Special Connection Homeschool

While we won't be starting school for several more weeks, I have been working on getting our workspace organized. I am still looking into to ordering a few more items for our curriculum and soon I will post about what we are doing. We are starting middle school (6th grade) this year, so I am very anxious to see what changes that will bring!  For now, here is a look at our workspace. It is small, but it gets the job done!

Homework sounds so silly in a homeschool setting.  Many parents argue that it isn't even necessary.  I used to be of that mindset myself, but I have realized there is an important concept behind it that children need to learn.  It is important for children to be given a task to do later and then to remember to do it without being reminded.  Unfortunately many children never get the hang of it, even if they go to a traditional school.  Kids continue to forget or simply not do their assignments.  This is something every adult must do in their life whether married or single, employed or a volunteer.  There will be always be tasks you must remember to do.  With Gess having special needs I think it is important to begin teaching her these skills. After the initial chuckle of whether or not we should even call it home work since all of our work is done at home, I started making assignments for Gess.  My board usually looks something like this. ...

When decorating our school room I really didn't put too much thought into what calendar I used.  I actually had a few calendars given to us, and one was very colorful and playful so I thought Gess would like it and put it next to her school desk. However as we were working on our English rules, specifically referring to capitalization, I realized this was not a good choice.  Gess had to write the date at the top of her paper and did not know how to spell February, so I told her to look at her calendar.  It was that very moment that I realized the calendar did not capitalize the first letter of the name of the month! While that looks all "cutesy" it is not very helpful in a school room, especially when the student has trouble remembering to capitalize certain words! I became even more frustrated when I tried to find another calender in my home to replace it with because they capitalized all the letters in the word.  I did not have one calendar in my home ...

Many people want to know what a typical homeschool day looks like for us.  Well, OK around my house no day is generally typical , but here is what we strive for.  So far it has worked out to where I am only ahead by 10 to 20 minutes, so I think this works great for us. I made this visual schedule to put up in the classroom.  This way Gess knows what to expect and when we get to do her favorite subject.  Otherwise she is constantly saying, "science now?"  While Gess generally likes school, every once in awhile she just doesn't want to stay engaged.  When that happens this visual tool also works as a gentle reminder of what she must do before she can stop.     What does your homeschooling day look like?  Find out how other families are fitting it all in by hopping over to the Schoolhouse Review Blog Cruise.

Well, we are starting school today.  We are both really excited and anxious to get back to some regularly scheduled learning.  I am even more excited because this is the first year I actually have an entire school room!  Usually I have a corner or section of a room but since my son moved off to college this year we rearranged some things to permanently open up the small room into a classroom/office. Here is the office side.  I will use this for teaching of course but my husband and I will both use it for other things as well.  It's nice to finally have some quiet place to go to study and write. And here is the view from the other direction that also shows my white board.  That is my other great addition to this school year.  I had a very small white board that I used to use, but this year I get the real thing!  (It's used but it's in good shape.) I want to thank my son Timothy for inspiring me to have the office for writing/studying...