Special Connection Homeschool

Most of you know that working with clothespins is a good way to work on fine motor skills. Well, while I was surfing I found a great idea from the TeachMama blog which had article on a Clothespin and Letter Match-up Game . It's really a simple, and easy game that takes the therapy aspect of clothespin and makes an educational game out of it. You can see on her site that they write the letter or number on a clothespin and then clip it to the corresponding letter or number on the card. If your child is at that level then I recommend you hop on over and see how to make this game! Gess, however is way past recognition, but still in need of fine motor work, so I just made a game that is more on her level. That's what so great about the idea, it's adaptable in so many ways! Since Gess is working on money recognition we made a game to help her identify coins and bills. First I copied some play money, cut it out and glued it to the card. Then I made 2 sets of clothespins, ...

Recently I shared with you a great FREE program I was able to review called BigIQkids . Not yet having my own spelling program, I was excited to have found something to use. I am really loving it and found it to be an excellent resource. You can see some of the activities it offers in my TOS Review: BigIQkids post. Gess has really found it fun and helpful. Now I wanted to share with you some other activities we use to supplement what we do on BigIQkids . We basically do spelling twice a day. We typically do our BigIQkids spelling on the computer in the morning and in the afternoon we do other hands on activities with those same spelling words. Here is how a week would look for us. Day 1 In the morning we will do the introduction to spelling activity on BigIQkids . This gives her not only the word and how to spell it, but the definition, how it is used in a sentence, and also shares the synonyms and antonyms of those words. In the afternoon she copies the words in her spelling...

Let me tell you about a really neat resource I had the opportunity to review this past month. Before Five in a Row is a unit study curriculum for preschoolers ages 2 to 4 based off the Five in a Row curriculum which is for children ages 4 to 8. While Before Five in a Row is less involved, and not quite as structured, both materials use children's literature as a basis for each unit in which you explore the Bible, science, language arts, math, and art through various hands on activities. While this is geared toward preschoolers, I offered to review it since there are often benefits for kids with special needs beyond the preschool years. I did find that by age 9 Gess was too advanced for most of the activities, but I certainly thought it would have been an incredible resource to have when she was younger. I can see having done some of these up until she was about 6. What's so beautiful about this concept is that it takes reading a book, which is a strength and joy for mos...

I was so excited when I got my homeschool materials this year. I was like a kid at Christmas opening a present! I just love going through all my new materials and was having a good time until I realized that I had nothing for spelling. Last year my curriculum included it, this year it didn't. I was bummed and was trying to figure out what I would use when I got some good news. I was chosen to review BigIQkids for the TOS Homeschool Crew . BigIQkids is a unique online educational program for grades K-8 that is designed to help students reach their full potential by offering exercises for them to do in math, spelling and geography. Now I was not only excited about the spelling, I was eager to see how friendly the math section would be to my special little student, who happens to have Down Syndrome. Once I managed the online registration process and really began looking at the program, I was quite pleased with what it had to offer. Each lesson is accompanied by it's own ...

"Hi! I'm Ed Mouse, the educational mouse. Guess what? It's time for learning...and fun!" That my friends, is the friendly greeting from Ed Mouse, of Time4Learning , a product that I had the opportunity to review this month for the TOS Homeschool Crew . Time4Learning is a K-8 grade online home education program which offers fun educational games and interactive videos. It is designed in a way that allows you to use it as an entire homeschool curriculum or as a supplement to your current school program giving it the flexibility to meet your family's personal needs. Since I already have a homeschool curriculum we planned on using it as a supplement. I was eager to see how well it would work with Gess, since she has Down Syndrome and therefore has some special needs and struggles. The registration process was fairly intuitive and it was not long before Gess was introduced to Ed Mouse, and began exploring Time4Learning . Now, you do not actually have to wat...

Gess actually likes school and does not generally complain about doing it, but when we would end one subject she would think that meant we were done with school . So last year I began keeping a schedule on the wall so that Gess could see just how many more subjects we had to do before we were done. This way she can look up at her desk and see which subjects are left without having to ask or wonder. Her current schedule looks like this. (Note that I have it divided into 2 sections which is basically before and after lunch.) Of course this may cause some children to insist that the subjects must be done in order, but I would rather Gess demand a set schedule and be willing to learn rather than to have to continually fight to get her back on task. While I know that some homeschooling methods do not follow close schedules, I am learning that Gess does much better when we follow one - so we do. Besides, once she gets used to the routine, she rarely checks out the list anymore ...