Special Connection Homeschool

Well, tomorrow is Thanksgiving and we are certainly ready. Here are some activities we did this week to help teach Gess what Thanksgiving is all about. Books We checked out two books from the library, the same two as last year as I thought they were both very good. The first book, "The First Thanksgiving" by Jean C. George which was about just that, the first Thanksgiving. It was very detailed and beautifully illustrated. It is long so it took us a few days to finish it. The second book was shorter and Gess was able to help us read it. It was called "Thanksgiving Day" by Gail Gibbons and is also about the first Thanksgiving but then it shares how people actually celebrate the holiday today. I liked that because it helped my daughter to identify the story of Thanksgiving with the events and activities that she partakes in on that day. Videos Since Gess is a very visual and hands on learner, sometimes just reading and looking at pictures are not enough for her t...

My daughter is not really much of a whiner, but she does have a way of not always asking for things politely. Instead of whining about being thirsty she would ask for a drink in a demanding sort of way. A very irritating and loud demanding sort of way. Well, at last year's homeschool convention I listened to a speaker and found that she had an awesome technique to stop whining and other behaviors that showed a lack of self-control. Ginger Plowman, a Christian author, speaker and founder of " Preparing the Way Ministries " had some great advice. It was not anything new or innovative, in fact, it was pretty simple yet it is the key to getting to the heart of the matter, which is the heart. As she says, most parents work on trying to change the way their children "act." We figure if they learn to "act" right then they are being raised right, but that is not true. What we have to do is change the way they think. We have to reach past he outward be...

So where have we been the last three weeks and what have we been doing? Well, we have moved into a larger house and I finally have more room for all of our school, therapy and art supplies (not to mention basic household items)! It has taken all of my extra time to pack, unpack and get this house shaped into a home but it is amost there! I love it already and can't wait to host my first homeschool group meeting here! Now I know many of you have entire rooms for your school and this would seem like little to be excited about, but just imagine how small the room we left was! We used to have to pull everything out and put it back each and every day. Of course I am not done. There are still flags to mount and calendars to post on the wall, etc, but its a start! I also had issues with my computer. First it just quit working, so we took apart our media center computer and installed my drives and video card in it. My video card was not pleased and demonstrated by torching itself....

School is still going really well, I think we really made excellent choices when picking our curriculum. Of course we spent quite a bit of time researching our options and really focused on ones that seemed geared towards Gesserine's strengths. Reading : Most of it had been review because she already knew her letter sounds, but since we were starting with a new approach I didn't want to start in the middle. I also wanted to emphasis the sounds making sure Gess said them correctly. This last week though we began working on word blends which was something new. We started with Sa, Se, Si, So, Su. For the first time Gess was listening for more than just the first letter of the word, she had to listen for the first blend. We spent the whole week on just these beginning blends and by the end of the week she was doing pretty good recognizing the proper blend. Now we will begin adding letters to the end of the blend. She is getting good with her worksheets and can do some of th...

As I previously mentioned Down syndrome is usually accompanied with various medical problems and some can be quite serious. Gesserine was born with a congenital heart defect. In her case the valves in her heart were not working properly and it was allowing the oxygenated and un-oxygenated blood to mix in the heart. At 2 1/2 months of age she had an AV Canal repair done. When she had her open heart surgery the Kansas City Star was doing a piece on her surgeon, Dr. Lofland. While doing this article they followed Gess from her pre-op visit, during her actual surgery all the way to our follow up visit afterwards. There were even full color photos of the surgery itself in the paper! I thought I would share the article for those who might want to learn a little bit more about it. They tell about Gesserine's surgery at the beginning and finish up at the end with a little bit in between. Of course you will learn more about her surgeon than Gess, but he is the man who skillfully re...

As you all probably know, my daughter is only 6 (almost 7 years old) so I do not really know what the future holds for her. What I do know is that it offers her more than I ever dreamed it could when we first got the diagnosis that she had Down syndrome. There have been great advances both medically and socially that have allowed a person with Down syndrome to live a fulfilling life. One of those great achievements have been early intervention. It used to just be assumed that a person with Down syndrome could not really learn or adapt well and therefore they were never given an opportunity to do so. They have since learned that not only are they able to learn but sometimes there are medical reasons for some of their delays. For instance part of their speech difficulties are sometimes due to hearing loss and their reading delays actually appear worse than they are when the child suffers from poor vision. Because they now know these facts children with Down syndrome are screened at...

Some of you might not know this but October is Down Syndrome Awareness month and at this time support groups all across America will be having Buddy Walks to raise funds to support education, research and advocacy for people who have Down syndrome. Many people do not really know much about Down syndrome. I know that when my daughter was born I certainly did not. My knowledge of DS was limited to what I learned while watching Life Goes On which starred Chris Burke who has DS. Of course these days, people do not even know what that show is, let alone what DS is. All I knew was that people who had Down syndrome had intellectual disabilities (which wasn't how it was referred to at the time). I knew that they were now attending school with their peers, but I knew that it was tough because they were not on the same level as their peers. What I didn't know was that the mental aspect was only one of many conditions that accompany DS. Many people who have Down syndrome often ...