Special Connection Homeschool

A few years ago I set Gess to memorizing her address and phone number. I started by teaching her what city she lived in. I found a state map of Kansas and had her locate our city on the map. Eventually she could point to that general vicinity, even when the city was not marked on the map. After she learned the name and location of her city, I had her start memorizing her address. The reason I wanted her to understand her city first is that we travel out of the city quite often (mostly for doctor's appointments). While she is improving now that she is older, when she was younger she was quite the wanderer. If she got lost and someone asked her what her address was, I wanted her to be able to clearly tell them where she was from. Whether or not they could understand what she said was another issue but practicing this quite often really helped her articulation to improve. After she knew what her city was called and where she lived I had her memorize these two sentences (one at ...

My daughter will be turning 8 in October and I know that in reality it will not be too many more years before she will head into the wonderful world of puberty. As horrifying as those years are for parents, there is an entirely different element of fear and horror when children with special needs are involved. While I still have time to handle the more delicate issues, I do realize there are some steps we must begin now, specifically in regards to privacy. A toddler running around in diapers is just fine, but at what age does it stop being acceptable for a child to be running around in a T-shirt and panties? Yes, my daughter hates wearing pants and/or shorts, almost as much as she hates shoes. When my daughter enters the house the first thing to go are her shoes, the second thing is her pants! We have several play dresses for just this purpose, but they are not always practical. Still, it is a bit embarrassing when you come home with company and she begins undressing in the livin...

Within one of my homeschooling communities I found a really neat Science resource called Steve Spangler Science . Many of you may already be familiar with him as he has a weekly television segment in which he demonstrates some science experiments that kids can do at school and home. He has appeared on many news and talk shows and he just has a great way of making science fun and exciting for kids. Since "experiments" and hands on science is not really my thing I have found him quite informative as well as entertaining. I subscribe to his Experiment of the Week so I get each segment sent directly to my email. While Gess and I have watched several of his videos together we have not actually done many of them of ourselves. My husband has agreed to take that part over and soon we may have our own potato gun , or at least our own launcher! Anyway, this week's video was particularly entertaining. Some of you may be aware of one of the big internet Youtube sensation the...

Last Saturday Gess attended the party for completing the summer reading program at our local library. She read her 20 books and for that got several prizes like free candy, drinks and various other items from area merchants along with a T-shirt donated from Emprise Bank. On top of that, each child got to pick out one additional prize. Gess got a blow up swimming pool that she got to use once before the weather cooled down to fall like temperatures! Here is a copy of her certificate and a photo of her in her T-shirt. She read every book all by herself, she is such an awesome reader!