Special Connection Homeschool

I am super excited to tell you about our latest discovery! This program is helping my daughter, who has Down syndrome, memorize her multiplication facts. This is really incredible when you consider that she has yet to master her addition and subtraction facts! It's all thanks to this handy resource we found called Times Tales . Times Tales introduces the times tables as stories. Each number is a "character" and in the stories those numbers interact. When they do you unlock the answer to what happens when you multiply those two characters together. The trick is that they don't mention that at all until the child has memorized the stories exactly as written! Gess is an excellent reader and great at memorizing when it comes to bible verses, rhymes, and songs so this was right up her alley. Stories make sense to her - numbers no so much. Now that these numbers have a story she has her facts all figured out! Along with the video you get downloadable resources t...

I had quite the year last year. I had a hysterectomy in June and just as I got my OK to become active again I had a terrible pain in my shoulder which turned out to be from a herniated disc in my neck. That put me down another 3 months. After that my mother's heart failure progressed and my responsibilities for her doubled. So now that things are calm again and a new year is upon us, I have a lot of goals that I want to accomplish. I sat down one day and listed all my goals. I want to read through the bible in a year, memorize more verses, have daily quiet time, exercise, lose 25 pounds, and my list kept growing and growing. Looking down at it all on paper completely overwhelmed me. Then, the Lord started to show me something. My pastor preached a New Year's sermon and ended it by stating that no matter what you were able to accomplish that year, were you faithful to God? If you were faithful that was enough! God had already been revealing this to me in his Word. I was seei...

I want to apologize for my unannounced absence. My mother's health has been poor and I have just been overwhelmed taking care of her and trying to keep up with school, church, house, and life in general. It has also been difficult for me to find things to write about. Now that Gess is older I don't have as many "ah ha" moments to share. Our school is pretty structured and she is doing amazingly well. I also feel bad that many of the tips on here are now outdated. Information that was once so hard to find is now available in so many places. Tricks that we had to use are now nicely packaged into new curriculum or even software. You know, Gess learned to read without an Ipad or any app for that matter. While I think those tools are nice I actually think that our hands on approach was probably somewhat better anyway. I do think touching objects is better than clicking on them. My plan for this year is to try to blog at least once a week. I realize that barely makes ...