Special Connection Homeschool

The reading curriculum we used this year is called Beginning Steps To Reading which is a Christian based phonics program published by Eastern Mennonite Publications (the do not have a website, you need to call for a catalog). It was recommended to me at a homeschool convention by someone who knew I had a daughter with Down Syndrome. They said the material seemed to move more slowly and had great results for children with special needs. So far I have found that to be true, but we still slowed it down even further. Instead of doing a lesson a day, we split the lessons up into two days. That one extra day seemed to help Gesserine get a better grasp of the concept. We would then spend Fridays doing some sort of review work as well as spelling and other related activities. This did mean that we spent a year covering one semester's worth of material, but my daughter actually grasped the concept and phonetics, so I think it was well worth it. I believe it is important that my da...

No Time For Flashcards is one of my favorite blogs for finding fun and easy craft and other hands on activities to do with youngsters. Well, this morning I found the Weather Man blog there and I realized that was something I just had to do with Gess. Since our hailstorm this summer she has been fascinated with the weather. While we did check the daily weather this last school year, we only had picture cards and a workbook to write it all down in. Well this Magnetic Weather Station looked like a lot more fun for us so I went right away to making one. You can visit the No Time For Flashcards blog for step by step instructions, as they did a really fine job at explaining it. It is really simple and took no time at all. They also always post great book ideas to go along with their activities, it's really neat. Here is Gess with our finished product. I did the actual cutting and just let Gess help me glue some cotton balls onto the clouds and the circle on the sun and she he...

I just had to share a little follow up on that last article. Gess has had the plastic glasses for so long that she apparently does not remember her old glasses. We were on my blog page and she noticed this picture from my last blog. She started laughing and said, "That's a silly picture, Gesserine in mommy's glasses!" I found it pretty exceptional that she assumed them to be mine. She just kept going on about how silly that was. It cracked me up so I had to share.

Vision problems tend to be common in persons with Down Syndrome and that has been an issue for us early on. Gesserine has been wearing glasses since she was 4 years old. As you might have figured, getting her to keep the glasses on was quite the trick. The ophthalmologist was right that it would not take her long to see they helped her so he would be willing to use them, but there was some problems adjusting. First she would always take them off the in car and we lost the first pair of glasses out of the window of our van! The next few pairs of glasses were ruined, not so much because she lost them (although she would just take them off and leave them in hard to find places) but because she would not take them off of her face properly. They kept breaking at the nose because she would pull them apart to take them off rather than up and over the ears. Here was her first pair of glasses. We went through 4 pair of these within the first year! While we have been going through the Ch...

I hope you all had a wonderful celebration on July 4th! Gess was really looking forward to it this year and started asking for fireworks a couple of weeks in advance. Thankfully the blog No Time for Flash Cards shared a great fireworks craft titled Light Up The Sky . When Gess asked for fireworks I told her that since we couldn't set some off yet, we could make some instead. She loved the idea and we went to work. Visit the Fireworks craft on the No Time for Flash Cards blog to see the instructions. Here is our finished product! To learn about the holiday we watched some 4th of July videos at the History Channel . Of course there is nothing like reading the actual Declaration of Independence itself. We plan on making that a family tradition. We spent the rest of the week on vacation so that was about all the "studying" we did about the holiday. Even so, Gess certainly knew that the 4th of July was "Independence Day" (even if it was tough to pronoun...