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...