Please don’t make the above the basis for parenting her in ways you wouldn’t otherwise. I truly say this to encourage you, not scold you, from the viewpoint of one who had a very hard time with one of my girls. It’s not easy, especially if you are constantly comparing yourself and your daughter to other homeschooling moms and students (i.e. your friend who does CC), but in ten years, you won’t care whether she appeared to be as smart as her peers if the two of you don’t have peace between you. She can always gain academic strides, at any age. But repairing a relationship is not an easy task. My heart goes out to you – many of us have been there and feel your pain.

One thing you might try to help writing skills is to remove the “school” from writing. One thing I did with both of my older daughters (and will do with my youngest when her skills are ready for it) was to keep a journal that was basically a place for letters back and forth. Full disclosure: neither of these two were struggling writers. For my difficult student, writing was a natural skill. But being open and receptive emotionally was not, especially when she was your dd’s age. It’s a hard age for a girl – hormones rage! So, my standard for the journal was that she could write anything she wanted to, whether positive or negative. My standard for myself was that I would write only positive things, no matter what she wrote. We wouldn’t write daily, sometimes not even weekly. But it was there when she needed it. We’d put them on each other’s pillows when we’d written. I did this with both girls for years. I don’t know if this is something that would be effective for you, but just wanted to put that thought out there.

Just want to share/add a couple of quick thoughts.  I’ve been there, and now my daughters and I are great friends (16 and 23). So, take courage!  Just this year I started doing something that has been possibly the best relationship-building thing I’ve done.  Each of my children has a regular “Special” day or time.  Weekly when I can manage it, monthly when I can’t.  It’s a little hard with seven kids, but one of them is too little yet… She gets enough attention?!? right now at almost two years old.  And two of   are grown and gone from home, so for them I try to have a largely uninterrupted phone call, or write a letter… And honestly, that hasn’t been happening much since school started in earnest this year! Anyway, I let them choose what they’d like to have me do with them at home, just the two of us.  Often it is after everyone else goes to bed.  It has done a lot to bring trust, closeness and enjoyment back into our relationships.  And we needed it.  The thing I love most about homeschooling is that we can set about to win their hearts back when realize we’ve lost it without having to compete with peers and everything else to do it.  That’s what I identified to be the root of our problems.  I’d lost their hearts because of having  high expectations with too little training, too little fun, and too little praise.  Best to you!

First, let me say you are not a failure!
I haven’t had time to read all the other responses in detail, but I wanted to see if I could help a little. I’ve had kids that are like yours–melt downs and tears, messy too. When I started homeschooling, people told me that I had to get obedience under control before I could expect to make them do what they’re supposed to do for school. I didn’t know it then, but there’s something missing in that. In my 18 years’ homeschooling, I’ve realized that when there’s crying there isn’t any learning. You could force your daughter to write, but that could teach her to hate it. I also feel like there isn’t any learning by force. I have a 14 yr old son that struggles with writing, and I know if I made him do more of it than he can do, it would not get better.

What I love to do instead is have a lot of great conversations, because it’s not about what he can get on paper. It’s really about helping him organize his thoughts, and conversation is a great way to do that. Also, my son loves writing when it’s something like putting a review on the lego website or sending an email to his brother. You know, real reasons to do it that are personally motivating. When I have my kids write about a book, I like to ask them to do something interesting like draw the scenes with captions, rewrite a scene from a different person’s point of view or write a journal entry for the main character–depending on their age.

Also, have you asked her gently what’s wrong? It took me years to realize I needed to ask. Sometimes they can’t really say, but they knew I cared about how they felt about it. And we could figure it out together. I hope you and your daughter figure it out together.