Special Connection Homeschool

Since Gess has Down syndrome there are many things that she struggles with.  While she can identify rhyming words, it is often difficult for her to actually tell what word rhymes when she is not given choices. This week in speech therapy our therapist gave us a nice little tool to give her a visual clue for rhyming words. Using a white board or chalk board or even index cards you make a card list using only consonants. You can also choose to leave out q and x if you want. Then you ask the child to rhyme a word and write that word to the side.  "What rhymes with cat?" To help aid them in seeing what they are looking for to make the word rhyme you take away the first letter and leave the other two like this. Then you lead them to look at the letters on the side and see if any of those work to make words that rhyme.  When they choose a letter that doesn't make a word you just let them know that isn't a word.  You continue on writing down the words they ...

The other day Gess and I were in the car and we were talking about a friend who had a great accomplishment.  Gess started saying how she wanted to do that too.  She could not seem to be just happy for the other person.  She wanted to a chance to be a part of it too.  She always wants the attention that everyone else gets and she absolutely hates losing.  While it is good that she wants to try and experience new things, she has to come to the realization that she can't do everything and especially that she can't do everything well . I told her that while God created her to do special things, he didn't create her to do absolutely everything .  I then talked about the different gifts we were all given.  This particular person was given a very unique gift in sports.  They are excellent at it and have competed around the world.  No matter how hard Gess tries at some things she will never be able to be as good as everyone else. This is even mor...

Super Duper Publications makes fun educational materials for kids.  These products are perfect for just about any child and are very special needs friendly.  In fact our speech therapist has used and recommended some of their products in the past. Because of that, I was super excited when I chosen to review their new HearBuilder Following Directions computer program for PreK-3rd grade (ages 4-9). HearBuilder Following Directions is an interactive computer program that helps children improve their auditory processing and following directions skills all while playing a computer game.  In HearBuilder each child is building their own Toy Factory and are working towards becoming Master Toy Makers.  There are 5 stages in making a toy and in each part of the process the children practice a different skill.  Each time you enter the game you choose which door you wish to enter. As you can see, the doors actually tell you which skill you will be working on. ...

Back in August of 2010 I blogged about a therapy activity we did to help Gess answer Why Questions . One of those activities was a workbook called " What's Wrong with This Picture? " We had fun with the book discussing what was wrong with various scenes and Gess was pretty good at pointing them out. Because of that it was something I put away and we haven't really done for awhile. That is why I just had to post about what Gess has been up to this past week. The other morning we were in the kitchen getting ready to make Gess' breakfast and she points to the tub of butter that had a butter knife sticking out of it and asks, "what's wrong with this picture?" I was like, well, I guess it has a knife in it. Then she starts looking around and finding other things she deemed "wrong" and kept asking me "what's wrong with this picture?" I thought, how cute! Well, it seems to have become something she loves to play. In fact...

Gess was really excited about the coming new year. Every night before she goes to bed she always asks, "What are we doing in the morning?" By that she means, what are we doing for the whole day tomorrow, not just in the morning. Well, the week before new year that question changed to "What year is it?" She knew the year was about to change and she was eager for it to do so. I would tell her it was still 2011 and then tell her how many more days until it was New Years Eve and News Years Day. She was so excited when I finally told her it was New Year's Eve! Gess has stayed up until midnight for the past couple years, this year we made it, but barely. We had some friends over and sang some karaoke until about 11 and then they all left. Her friend Kayleigh is much younger and was getting tired. Gess started to go asleep but decided to join us in some singing and at midnight I had my alarm go off. She got her hand clapper to make some loud noise, ran out ont...

In my recent review of Math Mammoth Money I shared how Gess was getting good at counting coins using dimes and pennies. To practice that skill we came up with a silly little game I called "Can I buy that?" I didn't even actually come up with the title or call it a game until we were playing it for awhile. However, it was something Gess enjoyed and now she will ask to play the game "Can I buy that?" whether we are doing school or not. I got the idea from an online friend who also homeschools their child that has Down syndrome. She said they make up a store around the house and have the kids spend their play money there. So far in money all we had done was recognize coins and know how much each one was worth. Now that we began counting coins in math I decided to implement the shopping idea into our lesson. I wanted Gess to see counting coins in an every day life situation however, instead of just pretending to play store, we acted as if it were a game to...

Gess is 9 now and often asks questions in church. Lately we have had some people come forward for baptism. Gess now wants to get baptized too because others are doing it. She just really wants to be involved in everything we do. However, we are Baptist and believe that the bible teaches only those who are saved should be baptized or partake in the Lord's Supper. It is hard to explain to a child why they can't do these things. Then I had someone else who told me they had an 8 year old girl ask about baptism because she had seen someone get baptized at her church. Being surprised by the question they were not quite sure how to answer and asked if I could write something up to help explain it. I thought, what perfect timing. This is something I want to share with Gess too, so I did more than just write up a paper. I wrote a small booklet made specifically for young kids to help explain baptism. This booklet is meant to explain what baptism is and in doing that it touches ...

We are currently using Math-U-See and Gess seems to do pretty well with it, though we are moving through it rather slowly. While studying addition they want you to memorize your math facts. We did alright with that for the zeros and ones, but Gess got stuck trying to memorize beyond that, so we went ahead and moved on. When we got to the doubles I decided to pull out a tool from the book Teaching Math to People with Down Syndrome . For teaching doubles they have some visual cues that you can copy and make cards out of. Now they don't have pictures for 7 and 8 so I made my own. They suggested using crayons for 8 so I got me a picture to do that with and I could not think of anything for 7 so we just made a domino with 7 on it. It seemed to work. We pasted the pictures on index cards. One side shows the answer and the other side does not. Now, some of these images assumes that the person already knows that number is a double. Gess however, did not know a bug had 6 le...

I keep a grocery list on my fridge and write down things as I run out of them so I don't forget to buy them at the store. I never realized that my daughter picked up on what we were doing until one day I found this on my list. There are other times I have found pancaks , straws and other various things my daughter uses. If we run out of, or low on, something, she lets me know by leaving it on the list. Well, this was my realization that Gess was ready for some more responsibility, so we have been working on letting her do her own shopping at the store. By doing her own shopping I do not mean that we let her spend her own money, I have already been letting her do that. What we have started to do now is to break up part of the shopping list (unless I am only going to pick up a few things then she gets the whole thing) and give it to her to be in charge of. For instance today I made the following list: Then as we shopped for them Gess would put them in the cart and then mark th...

Fostering independence is a bit tricky with a child with special needs. You can tell that Gess really desires to have the same independence that her peers have. Our current focus has been on giving her more unsupervised outside play time. Since we have a fenced in back yard that has a lock out of her reach, we are able to do this without too much fear of her wandering off. I must admit I am still constantly peeking out to be sure that she is OK, but it's the most independent she has been and she truly loves it. Our main concern with giving Gess the freedom is that she learn to use it responsibly. Gess had finally quit trying to wander outside without permission until we introduced letting her play outside alone. Now she was again trying to leave the house without telling us. However, this time she was not trying to simply "wander" off, she was just trying to do what we sometimes gave her permission to. So to address this we reviewed safety rules for playing outsid...

As we are getting into addition, an important concept we are trying to master is counting on from one number to the next. In the book Teaching Math to People with Down Syndrome they offer some ways to help teach the concept. They suggest playing games with dice and count on from the first dice to add the second. You can count money starting with a $5 or $10 dollar bill. They also suggested laying out a number line that goes to 20 and throwing out random playing cards (with the face cards removed and using aces as ones) and counting up to 20 from whatever card is thrown. Another idea that my husband came up with involved an abacus I had purchased but have yet to use. While this game does not use it in the manner in which it was intended, it is a great visual tool to help Gess count on and she has found it more interesting then just throwing out one random card to count from. First we took the playing cards that already had the face cards removed and used aces as ones. I then...

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 ...