Special Connection Homeschool

Last year I posted about the Creative Writing Journa l we kept throughout the year. In it Gess would write down something that she learned that day. I started with the sentence "Today in school I learned about..." and she would write down one subject or topic and draw a picture about it. By the end of the year she was writing the entire sentence. Our goal for the journal was to not to simply work on writing skills, though it is helpful for that, but to help Gess answer the question "What did you do today?" In order for her to answer that, she had to think about what we had done. Since her memory retention was limited she almost always just said the last subject we studied unless I cued her to remember another subject (which I often did.) So this year, her speech therapist and I came up with an idea that we hope will help Gess retain the information throughout her day. To challenge Gess a bit we decided that this year we would have Gess choose two things that ...

Over the last year Gess has started expressing fear over things like heights, the dark and things at the doctor's office. Along with that she has also displayed some really defiant behavior. It is not the simple fear or behavioral issues that I became concerned about, every child goes through those. In her case, she would become so upset or distraught that she would simply become unreasonable and it just seemed like there was no way to talk her down. It was like she would just shut down and the episode would then spin out of control. Since this was all new behavior for her I was striving for a way to deal with it. Typically if Gess started to disobey we could simply provide her with options and she would usually choose the option that would make her obey. Option 1 (raising first index finger) would be to obey and option 2 (raising my next finger) would be whatever the proper punishment for not obeying would entail. It even got the point where I didn't have to explain ...

Well, Gess had her surgery which went really well. She had a rough first week home as her throat got infected but after some stronger antibiotics we are finally healing up. She is doing much better now so we started school on Monday August 30. We had a really great first day of school and I think I will like all the choices I have made for this year. Today I will share what we are doing for Social Studies. I have really struggled to find a curriculum that works well for Gess in this area. Gess should probably be in the 3rd grade, however for social skills and interaction in group activities we generally keep her one grade behind that. With that said, we are still mostly in grade 1 materials. So when I grabbed a new Social Studies Curriculum I decided to stay back at level 1. One reason is that I really want books that Gess can read by herself, not ones that I have to read to her. While her vocabulary is really advanced and she can read the words in 2nd grade materials, she strugg...