Special Connection Homeschool

One of the biggest arguments against homeschooling is socialization. They claim that public or at least formal schooling is necessary for learning social skills. Oh really? Have you been to your supermarket lately? How about the mall, the discount store, restaurant or any other public place? It does not take long at any one of these places to realize that very few people have mastered basic social skills. If most children go to school and school is necessary for learning proper social skills, why do so few people seem to have any? I was thinking about this at the store the other day as I noticed several areas in which people seemed ill trained to be in public. Here are a few examples that I came across that day. Hygiene : You would think that since public schools spend tons of money on health and fitness classes that its graduates would at least have basic hygiene skills, unfortunately that is not the case. Don't get me wrong there are times when I run to the store and I ...

Christmas is an odd holiday for me. As a Christian that seeks to stay true to the Word I see nothing that tells me to celebrate the Lord's birth nor is there any proof that December 25th is His birth day. There are pagan roots to the holiday and there is no evidence of the early church celebrating this event until the 300sAD. That is a bit late to either give any credence to the date or the command to celebrate it. However, is celebrating it wrong? That is a subject I do not want to debate in this thread. Whenever this question comes to me I am always led to the 14th chapter in Romans which says Rom 14:5, 14 One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind...Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. NIV So whether a Christian celebrates it is a religious holiday or chooses not to, we should not judge them for it. These are what Romans 14:1 refers to as "disputabl...

I am on a mission to teach my daughter the concept of the five senses. We have studied them this year and last and she can tell you what she uses to see, hear, taste, touch and smell. If you ask her what do you hear with she says ears, what do you see with, she knows it is the eyes. However, when you ask her did she see or feel the color blue, she always says she felt it! If you ask her does she use her eyes or hands to find the color red, she will say her hands. Now I know I have been telling you that she is a hands on learner, but really, her eyes do work. So now it is my job to find a way to explain that to her. This is one of the greatest challenges of teaching a child with special needs. Most children seem to grasp certain abstract concepts pretty easily, but we have to find ways to teach them to our children. Some of it just does not come naturally and more often then not, when a child does not pick up the concept it is assumed that it is beyond their reach. I, however, ...

Math U See is an awesome hands on curriculum. You can buy blocks to represent the numbers and they have them in values 1-9, tens and hundreds. To learn place value they have a thing called "Decimal street." They teach that there are three houses on the block. The units (ones), tens and hundreds. They have different color blocks for each place value and of course each house is the appropriate size to hold up to 9 of each kind of block. I was really worried that my daughter would struggle with place value, but this is taught in such a way that it was really easy for her to grasp and is also fun to do! Here is how it works. We have cards 0-9 in three different colors. Green for the units, blue for the tens and red for the hundreds (which is the same color as the corresponding blocks). She draws one of each card and places it below the appropriate house. Then, starting with the units she places that many blocks in the house. (They call the ones units for the sake of a...

Well, tomorrow is Thanksgiving and we are certainly ready. Here are some activities we did this week to help teach Gess what Thanksgiving is all about. Books We checked out two books from the library, the same two as last year as I thought they were both very good. The first book, "The First Thanksgiving" by Jean C. George which was about just that, the first Thanksgiving. It was very detailed and beautifully illustrated. It is long so it took us a few days to finish it. The second book was shorter and Gess was able to help us read it. It was called "Thanksgiving Day" by Gail Gibbons and is also about the first Thanksgiving but then it shares how people actually celebrate the holiday today. I liked that because it helped my daughter to identify the story of Thanksgiving with the events and activities that she partakes in on that day. Videos Since Gess is a very visual and hands on learner, sometimes just reading and looking at pictures are not enough for her t...

My daughter is not really much of a whiner, but she does have a way of not always asking for things politely. Instead of whining about being thirsty she would ask for a drink in a demanding sort of way. A very irritating and loud demanding sort of way. Well, at last year's homeschool convention I listened to a speaker and found that she had an awesome technique to stop whining and other behaviors that showed a lack of self-control. Ginger Plowman, a Christian author, speaker and founder of " Preparing the Way Ministries " had some great advice. It was not anything new or innovative, in fact, it was pretty simple yet it is the key to getting to the heart of the matter, which is the heart. As she says, most parents work on trying to change the way their children "act." We figure if they learn to "act" right then they are being raised right, but that is not true. What we have to do is change the way they think. We have to reach past he outward be...

So where have we been the last three weeks and what have we been doing? Well, we have moved into a larger house and I finally have more room for all of our school, therapy and art supplies (not to mention basic household items)! It has taken all of my extra time to pack, unpack and get this house shaped into a home but it is amost there! I love it already and can't wait to host my first homeschool group meeting here! Now I know many of you have entire rooms for your school and this would seem like little to be excited about, but just imagine how small the room we left was! We used to have to pull everything out and put it back each and every day. Of course I am not done. There are still flags to mount and calendars to post on the wall, etc, but its a start! I also had issues with my computer. First it just quit working, so we took apart our media center computer and installed my drives and video card in it. My video card was not pleased and demonstrated by torching itself....

School is still going really well, I think we really made excellent choices when picking our curriculum. Of course we spent quite a bit of time researching our options and really focused on ones that seemed geared towards Gesserine's strengths. Reading : Most of it had been review because she already knew her letter sounds, but since we were starting with a new approach I didn't want to start in the middle. I also wanted to emphasis the sounds making sure Gess said them correctly. This last week though we began working on word blends which was something new. We started with Sa, Se, Si, So, Su. For the first time Gess was listening for more than just the first letter of the word, she had to listen for the first blend. We spent the whole week on just these beginning blends and by the end of the week she was doing pretty good recognizing the proper blend. Now we will begin adding letters to the end of the blend. She is getting good with her worksheets and can do some of th...

As I previously mentioned Down syndrome is usually accompanied with various medical problems and some can be quite serious. Gesserine was born with a congenital heart defect. In her case the valves in her heart were not working properly and it was allowing the oxygenated and un-oxygenated blood to mix in the heart. At 2 1/2 months of age she had an AV Canal repair done. When she had her open heart surgery the Kansas City Star was doing a piece on her surgeon, Dr. Lofland. While doing this article they followed Gess from her pre-op visit, during her actual surgery all the way to our follow up visit afterwards. There were even full color photos of the surgery itself in the paper! I thought I would share the article for those who might want to learn a little bit more about it. They tell about Gesserine's surgery at the beginning and finish up at the end with a little bit in between. Of course you will learn more about her surgeon than Gess, but he is the man who skillfully re...

As you all probably know, my daughter is only 6 (almost 7 years old) so I do not really know what the future holds for her. What I do know is that it offers her more than I ever dreamed it could when we first got the diagnosis that she had Down syndrome. There have been great advances both medically and socially that have allowed a person with Down syndrome to live a fulfilling life. One of those great achievements have been early intervention. It used to just be assumed that a person with Down syndrome could not really learn or adapt well and therefore they were never given an opportunity to do so. They have since learned that not only are they able to learn but sometimes there are medical reasons for some of their delays. For instance part of their speech difficulties are sometimes due to hearing loss and their reading delays actually appear worse than they are when the child suffers from poor vision. Because they now know these facts children with Down syndrome are screened at...

Some of you might not know this but October is Down Syndrome Awareness month and at this time support groups all across America will be having Buddy Walks to raise funds to support education, research and advocacy for people who have Down syndrome. Many people do not really know much about Down syndrome. I know that when my daughter was born I certainly did not. My knowledge of DS was limited to what I learned while watching Life Goes On which starred Chris Burke who has DS. Of course these days, people do not even know what that show is, let alone what DS is. All I knew was that people who had Down syndrome had intellectual disabilities (which wasn't how it was referred to at the time). I knew that they were now attending school with their peers, but I knew that it was tough because they were not on the same level as their peers. What I didn't know was that the mental aspect was only one of many conditions that accompany DS. Many people who have Down syndrome often ...

School has been going well, not much new to tell. The weather has been really great though! My son and his girlfriend came over on Tuesday and wanted to take my daughter to feed the ducks, so we grabbed some left-over hamburger buns and off we went. My daughter, like most any other child, has always loved feeding the ducks (see how much our kids are just like yours!). What you might not know about my daughter is that duck became one of my daughter's first words (which was significant since she spoke very few of them for the first few years of her life). She could say, mom, dad, Jesus and then "duck." Why duck? Because of moments just like this! Every time we passed this park my daughter would use her very limited vocabulary to tell us she wanted yet another experience to interact with her beloved feathered friends. (This was also my first clue into realizing just how much of a "hands on" learner my daughter was.) I just thought I would share one of our ...

I know we are only four weeks into school but so far this year I am really pleased with all the curriculum and products I have purchased for school. Gess seems to be adapting to them well and they are offering lots of opportunities for her to do some things hands on. Her Beginning Steps to Reading Program is really great although at this point it has been all review. We haven't gotten into word blends yet, we are just learning the sounds letters make. While Gess is reading extremely well, she mostly reads by sight. She knows her phonetic sounds and she has successfully sounded out some words and makes some good tries with others. Still we haven't quite gotten into blending sounds very much and she can't do that in any consistent way, but we are getting there! So far we have just gone over her short vowel sounds (which we knew from last year) but this time she really seems to be getting the differences between them. She always could tell A from the others, but lets fa...