Special Connection Homeschool

A few years ago I set Gess to memorizing her address and phone number. I started by teaching her what city she lived in. I found a state map of Kansas and had her locate our city on the map. Eventually she could point to that general vicinity, even when the city was not marked on the map. After she learned the name and location of her city, I had her start memorizing her address. The reason I wanted her to understand her city first is that we travel out of the city quite often (mostly for doctor's appointments). While she is improving now that she is older, when she was younger she was quite the wanderer. If she got lost and someone asked her what her address was, I wanted her to be able to clearly tell them where she was from. Whether or not they could understand what she said was another issue but practicing this quite often really helped her articulation to improve. After she knew what her city was called and where she lived I had her memorize these two sentences (one at ...

My daughter will be turning 8 in October and I know that in reality it will not be too many more years before she will head into the wonderful world of puberty. As horrifying as those years are for parents, there is an entirely different element of fear and horror when children with special needs are involved. While I still have time to handle the more delicate issues, I do realize there are some steps we must begin now, specifically in regards to privacy. A toddler running around in diapers is just fine, but at what age does it stop being acceptable for a child to be running around in a T-shirt and panties? Yes, my daughter hates wearing pants and/or shorts, almost as much as she hates shoes. When my daughter enters the house the first thing to go are her shoes, the second thing is her pants! We have several play dresses for just this purpose, but they are not always practical. Still, it is a bit embarrassing when you come home with company and she begins undressing in the livin...

Within one of my homeschooling communities I found a really neat Science resource called Steve Spangler Science . Many of you may already be familiar with him as he has a weekly television segment in which he demonstrates some science experiments that kids can do at school and home. He has appeared on many news and talk shows and he just has a great way of making science fun and exciting for kids. Since "experiments" and hands on science is not really my thing I have found him quite informative as well as entertaining. I subscribe to his Experiment of the Week so I get each segment sent directly to my email. While Gess and I have watched several of his videos together we have not actually done many of them of ourselves. My husband has agreed to take that part over and soon we may have our own potato gun , or at least our own launcher! Anyway, this week's video was particularly entertaining. Some of you may be aware of one of the big internet Youtube sensation the...

Last Saturday Gess attended the party for completing the summer reading program at our local library. She read her 20 books and for that got several prizes like free candy, drinks and various other items from area merchants along with a T-shirt donated from Emprise Bank. On top of that, each child got to pick out one additional prize. Gess got a blow up swimming pool that she got to use once before the weather cooled down to fall like temperatures! Here is a copy of her certificate and a photo of her in her T-shirt. She read every book all by herself, she is such an awesome reader!

Skip counting is one of the challenges we faced last school year. Gess seems to get the tens fairly well (though she often omits 30). but she still struggles with the fives and twos. Math U See has a CD with songs including some for skip counting but I have never purchased it. One of the reasons is that in the videos and material they do warn you not to let them get accustomed to singing them because ultimately he wants them to say them by rote. It's important for math. So I am thinking I am not going to teach her one way and then try to undo it. So I decided to not use the CD. In the mean time I was looking for something to help Gess learn skip counting and I came across this video on Youtube. I like it because there is singing during the chorus but they do not actually sing when they are counting. Gess really loves it and it seems to have helped some. I do think that it is somewhat confusing because it teaches all three concepts at once. Because of that I recommend usin...

We are using the Math-U-See curriculum and so far we are really pleased with the results. Having blocks to use to work out all your problems is really beneficial for hands on learners, which Gess definitely is. We are still in the Primer that we did not quite complete last year and we finally got to a section that introduces algebra! It calls the section "Solving for the Unknown." I was not really certain if I should try such a concept with Gess but since she seemed to get everything else, including place values , I figured I would give it a try. Gess did struggle a little bit on day one as she was simply used to solving the problem and answering with the final result. Once we would find the "unknown" she still wanted to answer the actual problem, not tell you what went in the blank. However, by day two she was really getting it and now has really mastered the concept! Granted this is very simple algebraic equations using a question mark and blank instead of...

As I prepared to begin school this year I was looking through my Teaching Reading to Children With Down Syndrome book to see if there were any other ideas I could use along the regular reading curriculum we are using. Gess' reading skills are going quite well so I was reading the chapter on writing and spelling. While I am using Handwriting Without Tears to teach Gess how to write her letters, I am not currently doing anything to teach her about creative writing. Other than answering questions and beginning to write dictated sentences, Gess doesn't use her writing skills very much. Well the book on Teaching Reading had a great idea that I am implementing this year. I guess most public schools start creative writing journals in Kindergarten. During that year and much of first grade the journal consists only of pictures. Next they move on to open sentences. The example she gave in the book was the sentence "I had fun this weekend." They would copy the sentence ...