What a lovely surprise we had yesterday as we peeked oustide the sunroom window during breakfast! Sunflowers! After our trip down the garden trail, Nicholas and Katie have been eagerly awaiting the blooming of the sunflowers. They were inspired by Camille and the Sunflowers to drag the easel outside and paint those big, beautiful flowers just as soon as they began to bloom. Yesterday was the day!
I want to thank Typepad from the bottom of my laundry basket. After I spent hours very early yesterday morning and carefully saved a draft of this post, Typepad published it for me, complete with all kinds of technical glitches, and then it was utterly inaccessible all day. The house is much cleaner and I had a heaping, helping dose of humility as you all got to see a very raw post. I'm trying again and hoping that the formatting and the links work this time.
This summer, I'm looking carefully at each child and planning specifically for them in detail. While we will certainly study lots of things together, I'm beginning with individual plans this year. The exercise has been good for me. I really enjoy considering each individual and marveling in his or her uniqueness. Because he has been so much on my mind, I started with Christian, who is fourteen and technically an eight grader.
**************************************************
Math
Turbo Twist handheld --nothing like a nifty gadget for boring car trips!
Christian will work his way through the Touchmath upper grades program. This is a program that is used extensively with children who have visual processing disabilities. Though it’s been primarily limited to schools heretofore, the learning disabilities experts at Touchmath were extremely helpful in working with me to create a wholly appropriate program for Christian. I promise much more on this in later blogs. I just watched the training video yesterday and I'm pretty excited about the concept and thinking I might use it for my little ones as well...
We will also provide a talking desktop calculator. Auditory cues will help reinforce keystroke accuracy and correct mistakes.
Processing support/improvement
BrainBuilder is a "neurobic", computer-based training program that is designed to assess and build auditory and visual sequential processing abilities. In an intensive series of adaptive, interactive exercises, BrainBuilder trains the brain to expand its ability to sequentially process auditory and visual information.
When working independently, Christian will listen to “Music for Concentration.” (He's not thrilled about this but he does want something to screen the outside noise and the research on Baroque music and concentration is really compelling. This CD uses streamlined baroque masterpieces to sharpen focus and enhance mental endurance.
Language Arts
Handwriting: Christian will continue to use the Handwriting Without Tears series and the AVKO keyboarding program (a program for dyslexics that reinforces word attack skills and spelling patterns while teaching keyboarding skills).
Spelling: Because spelling is traditionally presented in a visual manner, Christian will not use a traditional spelling program to strengthen his spelling skills. Instead, we will draw upon his strength in word attack and phonics skills to teach spelling from an auditory perspective, using The Phonetic Zoo, a phonetically based auditory spelling program. When Christian looks at a word, he sees it as a whole. But spelling is sequential, and the correct sequence can be missed when seen as a whole, particularly because he cannot rely on visual memory to retrieve the word. Spelling the word out loud, letter by letter, will convert the input to auditory input and aid in accurate storage of the correct sequence in the brain.
We’ll continue using AVKO spelling as well.
Literature: Christian will study literature and grammar typical for the eighth and ninth grades using videos to help comprehension.
To Kill a Mockingbird and 24 More Videos is a program that will enable him to watch video productions of great books and still get the literary nuances. Videos are democratic in their range and depth. Most, if not all, students can understand the focus, the message of a video even when they might not pick up on the rhythm and nuance of the written language. That doesn’t mean the written language is not important - but a well-made movie based on a classic work of literature can make that literary work accessible to children for whom reading is a struggle.
Composition: Writing is very important to Christian. He has spent hours writing a novel on his own. He chooses to write for pleasure, as long as no one has assigned it and no one is watching. While the conventions of punctuation and spelling are missing, the story is amazingly complex and beautifully written. We spend time together daily proofing and editing. He is publishing it in installments on his blog. He has a regular audience of enthusiastic readers which is really increasing his confidence and helping to hone some of those interpersonal skills.
Science: Christian will study Life Science this year using Lyrical Life Science .This multi-sensory program, which has a core audio-component, will allow him to memorize typical eighth grade science facts more easily. Mostly, though, he will do nature rabbit rails with the rest of us. He will also continue his extensive gardening projects and the maintenance of a family nature journal on the computer (using the camera and writing to record his observations ). His goal this year is to build several different wildlife habitats and to have our yard certified as a Backyard Habitat by the National Wildlife Federation. He is registered with the NWF and has set up a planner specific for our yard on their website .
Religion: Christian will listen to saints’ stories on CD and narrate them orally to me to record and save the summaries in a notebook. He will continue to memorize the catechism and to participate in all our family-centered Catholic Mosaic projects.
History: Christian will continue to pursue his love of history, reading historical fiction and listening to it in audiobook format, as well as watching the History Channel. He has chosen the subject matter for this year because he considers it “research” for his novel. Together, we will work through a complete ancient history course to include the audio version History of the World, the classic D’Aulaire’s Greek myths on audiotape, and Odds Bodkin’s stunning rendition of The Odyssey on audio.
He will read the following books and narrate the chapters orally. Because Christian brings a great deal of background knowledge and an intense interest to this subject matter, I have little doubt that he can handle the reading material. These are all in our personal collection and he has heard many of them read aloud. This familiarity will aid the silent reading.
D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths
Nordic Gods and Heroes (Colum)
Archimedes and the Door of Science (Bendick)
Between the Forest and the Hills (Lawrence)
Black Ships BeforeTroy(Sutcliff)
Foreign Language: While the requirement for a foreign language has been waived, Christian will continue to build his repertoire of American Sign Language vocabulary with the rest of his family, using the Signing Time DVDS, a multi-sensory approach to sign language.
Much to his relief, Latin study will be limited to the memorization of roots.
Please remember to pray for Regina Doman Schmiedecke and her family as you go about your daily round this week and in the weeks to come. Regina has given us all so much that is good and beautiful with her books. Please offer your prayers as we mourn the loss of four-year-old Joshua. Information regarding the funeral and donations can be found on the prayer thread. Join us there to pray a novena for the Schmiedecke family.
Many years ago, when I was fresh out of college, I took my first job teaching in a public school. The entire school was a "special needs school." I didn't apply for a special needs job. I wanted to teach kindergarten, preferably in the neighborhood school near my home. Instead, I was in a special needs school, teaching first grade to 21 students. I had an aide for one hour a day. My principal had a strict policy against teachers talking with one another (I'm not kidding). I was on my own.
Have I mentioned yet that I was 21, I got married the first week of school, was pregnant by the end of Christmas break, and didn't have a degree in special ed?
My friend Jan reminded me that the special ed majors had all the same classes we did except for a very few. Perhaps I could do this...The children were, with few exceptions, from very needy and broken homes. There were days, almost every day actually, when I just wanted to take them home with me, feed them good food, give them baths, read them stories, and tuck them in bed. I definitely had classroom management problems. The school psychologist told me it was because I was too available. I didn't distance myself enough. She was probably right; how do you distance yourself from need? I could never get parent volunteers for anything from chaperoning field trips to classroom parties. My new husband, bless his heart, was the de-facto room mother. It was there, in the utter chaos of that sad classroom, that we decided to homeschool.
Our first child was born and eighteen months later, I was diagnosed with cancer. That experience cemented the decision. We were not sending this child out of our home for the better part of every day to let strangers shape his heart and mind. There is something about being reminded that you don't know how long you have to love your child that makes you want to be certain that every day is lived according to its precious worth.
They warned us we'd probably never have another child. Our second son was born eighteen months after I finished treatment. Apparently, "they" didn't consult God.
This child was wired differently. High need, certainly. "Special needs?" I had my suspicions, but I really didn't know. We bumped along with him until he was just four. Then, I was certain that there were special needs. We had him tested, eager to learn if the diagnosis was Attention Deficit or Sensory Integration Disorder. No, the reply came, there's no problem here at all. Academically, he was right on track. And the experts all scratched their heads at that, given that he had had no formal preschool.
We continued on, learning and living together and adding a new baby every two years. He struggled. Things that made most kids smile--birthday parties, theme parks, big holiday gatherings, play groups--all made him cry. So we avoided those. We adapted and compensated and persevered. It just became integrated to our lifestyle.
It took a very long time, but he learned to read. And all along, he had been listening. He heard all the stories read aloud, all the great language and literature, and he took it all to heart. He has the soul of a poet, but simple things evade him. And numbers are his nemesis.
With adolescence in full bloom and things like driver's ed and SATs lurking in his not-too-distant future, we decided we needed to know more precisely what his challenges are. We began this summer with a battery of tests. The scores surprised us; his deficiencies were far beyond what we'd imagined. The tester puzzled over his "inconsistencies."
He didn't behave the way most kids did who were tested by her. He wasn't rude or poorly behaved or non-compliant. Despite substantial reading difficulites, he has a good grasp on stories and an amazing sense of literature. Though handwriting was literally painful and spelling evaded him, he can compose. Boy, can he compose! "Still," she suggested with a knowing smile and a bit of a condescending air, "you need a team to help you with your boy. He needs a special needs classroom or a special needs school." I shuddered. She kept referring to him as "your boy," as if she couldn't remember his name. I kept nodding and blinking back tears.
Oh, but I have a team, and it's growing every day.
When I read the extensive report at home, I discovered that in some places, she did, indeed, get his name wrong. And, I think she got him wrong. There is no doubt we have serious needs here. But she missed the blessings entirely. She failed to see, from her institutionalized paradigm, how well home education has served him. She missed his gifts entirely because they don't fit into her neat little boxes. She missed my boy.
But I didn't. And I won't.
Lissa is reviewing planners at the Lilting House and she has found a real gem today!
I'm Elizabeth. I'm a happy wife and the mother of nine children. I grab grace with both hands and write to encourage myself and others to seize and nurture the joy of every day. I blog here with my daughter, Mary Beth, a wholehearted young lady on the brink of adulthood.
Like what you see here? Support this space by treating yourself to some of these good things.
Powered by Squarespace.
