Special Connection Homeschool

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...

Below is the transcript from the news story that was done on CBS about Prenatal Testing for Down Syndrome. You can watch the video at the link below _____________________________________________ Down Syndrome Parents: Palin Is Role Model (CBS) .. --> sphereit start -->When Sarah Palin was four months pregnant with her fifth child, she received life-changing news: her baby had Down Syndrome. Today, five-month-old Trig is one of 400,000 Americans living with Down Syndrome. And the Palins' decision to have the baby has made her a role model to the parents of some 5,000 children born with the genetic disorder each year. While most Americans hadn't heard of Sarah Palin before she became John McCain's running mate, she was well known to many parents of children with Down Syndrome, CBS News anchor Katie Couric reports. "Gov. Palin went through the same thing we did," said parent Sharon Vopal. "Same prenatal testing; same screening." Advances in prenatal ...

It is just so great to see how much a child has advanced from one year to the next. This time last year my daughter was starting Kindergarten. Some of our major goals were not just important educational wise, but for everyday living. One thing I wanted my daughter to do was to learn her address and phone number. With the learning struggles we faced, we were not only working on "memorizing" the information but understanding what it was for. It took a couple of months or longer but by the end the of the first semester my daughter could answer the questions "Where do you live?" and "What's your address?" The rest of the year was spent reviewing that information and adding her phone number into the mix. It took time and patience, but she got it! We also worked on memorizing small Bible verses (or small parts of a passage) throughout the year. So she was introduced into memorization but we always made sure to make it fun and encourage success, it ...

Writing skills are very important and rely on more than just our cognitive skills to develop them properly. Thanks to the blocks that come with our Handwriting Without Tears curriculum Gess has been able to prove she knows how a letter is made, because she can make every capital letter with blocks. What she lacks is the ability is to properly and consistently write the letter. Therefore she needs to strengthen the muscles in her hand to improve her motor skills. Below is a simple activity that will do just that. (This was shown to me by our speech therapist.) All you need for this exercise is some clothespins and something for the child to clip them to. My therapist takes several of those plastic travel soap containers and fills them with clothespins and gives them to the child. They then clip each clothespin around the edges of the container and then takes them off and do it again. I didn't have a soap dish so I used a plastic basket. Since my daughter is older and doing...