Special Connection Homeschool

Below is the transcript from the news story that was done on CBS about Prenatal Testing for Down Syndrome. You can watch the video at the link below _____________________________________________ Down Syndrome Parents: Palin Is Role Model (CBS) .. --> sphereit start -->When Sarah Palin was four months pregnant with her fifth child, she received life-changing news: her baby had Down Syndrome. Today, five-month-old Trig is one of 400,000 Americans living with Down Syndrome. And the Palins' decision to have the baby has made her a role model to the parents of some 5,000 children born with the genetic disorder each year. While most Americans hadn't heard of Sarah Palin before she became John McCain's running mate, she was well known to many parents of children with Down Syndrome, CBS News anchor Katie Couric reports. "Gov. Palin went through the same thing we did," said parent Sharon Vopal. "Same prenatal testing; same screening." Advances in prenatal ...

It is just so great to see how much a child has advanced from one year to the next. This time last year my daughter was starting Kindergarten. Some of our major goals were not just important educational wise, but for everyday living. One thing I wanted my daughter to do was to learn her address and phone number. With the learning struggles we faced, we were not only working on "memorizing" the information but understanding what it was for. It took a couple of months or longer but by the end the of the first semester my daughter could answer the questions "Where do you live?" and "What's your address?" The rest of the year was spent reviewing that information and adding her phone number into the mix. It took time and patience, but she got it! We also worked on memorizing small Bible verses (or small parts of a passage) throughout the year. So she was introduced into memorization but we always made sure to make it fun and encourage success, it ...

Writing skills are very important and rely on more than just our cognitive skills to develop them properly. Thanks to the blocks that come with our Handwriting Without Tears curriculum Gess has been able to prove she knows how a letter is made, because she can make every capital letter with blocks. What she lacks is the ability is to properly and consistently write the letter. Therefore she needs to strengthen the muscles in her hand to improve her motor skills. Below is a simple activity that will do just that. (This was shown to me by our speech therapist.) All you need for this exercise is some clothespins and something for the child to clip them to. My therapist takes several of those plastic travel soap containers and fills them with clothespins and gives them to the child. They then clip each clothespin around the edges of the container and then takes them off and do it again. I didn't have a soap dish so I used a plastic basket. Since my daughter is older and doing...

Ok, today was the first day we tried out one of the many cool activities our speech therapist shared with us. For those looking for hands on resources this is just one of many excellent ideas that can be done with materials that are easy to get or already in your house. For this one the only cost was a set of plastic bracelets I spent $2 on yesterday at Wal-Mart. The other items were from around the house. This idea and many others can be found in a book that my therapist was a consultant for. Its titled Early Childhood Materials and Equipment by Janice Schultz. It covers areas like gross motor skills, sorting, lacing, patterns, language and comprehension, creative play and more. It has color photos of the activities set up with an explanation of where the items came from and what to do with them. Today we did a lesson in patterns and sequence. This helped to not only enhance the skill of order and placement but also her language skill as we emphasized concepts such as "f...

Learning you have a child with Down Syndrome is overwhelming at first, at least for those of us who really did not know much about it. When I thought of Down Syndrome I generally just thought of mental retardation. Well there is SO much more to it than that! I didn't realize all the medical problems that came along with it. I did not even really care that my daughter had Down Syndrome because that information was immediately followed by the fact that she had a congenital heart defect and would need open heart surgery! My father just had a quadruple bypass the month before and it was very tough on him. Now they want to open up my daughter's chest, remove her heart from her body and fix it? No way! As I promised in my previous blog, I will one day share all about Down Syndrome but we are still on the subject of our decision to homeschool so let me get back to that. The point of all this is that all of this information about my daughter's condition made us seriously ...

When I was pregnant with my daughter my husband I were determined to homeschool. Two of his siblings were homeschooling their children with great success and we both had pretty much the same point of view. We felt it was the best option for us. As parents we wanted to be the ones to direct our child's education in a manner that is compatible with both our belief system and academic standards. Let me explain a few reasons as to why we wanted to homeschool. Religious: Our faith is more than just a Sunday activity to us, it is an integral part of our lives. We do not like a system in which our faith is ignored for most of the day. In homeschooling you can integrate your faith into many aspects of learning. I tell you, pronouncing Bible names and praying at night were very beneficial in helping my daughter develop intelligible speech let alone helping her with reading comprehension and things like that. Academic: We have seen the way the schools work and their stand...

I am really excited for the new school year to start. This will be my second "official" year to homeschool Gess. Last year we did Kindergarten and she did really well. However, since she has DS I have been doing pre-school since she was three. See, when you have a child with special needs you enroll them in the system at birth. From Birth to Three they get in home services such as Physical Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Speech Therapy and other necessary programs to help with the child's development. I found this help invaluable with Gess. She was walking by 14 months when I was told children with DS do not walk until after age 2. Birth to Three is a great tool to help new parents learn some of the ways to assist their child with special needs. However, when they turn three they are enrolled in a preschool program so that they can continue these services and prepare your child for school. Of course we opted out of sending Gess anywhere other than home. We could...