About Accomplished Kids
Accomplished Kids is a resource for parents who want to enhance their children’s learning experience at home. Providing helpful information for homeschooling and traditional school families, our goal is to partner with parents to ensure that every child can become an accomplished kid.
Our Story
Hello, my name is JaLes. I’m the creator of Accomplished Kids. This has been a journey of experiences cultivated by downfalls, triumphs, and infused with a passion to serve others. I am a homeschool teacher of two amazing yet different elementary age students. Like many Americans, our journey started with daycare and public school. It’s amazing how our journey leads us to our destiny. Here’s our story.
I met my husband in college and we did a lot of dreaming about our future. We both agreed that we wanted a parent-led education for our future kids. We wanted them to learn through hands-on experiences and to maintain a love for learning.
As you can imagine, life sort of derailed that plan. I began a career working with families and children within my community. My husband continued advancing in entrepreneurship. We found life had taken over and our two kids were living differently than we had planned.
Fast forward to my daughter’s 3rd-grade year in public school. She was having great difficulty with reading fluency. Her teacher reported her frustration was so grave that she would sit at her desk and cry. After over a year of working with the school’s reading specialist and private tutor over the summer, there was little improvement.
So, in typical JaLes fashion. I started researching ways to help my child. This led us to get our daughter tested and we learned that she lacked phonics and decoding skills. She had been taught to read through sightwords which caused her to guess words instead of read them. Essentially, every word was a pause to pull it from a memory bank. Hence her fluency issue.
We were so grateful for the reading experts that found the problem for us but the cost for their services and time commitment (requiring me to leave work early daily for over 2 months) caused us to second guess her enrollment.
I thought to myself: “I can do this.” And then I thought about all the children whose parents couldn’t afford to send them to such an expensive or heavily obligated program. So, I researched the methods and learned exactly what I needed to be successful.
Here is the secret
Kids who have reading fluency issues where they are guessing words lack the ability and confidence to sound out single to multiple syllable words. The use of visual phonics, spelling rules, decoding skills, a lot of practice, and patience have yielded my daughter more improvement in reading fluency in one semester of homeschool than years of professional “highly-rated” public school help.
This is just one of my stories that led me to take charge of my kids’ learning and create my own materials. Our home is filled with curiosity, exploration, and investigation. All great qualities of exceptional learners. My goal for this site is to do the same for your home.
I remember when I realized my daughter knew the processes to follow to get correct math answers but didn’t understand what it all meant. We are working everyday to tare down the walls of robotic thinking. For my 3rd grader turned homeschooler, we started back at the begining and it has been worth the effort, the doubt, and the sacrifice.