Special Connection Homeschool

With Gess down with Strep throat and the holiday this week I thought this would be great time to share some pictures my husband took one day when he took Gess out to the garage with him. She loves to play while daddy works but this time she wanted to do what daddy was doing, so daddy let her do just that! Here is how I think it went down. "Daddy, I want to hammer too." Daddy says, "Ok, here is a hammer, a piece of wood and nail, have fun!" While she is enjoying herself, she looks up and says... "Daddy, I need more wood." Daddy, says "sure, come here and cut some." "Perfect! That's just what I needed!" That's probably not exactly how it happened, but either way you can see she had a great time! Working with dad sure is fun!

We are, of course, preparing for Thanksgiving by implementing it into our homeschool activities. Below are the things we did to study Thanksgiving this year. (For more Thanksgiving ideas visit my blog from last year titled " Thanksgiving .") Workbook: Gess learned about the founding of America in our Christian Light Education Social Studies Unit . In these lessons Gess learned all about the Pilgrims, why they came to America on the Mayflower and how the Indians helped them to learn how to plant corn among many other things. Books: To build on that we added additional activities. First we checked out books at the library. I really liked the books we checked out last year so we checked out the same ones again this year. We also got a Thanksgiving craft book that has several crafts that are fairly simple. It is called 175 Easy-To-Do Thanksgiving Crafts . Crafts: Pumpkin Pie Game The craft we chose from the book 175 Easy-To-Do Thanksgiving Crafts was the Pumpkin Pie Game...

I really love the way the Phonetic and Spelling book is laid out in the Reading 1 - Bible Blessing Readers curriculum. It is set up in a way that encourages success, especially for children with special needs. We start with phonetic spelling. Each lesson has at least two vowel sets. For example it might be a short e and long e vowel set like the one you will see below. Because there are two sets in a lesson we make sure we do each set on different days. I do not want to confuse Gess by doing two rules at the same time. (Remember that some of these are review from Beginning Steps to Reading that we completed last year) I start by showing her the rule on the chalkboard and then share examples of how they are used in words. When we are ready for her to spell on her own we go to her workbook and have her write the vowel set at the top of the page. (The book has a "basket" of apples at the top of each row to write them in). This of course sets up the work in a way that ...

We finally started on Reading 1 - Bible Blessing Readers which is the curriculum that follows the Beginning Steps to Reading that I previously blogged about. (You have to write Eastern Mennonite Publications for a catalog they do not have a website)As I have stated before, this curriculum was meant to be done all in one year. Beginning Steps to Reading is used for the first semester and Reading 1 for the second. Since my daughter has Down Syndrome I have slowed this material down tremendously and am using each one of them for an entire year. I used Beginning Steps for Kindergarten and am using Reading 1 as 1st grade. (While Gess would be in the 2nd grade based upon her age, socially and academically we are calling this her 1st grade year even though it is our 3rd year homeschooling.) I am really loving Reading 1 so far as it too progresses at a slower pace. It also still offers multiple choice answers to some questions which really gives children with special needs an op...